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

It's been five years since How I Met Your Mother's ending, and about time the controversial finale was reevaluated. What made Carter Bays and Craig Thomas' CBS show stand out from other inheritors vying for Friends crown was its purposed premise; this wasn't just a string of adventures involving twenty/thirty-somethings in New York City, it was the romantic story of how Ted Mosby (Josh Radnor in the present, Bob Saget in narration from 2030) met the mother of his children. But that put an increased onus on the ending compared to other friendship-coms.

The final season of How I Met Your Mother was already an extended finale, following the gang in the days and hours leading up to Barney (Neil Patrick Harris) and Robin's (Cobie Smulders) wedding - the foreshadowed day of the meeting - with the Mother (Christin Miloti) Rozencrantzing through Ted's life. But, then, the final episode took the audience way beyond, charting the years to come: after Ted met the mother, Barney and Robin divorced, Barney had a child, Marshall (Jason Segel) became a judge, Robin drifted from the group, Ted got married and, a few years after, the mother died. After jumping back to show the long-teased meeting of Ted and Tracy, the show concluded with the kids in 2030 convincing Ted to move past their mother and pluck up the coverage to ask out Aunt Robin.

Few TV endings receive quite a strong reaction as How I Met Your Mother's. The backlash was so swift and strong that the showrunners even released an alternate ending on home video that completely edited out the two biggest points of contention: the killing of the Mother so soon after introduction, underscoring the show's ultimate victory with sadness and regret, and Ted then moving past her in - for the audience - a matter of minutes to go back to Robin, a character who's spent the last few seasons building towards Barney. That ending is unchallenging and effective enough thanks to the base show, yet something's missing - How I Met Your Mother's true purpose.

The development of How I Met Your Mother's ending makes the whole thing more complicated. While at first how Ted actually met the Mother wasn't defined - when it was originally a thirteen-episode order, that honor could have gone to Victoria - both of the major twists were written in stone back in 2007, at the end of season 2: as Lyndsy Fonseca and David Henrie, who played Ted's kids, would soon visibly age, the producers decided to shoot their side of the ending dialogue immediately. This locked How I Met Your Mother into an ending centered on the mother's death and their father ending up with Robin only 20% of the way through its run, allowing very little leeway. Even as the show moved characters in different directions - Robin and Barney being the biggest - the endgame loomed large.

This is often cited as an undisputed stamp on the ending, that How I Met Your Mother's rigid conclusion rendered any of its post-season 2 development moot. While it's true that, as much as fans will often praise showrunners having a detailed plan, in practice that can be as damaging as freewheeling, that the show still took characters in natural directions shows this was never a restriction. And all of that ignores one bigger point: How I Met Your Mother's finale is, actually, quite brilliant.

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Page 2: How I Met Your Mother's Ending Rebukes "The One"

How I Met Your Mother's Finale Breaks The Group - Because It Had To

The first half of How I Met Your Mother's two-part, bumper-length finale offers up a classic sitcom trope: saying goodbye to the primary set. From Friends to The IT Crowd, this has always been a popular way to underscore the episodic events of previous seasons and allow characters to reminisce about good times long gone. Except for How I Met Your Mother, it comes much later and tinged with sadness.

By 2016, Robin and Barney are divorced, Ted has a daughter and Marshall and Lily (Alyson Hannigan) are planning to finally move to the suburbs. Robin comes to the customary Halloween/flat leaving party, but having drifted from the others since her breakup, feels incredibly out of place and, intercepted by Lily when trying to leave early, declares the gang over: "We'll always be friends. It's just never gonna be how it was. It can't be. And that doesn't have to be a sad thing. There's so much wonderful stuff happening in all of our lives right now, more than enough to be grateful for. But the five of us hanging out at MacLaren's, being young and stupid - that's just not one of those things. That part's over." That stereotypical final shot of the apartment is of Lily - in a white whale costume while pregnant with her second child - dispirited by what's been lost.

The notion that the gang wouldn't stay the same had been seeded throughout the show. In season 7, Marshall and Lily's initial move to the suburbs highlighted growing distance, while Kevin's tirade about the group's dependency in "Mystery vs. History" broke down the illusion of sustainability. Season 8's "The Time Travellers" (a very important episode we'll come back to) further highlighted how, 45 days before Robin and Barney's wedding, everybody was now on their own, segmented life tracks. And season 9's "Gary Blauman", the third-to-last episode of the whole show, ended with 2030 Ted admitting how people drift through life.

How I Met Your Mother's finale brought a crushing realization about even the strongest of friendships; that life changes in ways we can't control. In the end, the gang do stay close for the big moments - culminating in Ted and Tracy's wedding day - but the journey they take is one rooted in harsh reality, highlighting how the rose-tinted sense of permanence traded by ensemble sitcoms is unfeasible. It's the natural endpoint for a show that was always acutely aware of its true nature that sets up a more subversive ending to come.

