How I Met Your Mother

That actually sounds like a pretty good idea of how it should have gone.

Honestly, after binge watching it once, I'm actually fine with the ending. The problem the first time for me was that it literally took us about nine years to get there, with an episode a week. With that kind of time investment and not going back to get caught back up, that finale hit hard and killed it for me to the point where I only rewatched it at the end of last year.

The ending was perfectly in character for everyone. Barney and Robin's issues with each other were telegraphed massively and with a ver clear message that it might look awesome and claim to get past said issues you can't always do that.

Ted's hang up on Robin since the start and the fact that the mother wasn't present in the actual narration made that ending clear too.

Yeah, the point of the finale was that the whole series has been building up to this big happy ending, but of course the characters' lives don't stop once they reach that point, so it shows us how the characters lives and situations kept changing for several years after the "happy ending".

Considering the finale was nearly three years ago, I'm not going to bother spoiler tagging anything.

Ultimately, by the 7th season the show was going to end one of two ways, Ted and the Mother with an overall happy ending or the mother had died and Ted is looking to renew something with Robin. That twist was anticipated for a long time, since after 9 years of anticipating the Driving Question someone, somewhere is going to guess something like that. That was unfortunately the main problem with the very premise, as television series involve a lot more investment and clue finding. I would say that up to the fifth season, that ending would have worked just fine. But the wheel spinning in the sixth and seventh seasons muddles that conclusion because A) it spends a lot of time shutting the door on Ted and Robin, B) there is a lot of hoop jumping as the show teases who the bride and groom are going to be at the wedding ^note It's implied before that the groom was Punchy at one point and the bride was Nora and Quinn and C) having both Robin and Barney go through character development where them even considering marriage is a big thing.

The main argument for why the official ending works lies primarily in the second season finale "Something Blue" and the fourth season "The Front Porch" that shows the reasons why Ted and Robin in the long run was a bad idea, Ted wanted a family and Robin wanted to build her career. Fast forward 20 years, Ted has children and Robin has had a great career, which was only possible because they weren't together this entire time. In a different stage of their life, they can now be together without that resentment.

Ultimately, the main thing I felt was missing from the finale was seeing more of the cast interact with the Mother. Everyone else in the cast needed to feel her death to make an impact, but it was just not quite enough.

Agreed. We really shouldn't have had a whole season on the wedding. It was lame that they did that. The wedding could have taken a few episodes, tops, and then given us a solid block of the relationship and ended with the Mother's death and the others grieving. With the final episode EARNING that Blue French Horn scene.

I'm pretty sure there's no force on this earth that could make me okay with returning to the Blue French Horn after everything Ted went through letting go.

OK, not sure whether this has been discussed, but I have to let it out.

So after those years, I found out I kinda missed the show and that I don't completely hate it. Recently, I started re-watching the show in German (to work on my German, hahaha, don't ask , the possibilities of the internet are endless).

I just got to the episode "How I Met Your Mother S 3 E 02 Were Not From Here".

I had to add Harsher in Hindsight to the YMMV page — I usually don't care about this subpage of any work very much, but dear Lord, I just had to.I mean, the Marshall and Lily plot — I can't even.

They are writing letters to each other for their "death folder". In the final moment, viewers are lead to believe that after twenty years, Lily died and Marshall is about to read her letter. BTW, when I first saw it when it aired, I saw that funny twist coming and did not believe for a moment that Lily died twenty years after their wedding, but I found this bit and argument between Marshall and Lily fairly entertaining.

Of course we find out she didn't in fact die, and she's mad at Marshall for opening her letter early yet again, and the letter is basically "Busted! I knew you'd do it, you suck, Marshall, you totally suck".

How does older Ted find this funny? How is that supposed to be funny to his kids, to whom he is telling the story? A guy who lost the love of his life and mother of his children? His children whose mother died six years ago, when they were six and nine?

