It has been almost 20 years since “How I Met Your Mother” (or “HIMYM”) started airing and just over 10 years since it aired what is generally considered one of the worst TV series finales ever created.
"HIMYM" follows Ted Mosby, whose future self in the 2020s tells his children the very, very long story about how he met their mother through a series of flashbacks. In the pilot episode, his two best friends, Marshall and Lily, get engaged, and this becomes the motivation he needs to find his one true love, much to the dismay of his other friend Barney, who would rather they continue as bachelors for the rest of their lives.
He meets Robin, and she ticks all of his boxes for the kind of woman for whom he is looking. But future Ted reveals to his children that this is also the story of meeting their Aunt Robin, and he has not yet gotten to the part with their mother. Robin joins the friend group, but Ted continuously obsesses over her for the better part of the first season before they finally get together at the end of season 1, only to break up at the end of season 2.
The series continued to run until its ninth season. Ted and Robin both move on with different relationships, still being friends. But while Robin never regrets the break up, Ted continuously wishes he could have Robin back. To make things more complicated, Robin and Barney start a relationship over the seasons, with the ninth season focused on their wedding weekend. It is only at the end of season 9 that we get the long awaited reveal of “the mother,” played by Cristin Milioti.
So, what goes wrong in that finale? The major point of anger from the fans is that after Barney and Robin’s wedding, we see the first interaction between Tracy (the mother) and Ted. Then, we get a speedrun of the events leading up to the present day, including Barney and Robin’s divorce and Tracy’s illness and subsequent death. Future Ted finally concludes the story to his children, but they point out that this wasn’t about their mom; it was about how he is still in love with Robin. So, the series ends with Ted stealing the blue French horn from a restaurant they went to on their first date and getting back together with Robin. This series finale betrayed its audience, its characters and even its own writing.
First, it should be noted that the creators knew “HIMYM” would run for a long time and they didn’t want Ted’s kids to age, so they shot the series finale at the end of season 1. My theory is that they had not anticipated how well received the Barney-Robin relationship would be, and more so, how unpopular the Ted-Robin relationship would prove. Among the most iconic love triangles in pop culture, Robin, Ted and Barney don’t usually show up, since the fandom wasn’t divided on Team Ted or Team Barney. Every time Ted would remind Robin of his feelings for her, she would remind him that she had none for him. The series always showed us that Ted and Robin were not a good fit, and gave us what felt like a message about letting go of an unrequited love.
The show introduced rules and theories on dating that felt like life lessons, even more so with the context of this being a story a father is telling his children. In the second episode, titled “Purple Giraffe,” future Ted relates his past self to a child who got stuck in a claw machine trying to get a purple giraffe toy after failing many times. This metaphor is for the younger Ted who throws a party three nights in a row just to invite Robin, who keeps canceling on him. In contrast, there is the yellow umbrella seen throughout the series. Ted finds it by chance at a random party, and we learn it actually belonged to Tracy. In the 200th episode entitled “How Your Mother Met Me,” we see how close Tracy and Ted were to meeting each other over the nine years. The idea of this was clear: Ted had to bend over backwards to try and get Robin to be with him and closed himself off to any actual possibilities including the woman who was supposedly his soulmate.
It seems like Ted’s romantic misfortune with other women was a direct consequence of his inability to let Robin go. At Robin’s wedding to Ted’s best friend, after a season of still secretly pining for her, Ted truly lets her go, and almost instantly finds the woman he is actually waiting for, Tracy. It seemed like his punishment would be over, but then he went right back to her in the end, as if no lesson had been learned.
"HIMYM" set up the perfect story to explain why we need to let go of obsessions and not force connections where there are none and let our soulmates come to us instead, but its finale completely contradicted this setup. It left us with the corrosive idea that it’s okay to obsess over someone for over a decade, because you will eventually get her. This isn’t how dating works, and it’s also not a good idea when writing: don’t hang onto your first idea of the ending, because like “How I Met Your Mother,” you might have outgrown it.
