Reviews Series / How I Met Your Mother

Why Last Forever Failed

I'm not gonna say what everyone has said about this already and why the finale failed to impress fans, but to add my own reason why it failed. Personally the biggest problem is that the finale was planned for an audience that have long since changed their worldviews on the show's pairings. Through some may argue otherwise, I figured the creators were not driven by their own Ted/Robin shipping—had the show never been picked up, Ted would have just ended up with Victoria and that's that, but the fact that Ted and Robin was popular during season 2 CBCT may wanted to "reward" the audience for their emotional investment by having the mother die in the end so the audience could get what they wanted.

However the audience changed and a lot of people who used to ship T/R stopped watching the show because their plot went nowhere and because the show kept saying that Ted and Robin did not work, furthermore the rest of the audience either shipped Swarkles or watched solely to find out who the mother was, thus whenever Ted went back to Robin felt very, very awkward. Thus the fanbase of the show drastically changed from one pairing to another and thus the imposition of this ending made it a very bitter pill to swallow in order to please a Vocal Minority that professes to not even watching the show anymore in contrast to the fanbase itself, which appreciated the show for what it is no matter how much flak it got for Seasonal Rot and wanted the show to end happily with all three pairings Happily Married. Thus the ending no longer worked because the fanbase stopped rooting for Ted/Robin a long time ago and the most popular pairing has changed. Even worse is that the audience could have been prepared for this ending, but the show made no effort to. A key problem is focusing the ending on the wedding itself, when they could have just done half of the season on the wedding and the other half on the events of the finale stretched out, in order to better prepare us for the ending or to justify why Ted should have ended up with Robin, and probably have avoided the Unfortunate Implications that the creators unwittingly triggered. Since this was not done, the finale felt like very badly written fanfiction very much out of place with the rest of the show in order to please a small group that themselves became less enthusiastic about the show in the first place.