Why I (Mostly) Like The Way How I Met Your Mother Ended

Two years ago this week, after 9 seasons and 206 episodes How I Met Your Mother aired Last Forever, the two-part last episodes of the series and the end of the story they began telling way back in 2005. The show was a few years removed from it's peak, and the last couple of seasons had been fairly inconsistent (Setting the entirety of season 9 over the course of one weekend was a bold and interesting creative choice, but also one that led to a lot of filler and time-wasting), but there had been enough glimmers of the shows former greatness in the last season (particularly everything with Cristin Milioti playing the mother) to suggest they could stick the landing, even with a worrying bit of foreshadowing in one of the last episodes. And then the last episodes aired. And the internet lost it.

Serious spoilers for a 2-year-old ending from here on out, yo!



In case you've blocked out the details from your memory, let me quickly refresh you on what happened to make everyone so upset. Last Forever takes us from the day Ted met Tracy (The mother) at Barney and Robin's wedding and shows us what happened to the gang in the years that followed. We find out that Barney and Robin divorced three years in because Robin's job caused her to spend too much time on the road making Barney unhappy that he never got to see her. This causes Robin to push herself away from the gang, not being able to handle being around Barney or Ted, who she's starting to feel she should have ended up with. It also convinces Barney that he's not able to be in a committed relationship and pushes him back to his old ways, until he knocks up a girl (never seen or given a name beyond 31) and gets a daughter, who makes him love again and brings out his paternal side. Meanwhile, though their wedding is delayed by a sudden pregnancy and then put off through the years, Ted and Tracy finally wed in 2020 and Ted loves her with everything she has. And then in 2024, she gets sick and dies. That's when 2030 Ted finally shows us the first meeting of him and Tracy in 2013 and ends his story. At which point his daughter tells him it's obvious the reason he told them this long story is because he wants to ask out Robin and wants to see if they're OK with it. Ted denies it but they tell him that after 6 years, it's time to move on so he shows up at Robin's with the blue french horn he stole so many years ago, ready to start again. End of show.

So yeah.

Obviously this was upsetting to many people. After 9 seasons, this was how they ended the show? With the mother dying and Ted and Robin back together? Really? And after a season where we got to spend time with the mother and fell in love with her ourselves, thanks to the superb performance of Cristin Milioti? And that stuff with the kids was filmed during season 2 so clearly this had been the plan all along. Never mind that the ending recontextualizes what the entire show was about. It was a lot to take and for the most part, people rejected the ending hard.

But here's the thing. I have watched Last Forever several times now and I like the ending. Is it perfect? No, and I'm going to talk about my issues with the ending very quick. But I think it's a daring ending and a beautiful one. I fully understand why people hate it so much and why most people aren't going to give it a second chance, but I'm not one of those people. So if you'll let me, let's go through that ending a bit closer.

What Doesn't Work About The Ending

For starters, let's look at Barney's storyline for a minute. Mainly the part where he gets a girl pregnant. This is something that happens at the end of his attempt at a perfect month (sleeping with 31 women in 31 days). It's a long-delayed consequence to his years of sleeping around and treating women like objects. The problem is the woman he sleeps with is basically an object. We never meet her. We never learn her actual name or her feelings about this pregnancy or Barney or anything. Her only purpose is to give Barney Ellie, the daughter he falls immediately in love with that causes him to stop hitting on young girls and start encouraging them to make better life choices. And it's weird. The show had always (well usually) been critical of Barney dehumanizing women as anonymous conquests and it was leaving the mother of his child, an anonymous conquest. Obviously Barney's arc wasn't the main focus of the episode, but this is still something that doesn't sit quite right with me.

That's a minor thing though. Let's get to my main issue with the ending: the scene with Ted's kids. In the early days of the show, the kids were a somewhat active part, commenting on the story from time to time as Ted told it. But as the show kept going and the kids started ageing, they stopped contributing to the action and became silent observers, through the magic of stock footage. But not before they shot one last scene to be held for the last episode. This scene was written and filmed back during season 2, where more people would have been onboard with Ted and Robin ending up together. It was also when the tone of the show was a lot lighter than the more emotional tone they would flirt with in the later seasons and when they had no idea the show would last 9 years or that they would spend much more time with Tracy than they had originally planned. Lyndsy Fonseca and David Henrie also weren't great actors back then so their delivery is kind of off. Also about a minute into the scene, the laugh track kicks in for some reason, lending the whole affair of Ted deciding to move on a oddly jovial feel. As a result, the scene is broad and off-putting, causing massive tonal whiplash between a scene crucial to the end of the series and what had come right before that makes it seem wildly out of place.

This combines with another misstep, which is us jumping from finding out Tracy got sick to the meeting to 2030 with no look at the 6 years during that time of Ted mourning the lost of his great love. To the characters, the mother has been dead for 6 years so of course it's OK for Ted to move on. But for us, the mother has been dead for about a minute and a half and before we as an audience can process it, now Ted is running off to get Robin. This causes people to get the wrong idea about the ending. It makes Tracy seem like a disposable figure in Ted's life, there to give him the children that Robin never would and keep him busy while Robin was getting the success Ted might have held her back from, and then die, giving them their chance to be together. If there had been even a glimpse of a Ted contemplating his lost, or if that damn kids scene had been shot differently to better convey the enormity of Ted's decision, maybe the last scene would've played a little better. It's a shame. Because that last scene is beautiful.

