How I Met Your Mother

No, I think I heard that it was entirely unrelated characters.

That is sad. Thanks though.

Just finished the episode with Mary the Paralegal again. In some episodes, Barney's a true asshole, and Ted's just an idiot. -Facepalms- Ted shoulda just talked about the bet with Barney, especially after Mary admitted she would never sleep with Barney anyway. I think she'd have understood what an immature creep Barney can be and would have been grateful to Ted for handling it maturely. Instead, he gets slapped, and it takes THREE denials for Ted to realize he's been had by the Barnacle.

I don't see why anyone would have wanted that show. Not because I hated the "Mother" ending (wich i didn't) but because I can't see what they could have made different with "Father". My best guess is it would just be a gender flipped rehash.

edited 5th Jun '14 7:21:13 AM by ZheToralf

Just watched the finale.

...

...

WHY?

That was the general reaction to it, yes. There was many pages about it and I have yet to rewatch the series since seeing the finale.

That has been the worst finale I've seen since Negima.

Actually...in a way, it's worse!

They had a perfect setup for a happy ending!

How the hell do you fuck that up?!

edited 2nd Aug '14 7:29:13 AM by Archivist10

By refusing to adapt and change your seven year old ending that doesn't work with characters that have had seven years of development since the time the ending was filmed, clearly.

They spent years adapting to circumstance and changes to their plans, mostly due to getting renewed, but they couldn't change from that?

Sigh.

edited 2nd Aug '14 7:42:54 AM by Archivist10

People do that sometimes. They come up with a brilliant plan, but as time passes they don't adapt their brilliant plan for new circumstances. Hence what feels like seven years of negative character development in one finale.

No, see, I think setting up the perfect happy ending and then ruining it was quite deliberate. HIMYM has always been a pretty meta show regarding how people structure their lives into stories; the finale was their way of saying that life doesn't stop just because you reach a perfect moment, that things will keep changing from good to bad to worse and back to good again.

I'm still waiting for that 'back to good again'. As far as I can tell, everything just kept getting worse and worse, topping it with the mother of all BS.

edited 2nd Aug '14 3:22:20 PM by RandomaNama

Agreed with Nama. It wasn't clever, it was harsh and unpleasant and out of character on top of it.

Well, Marshall becomes a judge, Barney becomes a loving father, Ted gets a lot of great years and two kids with Tracy, Robin becomes part of the gang again, and it's implied she and Ted are gonna have another go at coupledom.

I think you're reading way deep into it.

This ending would have fit almost exactly as is after the second season. When they first conceived this ending, it was a fun idea they had. You know, an obvious twist on this being a love story about the mother. Fun, sweet. Years of character development made it inappropriate. Yes, there are serious running themes in the show. The ending spoke to none of that. The show was silly and lighthearted. The initial idea, the one they sank clinging to, didn't have much underlying meaning.

We expected more than we were ever getting. If you really, really want to you can find meaning in anything.

I'm not saying the finale we got was how they originally planned to end the show seven or eight seasons back, just that the way the finale built to a happy ending with full closure for everyone, then subverted it by showing how things changed and fell apart years later, was done deliberately to play with what people expect out of endings.

Yeah, there had to be something deliberate to it. If they were JUST clinging to an old ending, they would have played the character development differently. They intended a somewhat bullshit ending, though I'm sure they weren't expecting this level of BS and backlash.

They would NOT have gone with marrying Robin and Barney if they were just clinging to an old idea. They would have paired Robin off with someone outside the show, or not gone with a stupid wedding in the first place.

Ok fine, they planned it. Doesn't mean it was a good idea.

1. We have thoroughly smashed that shit finale to pieces earlier in this thread.

2. No one was arguing for it being a good idea.

So where'd that come from?

I'm bitter, that's where. Sorry about that.

There was nothing really fundamentally wrong with the ending they planned or the ending they eventually showed, the core problem was the pacing and organization of the finale left the emphasis on the wrong emotional beats.

Too much time was spent on rehashing old jokes like the Playbook, Perfect Week and Robots vs. Wrestlers and not enough time on the emotional struggle of the characters growing apart, having kids, feeling regrets, saying goodbye to loved ones, etc. Barney seeing his daughter for the first time was incredibly powerful, and the life Ted and The Mother had was both sweet and charmingly imperfect (how marriage was put on the backburner just because they were too busy actually having their life together).

Imagine, if you will, if the last shot of the series wasn't recreating the Ted/Robin/Blue French Horn from the pilot. Instead that scene is pulled ahead, with the narrative with the kids skipping the scene of Ted actually meeting the Mother. That scene is instead the very last scene, and the last shot of the series is Ted and the Mother meeting for the first time, talking about the idiosyncrasies of fate and destiny. Also fitting, in that we leave the characters as they are in the present, not as completely different people we barely know.

Cause really, if you're not looking for the "bad implications," there is a powerful and important message about what you perceive as the path your life is supposed to take, that it isn't a straight line but you will find yourself jumping back and forth between emotions that you thought were no longer there. I said it once before, for a show that loves the Anachronic Order having the final message be "Love is not linear" seems about right. But the finale didn't convey that very well.

edited 2nd Aug '14 11:38:54 PM by KJMackley

Tell me, did the series spend years proving and reproving that Ted and Robin do not belong together or not?

It didn't so much prove that they didn't belong together as establish a track record of their attempts to get together not going very well, causing lots of angst for them and difficulties for their friendship. The Ted/Robin ship is like a guy who keeps trying to start his own business, but it either never gets off the ground or goes out of business within a year. That doesn't make the guy's latest business venture sound like a good investment, but if he's got a good idea and is willing to commit to it, there's no reason it can't finally pay off.

I think I could have handled the whole "Ted and Robin get back together" thing if they hadn't spent season after season harping on the points that A: She is no longer in love with him, and B: He needs to let her go.

That's basically my problem with the whole thing (aside from being hurt in my shipper heart). They proved, over and over and over again, that Ted and Robin Do Not Work, for reasons deeper that their specific circumstances at that moment. They were incompatible as a couple because they weren't compatible as people, and the last season proved that beyond a shadow of a doubt. And then the freaking finale happened and starting that cycle all over again was supposed to be the happy ending and I'm ticking myself off again.