It's been about 24 hours since the finale of How I Met Your Mother, so I think it's safe to talk about it now. If not, here's your spoiler warning.
SPOILERS AHEAD. SERIOUSLY DON'T READ UNLESS YOU WANT TO KNOW THE ENDING.
I started watching HIMYM two years ago during my freshman year of college. It was a recent add to Netflix and I figured I would give it a shot to further put off doing my assignments. It quickly became one of my favorite shows of all time. It was funny, original, and had some of the best character development and consistencies I had ever seen so the writing part of my brain was also very much pleased.
So, naturally, I looked upon the series finale as both a sad but necessary part of this wonderful show's life cycle. I had my predictions, but mostly I had high hopes that thing would finally work out and I could finish watching with a mixture of sad and happy tears streaming down my face.
Oh, there were tears all right. Half were sadness. Half were rage.
As I said before, one of my favorite parts of the show was the amazing character development. All that was thrown out the tube during the last half of the hour-long finale. The development with Barney especially was the most groundbreaking. He had finally given up his playboy ways, trading in The Playbook for wedding vows. He made the ultimate display of affection to the love of his life and took up the entire last season counting down the hours until he married her.
After three years, they got divorced because Robin was "travelling too much" and he instantly reverted back to his original self, ruining years of character development and growth. It took him knocking up a random woman and having a daughter to put him back into perspective. The one thing that could shake him out of his playboy relapse was the one thing Robin couldn't give him.
Seriously?
And if that wasn't bad enough, the entire scene where Robin and Ted give each other up on the beach is entirely irrelevant now.
The ending of the series was filmed in the early years of How I Met Your Mother - probably the first or second season to be specific. The actors who played the children were noticeably the same age as when the series began with dialogue we'd never heard before. This makes it undeniably clear that the writers didn't think the show would have as long of a run as it did. If the show had run for four or less seasons, the ending of the finale would make sense. But because the last few seasons of Ted running back to Robin, only to be rejected time and time again as she drew closer and closer to her better match in Barney, the ending left the audience feeling both tricked and disappointed. We were teased with tidbits of how the mother and Ted were soulmates and were given an entire season to grow to love her only to have her converted into a plot device to make the ending possible. To give Ted the kids he wanted while he waited around for the woman who never wanted them.
Now, I don't mind that the mother ended up dying. It was one of my predictions and honestly kind of made sense to the plot. Why else would a man sit his children down for a nine-year story about how he met her?
The writer's choice to stick to their first ending with Robin and Ted getting back together just goes to show how little they care about their characters. Now it's my belief that writers should always have the final say on what happens to their characters. They're the creators after all. But it's also my belief that characters have a tendency to develop with time to places the writer never dreamed up. When a show lasts as long as HIMYM did, the ending is bound to change to accommodate the changes that the characters have gone through. And the gang of HIMYM was met with a lot of changes and hardships in its run. These made the show what it was and was why we had such high hopes for the finale. The characters deserved a happy ending. And so did the audience who watched them go through everything to get there.
The "shocker" ending to this beloved series had less of a shock and more of a sting. A nearly decade-old ending to a story that was constantly evolving is an insult to what the show was and had the potential to be. It's also a testament to one of the building blocks of writing: revision. Revision is a part of the writing process and is a dreaded and wonderful thing. No matter what the genre of writing, revision is key to making certain elements work. Especially when the original ending you had planned completely contradicts everything you've had building up to it. No story is "good enough" for revision. No ending is "good enough" to justify not changing unless you make it justifiable with the preceding chapters/paragraphs/episodes/lines/etc.
HIMYM will forever be an example of the low road to take in regards to television writing and will forever live in infamy as the show that could have had it all but lost it due to pride and stubbornness of its writers. Ted, Barney, Robin, Marshall, Lily, and Tracy... I'm truly sorry.
I'll leave you with this.