Why I Like The Ending

Look, after 9 years of spending time with these characters, it would have been easy for Craig Thomas and Carter Bays to let their characters just sail off into the sunset and have a final episode that was purely a happy ending. But the world the show was in was always just a heightened version of our world and in our world, life seldom has purely happy endings. People grow apart. Marriages don't always work out. People get sick. The show had tackled less happy subject matter before in things like Marshall's dad dying or Robin learning she was infertile. The idea that the gang might drift apart as the years went by had come up as early as season 4 and had been coming up more and more often as the show got older. A purely happy, purely fan-service ending might have worked, but it also would have been disingenuous to what the show was. So yes, it's difficult and sad to watch Barney and Robin divorce and Barney regress to his old ways because he's convinced he can't change. It's hard seeing the gang drift apart over the years as life gets in the way. And it's terrible that Tracy dies. But all that makes for a finale that's ambitious and challenging and an interesting subversion of a lot of the shows themes (Though there is an alternate cut of the finale available on the season 9 DVD where Tracy doesn't die that works just as well, so I'm not going to say that Tracy had to die for the finale to be interesting). And the various trials the characters go through in the finales do lead to happy endings for essentially all the characters, which are only made better through the suffering they had to go to to get there. Marshall getting that judge call after years toiling at a terrible job or Barney meeting his daughter are powerful moments because of everything they went through.

Another thing the episode does incredibly well that gets overlooked because of what immediately preceded and followed the scene is the meeting of Ted and Tracy. It's a big scene, and the entire series had been building up to it. And as the years had gone on, there was a lot of pressure on this scene to be significant. Especially because Ted spends a good part of season 8, and 9 fighting his feelings for Robin. And season 9 took place over the course of a weekend, so in the shows timeline, Ted is in love with another woman hours before meeting his future wife and about to move to Chicago to get away from those feelings. So the connection between Ted and Tracy had to be strong enough that he would cancel his plans to move so he could see this girl again. And the scene delivers big-time. Don't believe that? Watch it again.

It's a beautiful scene, one of the best the show would ever do, and the chemistry between Radnor and Milioti is immediate. We watch them instantly connect, see them use their connection to Tracy's former roommate Cindy to establish a sense of familiarity, watch them banter about the fabled yellow umbrella and see that lead them to see they were more connected than they previously thought. It pays off two big things we knew about the mother (She was in the Econ 305 class Ted accidentally taught and she left her yellow umbrella in a club on St. Patricks Day where Ted also was) and weaves them together beautifully and by the end of the scene, you can see they were in love from the start. Just try not to get chills as they say "hi" to each other again, oblivious to the fact that the train they were waiting for is passing them by. It's a stunning sequence whether used as the ending to the show (as it is in the alternate ending I recommend you watch if you hated the official one) or as only an ending to the story Ted has been telling his kids. An affirmation that no matter where Ted's life goes from there, he will always love that woman with the yellow umbrella. She was the one.

The thing is though, there's no such thing as "the one". You can have more than one true love. And if you lose your love, it's possible to start again. It doesn't diminish the love you had or mean you loved them any less. It just means you're keeping on living. That's the ultimate message of what How I Met Your Mother is trying to say in that ending. It's a subversion of most romantic comedies and a lot of what the show had been seemingly trying to say about love up to that point. It's something they lay the groundwork for in How Your Mother Met Me, a Tracy spotlight episode that shows her attempting to move on from her great love after he tragically died and deciding she was ready to move on hours before she met Ted. Now while on some level Tracy would always love Max (her dead boyfriend), that doesn't mean she didn't love Ted just as much. Ted wasn't a consolation prize in place of what she really wanted. And Tracy wasn't a consolation prize either. Relationships are complex and this was something the show made an admirable (if, admittedly flawed) effort to tackle.

Which brings us to the Robin of it all. As I mentioned above, the ending recontextualizes what the entire show had been about. It was no longer just a story about Ted telling his kids how he met their mother. Or, more accurately, Ted telling his kids about the long journey he had to take to be ready to meet their mother. It was now a story about a man who had lost one of the loves of his life, but was starting to realize the one who got away might be ready to start again. It was about a man telling his kids all the things he went through to meet their mother, trying to get them to understand and get their permission to give himself permission to move on. And if the second-to-last scene of the show fails to convey all that, the last scene gets it perfectly.

Underscored to Heaven by The Walkmen, we see Robin enter an apartment that's not too different from her apartment at the beginning of the series. Her door is buzzing, and with future technology on the fritz she has no choice to stick her head out the window to see who it is. And she sees Ted, standing there with the Blue French Horn, that's been a symbol of their relationship for the run of the show. It's a near-exact mirror of a scene from the show's pilot, but it's different now. They've been through so much in their lives and are different people from the ones who met all those years ago. And it all comes through in the facial expressions on both their faces without a single word being uttered once Robin looks out that window. You can see her confusion turn to bewilderment turn to joy as Ted smiles on. And the steps the show took to get to this scene got a bit muddled at the end, but if you can find it in you to get past that clumsiness, what you see is an incredibly effective scene that feels like the culmination of everything the show has been building towards. Life isn't simple. There is no such thing as a perfect love story. But you can start again if you just try. It's an ending, but it's also a beginning and it's a beginning that resonates because it suggests there's always hope. And honestly, long after all the shows I currently watch and many of the shows I will watch end, I'm probably not going to remember that scene with Ted's kids, but I will remember that final shot of Ted holding up that Blue French Horn, with all the questions and promise it implies, and I'm going to smile because the hope of that ending is a powerful thing.

Remember, Remember, All We Fight For