WAIT FOR ... THAT? Kids, I'm in Pittsburgh on trial this week and was unable to watch last night's HIMYM finale, but I certainly learned what happened and have to ask:
was it that bad? Are you disappointed, annoyed, betrayed ... or actually okay with it?
I think the core issue is "how upset are you that (as foreshadowed) the Mother was dead and Ted was telling the story to justify asking out Robin?" To me, two key things leave me not happy, but OK with it: (1) the "kids" footage made crystal clear that this was a decision made long ago--it wasn't a last minute call by Bays/Thomas--they've had this in mind since the beginning, (2) Ted's VO made very clear that it was not "I didn't really love your mother." Ted loved that woman completely and totally. And there was a bunch of emotional stuff separate from that which I thought really rang true--most notably NPH's speech to the baby and the Robin/Barney breakup argument.
ReplyDeleteAnd my bet--it is revealed in the final scene of the HIMYD pilot that the titular Dad is Barney. Notably, we never saw or heard the name of Barney's love child's mother.
Yes, it was really that bad. I'm really disappointed. And the montage of moments we got to see of Ted and Tracy's marriage had me sobbing. Had they ended the show on the platform when Ted met Tracy, I would have been happy.
ReplyDeleteI still don't know how I feel. I loved the episode and thought it was perfect, until the ending. When Ted said the mother got sick, I said "NO!" out loud to my TV (even though I knew it was coming) and still had hope that she would recover and walk into the room where Future Ted was telling the story to the kids. Ultimately, I'm disappointed, but as someone pointed out in another post, I think it is mostly because we all really liked the mother and would have liked to see much more of her this season (and some previous seasons.)
ReplyDeleteOnce again, I've got enough of an ego to want to point to my not-that-far-off prediction form six and a half years ago: http://tosyandcosh.blogspot.com/2007/11/dead-mother-i-dont-know-why-but-i-cant.html
ReplyDeleteAs far as the actual episode, I actually quite liked it. The only thing that bothered me about Barney and Robin divorcing is that it makes the decision to set season 9 entirely at their wedding odd. Still, it's not as if many a couple hasn't had emotionally powerful, love-filled weddings and then eventually divorced. But as Matt said, what I really loved about it was that the show and actors did a beautiful job of painting the relationship with the mother as not even close to a compromise or consolation prize. This was, in truth, the love of Ted's life, and whatever happens with Robin (and remember that we have no information about what kind of/how successful a relationship they have), this will always be the defining love of his life. The splintering of the gang also rang true - very close friends really do drift apart, and that Robin would eventually split from the gang felt very natural to me (I loved the opening, and how it reminded us that Robin came to the group as an outsider originally).
All that said - I REALLY want a spin-off about the years Ted and the Mother had together.
As someone who loved the show for the first few years and hasn't watched it the last few because it's been very not enjoyable (but occasionally checked in with friends/reviews to see if I should be hopping back on), I thought the finale was a perfect disaster. All of the stuff Alan and others had been worried about came to be. The two big structural issues Bays/Thomas could have fixed:
ReplyDelete1) Spending the whole final season on a wedding and showing how great a character was, then ending that marriage and killing that character within 40 minutes of screen time.
2) Their belief Ted couldn't meet the mother until the end. They could have introduced her a season or two ago and just had fun adventures with the gang. They painted themselves into a corner with the "Aunt Robin" thing, and then just kept adding more paint.
It was more like "How I Met Your MacGuffin," really. Perhaps now that this and "Lost" are both done writers and fans can focus on finales that are good instead of clever.
I think the worst part is just that Robin really got the short shrift, by virtue of this all being from Ted's point of view. We don't see the good years of her marriage, or her enjoying her life on the road with her awesome job. Every time we see her, she's sad. She doesn't even keep in touch with Lily, her best friend, after they did several episodes over the years about how Robin and Lily didn't have to drift apart just because Lily was having kids. The overall impression is that she just abandons all her personal relationships and waits, alone, for her first choice to get over losing HIS first choice and then exactly reenact what happened 15 years earlier.
