Wednesday, April 02, 2014

How I Met Your Dead Mother

And Ended Up With the Woman I Really Wanted the Entire Time

I really don’t know how to feel about the series finale of “How I Met Your Mother”. So let me start with a big sweeping generalization.

Women ruin everything, but especially sitcoms. When sitcoms are designed only for men they are funny. When sitcoms are designed to appeal to the female audience too, they become sappy and every couple that’s “supposed” to be together ends up together. It may be hard to remember this now, but “Friends” was actually funny when it started. But then the female fans started to clamor for certain characters to be coupled with other characters and it became an incestuous mess.

I firmly believe that’s what happened here. The female fans, and probably the female writers, and maybe some of the males, wanted Ted to end up with Robin in the end. It just felt right.

I actually kind of agree, untilllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllll they called her Aunt Robin for the first time. [I thought that happened in the season one series finale, evidently it was the first episode, but still my point remains]. Once they did that, they should have thrown the whole idea out the window. I know they didn’t want it to be too obvious (people would have bitched), but if it felt right, it would have felt right.

And if we’re looking at it from the sappy point of view why not make Ted and Tracy a happy couple who shares their life together. That’s how the show started, Ted running through all the wrong women because he believed in love and that he would eventually find the right one, the love of his life he was looking for.

I loved the scene when he finally met my mother under the yellow umbrella at the train station. And they talked about all their near misses, and all the luck that brought them together.



As I was watching I thought this would have worked out really well. Lily in her white whale costume, Robin walking out the door, and instead of Robin being Ted’s white whale. Ted became Robin’s. The symmetry would have been beautiful.



But they ruined the ending. It could have been beautiful, he went through all the trials and tribulations of looking for love and finally found the one perfect woman for him. Why did they have to kill her off and get him together with Robin? Girlz is dumb.

There have been many series finales (Sopranos and Seinfeld come to mind) that people hated because they weren’t true to the show.

Note: I sort of felt this way about “Breaking Bad

But that’s bullshit. Sopranos was a mob show, we were never promised some deep look into the makeup of the American family. How I Met Your Mother is a comedy. Its only mission is to be funny. I think the finale failed on that point a little, because too many sad things happened (Barney-Robin divorce, deterioration of the gang and of course my mother’s death) and it wasn’t all that funny.

But I don’t think they degraded the entire series by making it about my mother who in the end didn’t necessarily turn out to be the real love of Ted’s life. Nor do I think the entire final season was a waste just because it focused on a wedding for a marriage that didn’t last.

My problem with the final season and especially the final episode is that they weren’t all that funny.

But as a whole, I do feel a little bit good about the way the series ended, with Ted and Robin and the blue French horn as the final image of a show I really enjoyed for a really long time.

4 comments:

RZR said...

This ending would have been perfect - http://gawker.com/someone-fixed-the-awful-ending-of-how-i-met-your-mother-1556841304

Robyn and Ted ending up together may have been good several seasons back - but the constant back and forth between them grew really tiresome over 9 years and by the end of the series, their chemistry was no longer there.

Bill said...

If your theory is that everyone got wrapped up in Ted & Robin and they created this ending due to that, it's an interesting theory but not true. They planned it from the beginning: http://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/josh-radnor-met-mother-show-title-fake/story?id=23158934

What's overlooked is Barney and Robin were never right for each other. The whole show was a tease or misdirect as alluded to in the link above and I agree that this was just another misdirection. One thing I haven't seen mentioned is that Barney's womanizing ways were poetically ended when he had a daughter.

We also knew for at least a few weeks that Tracy was going to die. At first I didn't like that because it's a comedy. But when you look at the, as Lily called them, "big moments" - it was to be expected. Much like BMW, HIMYM developed from a comedy and grew with the characters to touch on serious issues. Life happens. I realized halfway through the finale that when she died, Ted and Robin would get together. Something about that was said or the way Robin looked during a scene hit me.

The final season - except for the final 2 or 3 episodes - wasn't funny. I think the final episodes were because they brought us full circle with some of the old stories/jokes. They wrapped it up nicely in the finale too - I enjoyed the "clues" run-through under the umbrella as well.

For years finales would all have formulaic, sappy, happy, and often predictable endings. That's what we're used to and maybe what most people want - a nice perfect bow. I think writers now are always trying to be clever and different. At least with this one, everyone got what they wanted. Marshal and Lily had a happy family, Barney who was the constant bachelor found a family, and Ted found love, twice.

Paul said...

A lot of people said that because the "kids" look the same, the ending must have been filmed years ago.

Perhaps they recorded several endings with the kids and over the course of the series decided what they were going to do.

I didn't hate it, I just didn't love it, and rather than feel that Ted got to find true love twice, I feel like ending up with Robin cheapened his life with my mother.

Elyse Heise said...

My main issue is that the kids called her "aunt robin" and were super into getting her together with their dad... BUT the rest of the final was about how absent Robin had been from their lives.

You don't get Auntie status just because you used to be close friends with the kids dad. You get it by being there for the kid.

"Aunt" Robin wasn't there for them.