Why How I Met Your Mother's Controversial Finale Was A Perfect Ending

[TMC]

https://screenrant.com/how-met-mothe...edium=referral

And so we get to the heart of the How I Met Your Mother ending: Ted actually meeting Tracy. This was the moment that had been teased since the very first episode, and taken in pure isolation delivers better than anybody could have imagined. A lot of legwork has been done through season 9 thanks to the showstopping casting of Cristin Milioti as the perfect wife for the dorky, driven Ted Mosby, but it's a lot more than just the actors.

Everything that had been established as core backstory to the Mother and how she met Ted is incorporated: the Yellow Umbrella's importance teased throughout seasons 3-5, the Econ 305 mishap from season 5's premiere, Ted's brief time dating roommate Cindy in 100th episode "Girls vs. Suits", and the other side shown in "How Your Mother Met Me" are not just namechecked but integrated into that fateful conversation. It's TV writing at its best, with big picture storytelling and effortless dialogue giving fans the short version of the story as always imagined (and scoring it to Everything But The Girl's "Downtown Train" cover adds the right level of wistful melancholy).

But, of course, the moment isn't just the meeting. Mere seconds before, How I Met Your Mother dropped its biggest twist: that the Mother has been dead this entire time. Tracy died in 2024 as a result of some undefined illness. If you'd been paying attention, then this shouldn't have been too much of a surprise; the end of "The Time Travellers", where Ted imagines going to the Mother and getting "those extra 45 days", is tinged with assumed loss, and when telling how Robin's mother turning up at the wedding in season 9's "Vesuvius", Ted cries at Tracy's insinuation "what mother will miss her daughter's wedding?" This was a popular fan theory, one Milioti had to go as far as deny.

The point of this discussion is to highlight just how unshakably complete How I Met Your Mother's mother meeting actually was. It had been foreshadowed so much yet from casting to the moment itself to a final twist was so carefully threaded into the ending. Although if we're talking the careful build-up of a series redefining twist, it's less the Mother's death that's the biggie than it is what she represents.

[TMC]

The problem with the HIMYM ending

Was that

1. HIMYM was a great show
   
2. The storytelling revolved Ted finding the Mother
   
3. "Aunt" Robin had been his on again of again, obsessive relationship. Ted spent many episodes, and arguably seasons especially the last season getting over her.
   
4. Barney had been matured from an immoral playboy that bounced around tricking women into one night stands to someone ready to marry and be faithful to the one woman he had fallen in love with and wanted to spend his love with
   
5. They spent the last season not only getting Ted over Robin but reassuring that Barney was ready to be married
   
6. After years of buildup they had made the mother into a mythological figure. It was impossible for anyone to live up to the shows descriptions. And yet Cristin Milioti as Tracy lived up to the ridiculous expectations. She was perfect mix of oddball charming. She was the best part of the final season and her episode "how your mother met me" is one of the best in the entire show.
   
7. Robin and Barney divorce in the finale after their season long wedding and Barney mostly goes back to his womanizing ways setting back his character development
   
8. Although Ted and the mother interact several times in flashback/forward during the final season in "real time" the show only spends a brief time with them meeting in the long finale, The Mother/Tracy McConnell dies, and after many years as he gets to the future where he's been telling the story to his children for nine seasons. His children say it's obvious this story is not about their mother but about Aunt Robin and that he should go rekindle their old relationship.
   
9. Although it makes sense for someone to seek another relationship a long time after the death of a spouse to TV watchers it's only been minutes since this perfect couple, one they'd been rooting for met.
   
10. The creators/show runners had originally planned the ending and filmed the scenes with the children (before they grew up) years ago and didn't bother changing it even as the show made it ever more clear as the seasons went by that Ted and Robin relationship was bad and that Robin and Barney was the relationship they were going with. They stuck with the original ending (the excuse that the kids would look older if they refilmed is pretty silly)