The Robin & Barney Problem

Robin and Barney splitting up in How I Met Your Mother

At the core of the group's breakdown is Robin and Barney's divorce: three into their marriage, Robin's hectic work schedule puts a strain and, after a drunken night in Argentina, they decide to break up. Splitting the pair up is necessary for the prerecorded ending's Robin twist (they were only brought together due to Neil Patrick Harris' and Cobie Smulders' chemistry in spite of the unavoidable breakup), but that it happened after making the entire final season about the couple's wedding - and all the doubts and learning that comes with it - is a key point of contention.

This is the trickiest part of the finale as it represents a complete reversion of the past six seasons - Barney first slept with Robin in season 3's "Sandcastles in the Sand" and carried a flame for her ever since - and passes core development on to shock events; in the end, Barney only truly calms down when meeting his daughter from the 31st one night stand of a "perfect month". But, all things considered in the execution, it's fair to say much of the hyperbole sidesteps the rather frank delivery.

The first half of the How I Met Your Mother finale is rather tightly on this aspect, giving the marriage time to show its faults before any big reveal, and it's folded into the bigger sense of the group changing over time. There's again that character-logical realism. And, more than just setting up Robin as Ted's future wife, it also lays down the ending's core thesis. As Barney says, "This isn't a failed marriage. It's a very successful marriage that happened to only last three years." It may be a joke, but it doesn't look like Bays and Thomas are being flippant.

Page 2 of 2: How I Met Your Mother's Ending Rebukes "The One"

Everything With The Mother Was Clearly Foreshadowed

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.

How I Met Your Mother's Rebuking Of "The One"

So much of what the How I Met Your Mother finale was going for was established seven episodes earlier in unconventional 200th episode "How My Mother Met Me". A reversal of the show that revealed the mother's life from the night Marshall proposed to Lily up to Barney and Robin's wedding by way of her and Ted's various near misses throughout the series, it revealed Tracy had previously believed she'd found "The One" in her late-teens only for him to die on her 21st birthday, leading to an adulthood of emotionally-enforced abstinence. The episode ends with boyfriend Louis proposing for Tracy, forcing her to ask the deceased Max whether it's OK to move on and deciding she can't either way; she still doesn't feel happy moving on, breaking it off with Louis and takes out a room at the Farhampton Inn where she plays "La Vie En Rose" while Ted listens next door.

While "How Your Mother Met Me" was ostensibly exploring the other side of the yellow umbrella story and the mother's relationship with Louis, it also provided a wrinkle to the ethos that How I Met Your Mother had been peddling in for the past decade. Ted's entire arc had been shaped by his objective desire to find "The One", yet the woman the audience knew he was destined to be with had already had such an experience and deemed her love life over. For them to end up together is to explicitly refute the very idea of "The One", to demystify the overly romantic worldview of a lovelorn protagonist.

From the point onwards, How I Met Your Mother couldn't have a simple happy ending; it was destined to challenge the misty-eyed meeting that, as idealized as it may seem within a story, is ultimately false in reality. This is why the show didn't just have the opportunity for Ted to make a romantic gesture for Robin, it had to do it. For Ted to try and move on, or at least accept, the mother's death is only to be expected; for him to be so eternally obsessed with Tracy would betray the lessons she herself learned - and that was the point of the telling.

Robin Explains Why Ted Told The Story This Way

Ted and the Blue French Horn in How I Met Your Mother

How I Met Your Mother's premise is fundamentally broken when a show framed as a story from a father to his kids has a 76 hour total runtime. The show called this out multiple times in a light fourth-wall-breaking way, never taking the faux-criticism too seriously. And yet the finale is ultimately an answer to this: why did the story take so long?

The most important self-shielding justification came at the start of season 3, where Ted says. "Kids, there more than one story of how I met your mother. You know the short version, the thing with your mom's yellow umbrella. But there's a bigger story, the story of how I became who I had to become before I could meet her." This was the first explicit mention of the iconic MacGuffin, but also revealed that the purpose of this story wasn't just to get Ted to the mother - that could be summed up in a couple of sentences - but more a story of Ted.

In many ways, it was the classic TV trick of saying "it's not about the destination, it's about the experiences along the way." This is true of fellow mystery-dominated-show-with-a-controversial-ending Lost, which sidestepped spelling out all of its mysteries for a finale that focused tightly on the characters and community created over the past six years. And How I Met Your Mother was embracing it implicitly throughout, perhaps seen best when Ted wants to skip to the "dessert" of old age in season 4's "Murtaugh".

But that's not the full extent of How I Met Your Mother. As revealed by Ted's kids, this was a subconscious attempt on his part to question his ideal of "The One" and, more immediately, whether it was OK for him to end up with Robin. That's why the story began with the night they met and why Tracy was barely in the story until the end; the final reveal with Robin reframes the story without undoing any of the journey as first seen.

This was inevitably going to be controversial, but that's why the show had to go this way. How I Met Your Mother's twist is that the story of Ted's life isn't as simple as "The One", and while that's a challenge to those who've been following what he'd been misbeliving for the past nine years, it's the only right ending.

Next: Best How I Met Your Mother Episodes