Then I realized — this is season 3, episode 2. The writers boasted they had made the ending after season 2 finale. Didn't they for a moment think this would be massive Dude, Not Funny!?

So now Marshall is a jerk (for opening the letter), Lily is a jerk (after her close friend dies, she doesn't think of writing a proper letter?). This happens, they probably argue, and being the jerks they are, they tell it to Ted as a funny story from their married life. And Ted apparently finds it hilarious, too, and thinks his kids will find it amusing as well. They are all jerks together, Ted's kids included. Jesus.

I hope Tracy is having lots of heavenly sex with her boyfriend Max in her afterlife!

edited 3rd Mar '18 11:27:49 AM by XFllo

The way the scene is shot is misleading for us, the audience, making it look like Marshall is opening the letter because Lily has died, only for the reveal that, no, she's alive, and Marshall just gave in to curiosity. But Ted's kids obviously know that Aunt Lily is still alive, so there's no misdirect for them.

The creators have said that there is a division between what future Ted is telling the kids and how the audience experiences the story. They also said that Ted didn't really take 9 years to tell the story, but was probably more a couple hours in the same afternoon (barring the pilot, the kids are wearing the same clothes every time we see them in the show).

A far more problematic story was when Marshall had to imagine Lily dying in order to fantasize about another woman, which included a massive parody of the Soap Opera Disease with a fatal hiccup disease and Lily's dying breath was to wait an appropriate amount of time before finding a girl and "plowing her like a corn field." So the show made fun of a certain plot line only to play it very straight later on.

Well given that scene opens with Ted going "and kids, he kept that promise. Until one fateful day..." so while what we see certainly isn't necessarily what he's telling the kids, the narration is so in this case it's kinda moot.

Good point about Marshall's death-fantasy thing. That never occurred to me.

Wow, I must be the only fan who wanted Robyn and him together.

It's entirely possible to have wanted them together and not want them to completely butcher... everything in the process.

In the process, they managed to undo seasons of character development, turn the mother into a Deus ex Machina to solve Ted and Robin's problems whose sole purpose is to rear Ted's kids that Robin cannot do, and hell, even ruin the framing device of the show.

For seven years they had an idea of how to end the show. And it wasn't necessarily a bad ending. But the show itself outgrew that and they refused to change their ending. If they either controlled the show so their ending still made sense, or they changed their ending so it fit how the show grew, that would've been fine. Instead they... didn't. And it was problematic.

An issue too was that they spent the better part of the last three years of the show trying to affirm that Ted HAD to give up Robin in order to meet his soulmate. We got to know that soulmate for an entire season and learn to love seeing her and Ted together, and that entire relationship was undone by a single line of dialogue "And it continued when she got sick" and a <10 second scene in a hospital room. It's not that Ted/Robin was disliked, but that the show didn't give us proper closure on Ted/Tracy. In most respects I think Ted/Robin was the Fan-Preferred Couple while Barney/Robin was more of a Vocal Minority.

I've read that the filming script for the finale easily had enough material for a third part, which included a funeral scene. In order to give us Ted/Robin at the end we needed more than a line of dialogue from the kids saying they were obviously still in love after Tracy's death. I think too more interaction between Tracy and Robin would have helped, as well as with the rest of the cast, it bugged me that at Ted/Tracy's wedding that Tracy took a group picture and wasn't in the picture herself.

See, I think how the ending is such a swerve from the last couple seasons leading up to it was very much intentional.

It's not like the writers didn't know they had this ending waiting in the wings while writing Seasons 8 and 9. They knew they were going to have the mother die, Robin and Barney get divorced, and Ted try to get back together with Robin. They could have very easily planted plenty of doubt about the viability of Barney and Robin as a couple, showed us that Ted and Robin would always hold a torch for each other, and made the mother a barely seen character we didn't get too attached to.

