Why I think the HIMYM finale was well done

By now, hopefully, all “How I Met Your Mother” fans have watched the finale (come on I waited two weeks to post this!), and gone through all manner of emotions. Before I continue, let me put this in bold.

THERE ARE SPOILERS BELOW.

Now that I’ve done my duty, let’s talk about the HIMYM finale. There are so many terrible articles which effectively say nothing, analyse nothing, and are just recaps or rants – and that was the impetus for writing this article. We need better articles about the HIMYM finale. Come on, Internet.

Here are some disclaimers. I ship Ted & Robin. I used to be a television comedy writer. I like continuity-heavy shows. And obviously, I liked the finale.

For a quick recap, here’s the ending.

Ted gets both Robin and the Mother

Honestly, this was the best way it could have ended. After 9 seasons worth of set-up, how could Ted possibly not end up with Robin? Similarly, after 9 seasons worth of crappy relationships, how could Ted possibly not end up with the Mother?

With these two set-ups in mind, the best possible pay off would be to give Ted the Mother and Robin. Short of polygamy, the ending was one of the better ways of doing it. If Ted had ended up with only the Mother or only Robin, it would have wasted the set-ups that we’ve spent the entire series watching.

Of course, the problem is that violent shippers of either camp want Ted exclusively to themselves, or find that this is a cop-out – how could one man love two women?

The thing is, this has been repeatedly established throughout the series, and heavily emphasised in the final season. Ted is capable of loving both Robin and another woman wholeheartedly. It’s not a case of Ted being unable to accept this fact, but it’s his partner’s inability to accept this quirk of Ted.

So it didn’t come out of left field. Ted does love both women faithfully, genuinely, and with the entirety of his heart, and as contradictory as this might be, we’ve had the whole series to ease us into this trait of his.

Robin’s ending is justified

Robin is filled with doubt about Barney in the last 48 hours leading up to her wedding. I don’t know what kind of trouble this is foreshadowing, but in the context of the show – whenever there’s a problem involving a third party, that relationship inevitably dissolves. Barney & Quinn. Ted & anybody.

None of Marshall & Lily’s fights are about a third party. And that is why their relationship, despite several hurdles, doesn’t foreshadow a terrible end.

I know that Robin’s doubts about Barney is paid off in the 3rd last episode, where she comes to terms that Ted is not the right person for her. But if you watch that scene carefully, Robin never actually resolves that issue. Ted seemingly resolves it for her – and then she bolts, only to bump into the Mother, who resolves it for her with a terrible deux ex machina (three deep breaths? really?).

In other words, Robin never earned her own conclusion to the Ted-Barney problem.

So when this issue rears its head again in the finale, it’s not without cause.

Robin gets happiness

See the previous point. Robin doesn’t have third party issues when she’s with Ted, and vice-versa. As with Marshall & Lily, this is indicative of her ideal pairing.

True, Robin-Barney shippers would have stated that she would get her eternal happiness with Barney. But the fact that she won’t is foreshadowed with all her angst over Ted, so when it is revealed that she won’t be happy with Barney, it makes sense. It’s not a likeable scenario, but it doesn’t come out of the blue either.

So giving Robin her happiness with Ted is really the only thing that could have been done to give Robin her happy ending – at this point, every other character has a happy ending already.

It fits the theme of the show

Much has been said how HIMYM is about the journey and not the destination. So it’s fitting that the finale sees them through the rest of their journey, and doesn’t actually show us the destination (how did the date between between old Robin & old Ted go). It implies that they were together, but it doesn’t definitively state that.

So if you’re anti-Tobin, there you go. They might not have gotten together after all. But we never see the destination.

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Now comes my personal gripe.

I hate how the locket subplot was handled.

It was never resolved in S09E01, and I had to wait until Ep 22 before it was mentioned again. It was a very, very poor pay off, for a subplot that was set up at the beginning of the season.

I guess I kind of expected it to play a huge part in the finale, with the locket playing a much larger symbolical role in the story. But no, it was just kind of passed around with a few mentions.

If there was anything that irked me about the finale, it was the lack of a locket. But the blue French horn made up for it, I suppose – if only that McGuffin had appeared earlier in the finale.