Warning: Contains spoilers for How I Met Your Father Season 1.
The original How I Met Your Mother ending has always been controversial among viewers, but How I Met Your Father just went a long way to fixing the original finale’s biggest mistake. After the successful 9-season run of How I Met Your Mother, there was near immediate talk of a spin-off. However, it took nearly a decade for How I Met Your Father to be released, but it seems like it might have been worth the wait.
In the How I Met Your Mother finale, it is revealed that the mother, Tracy McConnell (Cristin Milioti) has actually died by the time that Ted Mosby (Josh Radnor/Bob Saget) started telling his kids the story. The purpose of the story was not really to explain how Ted met their mother, but rather to explain that while he had always loved their mother and she was perfect, he was considering dating Robin Scherbatsky (Cobie Smulders) at this point. This caused two major problems for some viewers: first, it felt like a bait and switch and that Ted’s relationship with the mother was not held as important enough, and second, that it was a betrayal of Robin’s character who had continually pushed that she didn’t want to settle down and have kids.
A large part of the problem with How I Met Your Mother’s ending for Robin came from the fact that the two-part finale had to tell years of her life experience in a relatively short space of time while also focusing on other characters. Robin needed more time to show her change in attitude and the way that, while she had loved her time traveling, she regretted all the things that she had missed out on while working as a jet-setting journalist. How I Met Your Father’s season 1 finale managed to fix this issue when it introduced Robin’s How I Met Your Father cameo at MacClaren’s bar, where she was able to give Sophie (Hilary Duff) advice on her relationship with Jesse. While the scene between the two is relatively short, it puts Robin’s experiences under a magnifying glass and is able to humanize the change that How I Met Your Mother had to breeze past while trying to give five main characters compelling conclusions and to kill of the mother in the original How I Met Your Mother ending.
How I Met Your Mother managed to handle most character endings well. Lily Aldrin (Alyson Hannigan) and Marshall Erickson’s (Jason Segal) endings were almost predetermined seasons before, and their ending was purely feel-good. While Barney Stinson’s (Neil Patrick Harris) ending upset some fans, his refocus of his life was well telegraphed and honestly necessary to put at least some distance between his character and his creepy behavior. Ted Mosby was the primary focus of the show, and his conclusion, while natural to some viewers and controversial for others, was given due attention. Yet Robin Scherbatsky’s How I Met Your Mother ending could easily feel like it was more in service of Ted’s story than a natural progression of her own narrative.
In a lot of ways, Robin’s How I Met Your Father cameo alongside Sophie serves as the missing link for her narrative, while leaving room for her to appear again in later episodes of How I Met Your Father. During the time jumps in the How I Met Your Mother series finale, Robin is a successful reporter and her relationship with Barney falls apart, and by the end of it she is ready to have a more grounded life with Ted and his now-adult kids, for whom she has already had a transient presence in their lives. But Robin’s middle ground is never really shown, and the happy but regretful Robin seen in How I Met Your Father talking to Sophie truly helps to bridge that final gap and fix a big How I Met Your Mother problem.