But they did the exact opposite of that. They devoted multiple episodes in the final season to assuaging any doubts about Barney/Robin and showing why they'd be great together. They had Ted (very literally) let go of any lingering feelings for Robin. And they did so much work making us like the mother, they even gave her an entire episode to herself.

The ending being so jarring was clearly a deliberate artistic choice. They built up the Barney/Robin and Ted/Tracy romances specifically so that seeing what happens to them in the finale would be even more of a gut punch and advance the "nothing lasts forever" theme of that episode (hence the finale's title: "Last Forever").

Alright so we finally have movement on the shuttered spinoff How I Met Your Father. Given how this series ended, I am not at all excited, but we'll see what happens...

Is it a new cast?

Well Hillary Duff has been cast as the main character, and that's all the news there is for now.

... well that's not promising.

I am currently watching the entire series again. I reconsidered the ninth season, which I hated when first watched whereas now I'm noticing many details which are actually quite good. I started to like Tracy's character more and more, and I developed a personal theory about her. The writers were very explicit in making her the perfect match for Ted, sometimes with no subtetly whatsoever (the same specific, nerdy hobbies...); yet, I started to think that, consciously or not, they made her very similar to another of the main characters, and that similarity helps to explain why Ted formed a long-lasting bond with her.

Now, that's what I mean: She can be both very naive, in a childlike way, and very level-headed. Some of her quirks border on cloudcuckoolander territory, but her advices are sensible and grounded. Her naivety combines with her trust on people; she tends to trust anybody, even people who should not be trusted, and this occasionaly turns against her (see Darren). She just can't help being kind and helpful. She seems to have a strong moral compass, and to be on the idealistic side on the scale. Her life choices are determined by an overall idealistic goal, but she pursues this goal by studying a stereotipically 'arid' and 'cynical' subject. In love relation she's strongly monogamous, in fact she mourns her first fiancee for years. Among her many interests and hobbies, the strongest one seems to be music. One of her most charateristic quirks is singing during everyday activities, and she plays in a band. A funky band, no less.

To me, all of this strongly reminds of Marshall. I see many similarities between the two, and I suspect that the writers were at least partially conscious of this.

Now, Marshall is the person with which Ted had the longest and stablest relation. Yes, we're talking here friendship and not love, but still it is a very strong bond which involved a deep familiarity. They lived together longer than almost every other character.

My idea is that the fact that Tracy is so similar to Marshall don't explain why Ted was attracted by her, but explains why their relationship worked for so long.

Wow, I never thought of it that way before, but that makes so much sense!

I like the way you put that. I never thought of it that way before.

While the final season had its' problems, Cristin Milioti as the Mother was the best thing the season had going for it. If we didn't know and love her and Ted together as much as we did the final reveal wouldn't have been as controversial. If anything, though, I wanted her more prominent to get more interactions with Marshall, Lily, Barney and especially Robin, as barring group scenes in the finale she had only one conversation with each throughout the season.

While I get the initial complaints that she was set-up as a female Ted, it was more to show that they had a similar sense of humor. Their "old, married couple" flash forward scenes centered a lot on the fact she knew most of the stories Ted has been telling the kids all this time.

Been re-watching the series (via Netflix) to prep for How I Met Your Father (if assuming the two shows will still be tied by continuity). I noticed something when I got past Spoiler Alert: they took out the subtitles when Ted used sign language to warn Cathy's fiance Daniel that she talks a lot. Any reason why the subtitles were omitted in the Netflix version?

Sometimes streaming services and DV Ds don't do a good job of distinguishing between subtitles that are meant to appear on screen, and subtitles that should only appear if you select that from the language options.

I heard they had some issues because the production company sent the international syndication versions of the episodes to various streaming services, who put aired it exactly as it was without checking to see that it had subtitles and other title graphics removed so they could be localized. This lead to things like Barney's Running Gag of "This is the night we did X" and cutting to a blank background card with a musical sting, utterly ruining half the joke.