ReplyDeleteNot to mention all of this being shown to us in one quick chunk, right after the wedding, right after the mother having a big role in the wedding happening...it just feels cold.
There's nothing necessarily wrong with the events of the finale, if they existed in a vacuum. (It's kind of the premise for As Time Goes By?) It's just not a very satisfying end to this series.
Me, I loved it. What I don't get is the extreme response in the reviews that some of the critics wrote. Did you read Sepinwall's review? It's little more than hysterical pearl-clutching. (Alan, I know you sometimes read ALOTT5MA, and if you see this, know that I still love most of your writing, but I hope you give this finale a sober second look in a few days.)
ReplyDeleteFor me, it redeemed most of the nonsense of the last few years - the characters were recognizable as ones I liked/loved in the first few seasons. Of COURSE Barney and Robin weren't going to live happily ever after, and of COURSE Robin and Lily were going to drift apart as Robin's career continued to take off. And kudos to the show for letting Robin - like Cristina on Grey's Anatomy - be career-first.
I liked it, but I didn't love it. The ending didn't really bother me - the fact that she died and he wants to date Robin now doesn't make his marriage in any way a sham (and it was never, ever presented as anything other than perfect love - and we actually got quite a bit about their lives together over the course of this season). And if you look back, the explanation of why he's telling this story this way makes a whole lot of sense. You may not like it, but you can't say it was all thrown together and didn't work plot-wise.
ReplyDeleteThe Robin-Barney thing is really the piece that didn't work for me structurally. I have no problem with the idea that those two didn't make it past three years - but I do have a problem that we spent an entire season dealing with their wedding, then didn't really get to SEE any of the wedding, and none of the marriage, and it was just over right away. That felt like poor structure and planning and THAT was the part that felt like it was done to conveniently make Robin available for Ted.
No matter what else they did in that hour, they gave us two transcendent scenes: Barney meeting his daughter for the first time, and the actual meeting between Ted and the same-initialed Mother. Radnor and Milioti absolutely killed that scene under the umbrella, and the writing was perfect. So really, they nailed the moment when Ted actually met the Mother, so I'm fine with what we got last night.
For what it's worth, ratings were apparently massive. https://twitter.com/TVMoJoe/status/451012372040126465 Likely to be the #1 show of the week in the demo.
ReplyDeleteThat is probably worth is a lot of people now with zero interest in watching "HIMYD."
ReplyDeleteI agree with your assessment of the critical response. I didn't love the finale, in that I felt the pacing was a bit off, and that they almost tried to do too much, it felt like they needed another 10 minutes of show to get it to flow smoothly together. That said, I thought the character arcs were realistic. The worst part to me, of the finale that is, was the awful job somebody did on Ted's hair to try to age him. On my tv at least, the highlights looked blue rather than the grey I think they were going for.
ReplyDeleteThe whole death / Ted & Robin premise might have worked -- if it turned out that the kids in question were not Ted's kids, but instead allocated to Robin and Barney, and Ted's explaining why he'd be an ok step-dad. Making Robin the Mother the whole time would have been quite the twist, though it would be hard not to give short shrift to the Mother they went with.
ReplyDeleteGiven that the kids know her as "Aunt Robin," how?
ReplyDeleteoh, all of a sudden the writers are going to start worrying about continuity?
ReplyDeleteThe problem with the finale is that it seemingly undid so many things the show had been urging viewers to care about for the past several years. We've seen Barney and Robin miserably fail at a relationship before, but then the show spent literally its entire season urging us that this time was different (for reasons never really demonstrated)--and then the finale confirmed that yup, they're totally unworkable. And it's even worse for Ted and Robin -- they'd spent years showing all of the reasons that those two could not work as a couple (as opposed to friends), only to fold the show in on itself by having her become Ted's happily-ever-after. Not to mention that this made the actual mother (who is far more enjoyable than Robin) something of a footnote in Ted's romantic adventures. Yes, a very important footnote, but still -- she's the love of his life after so many false starts, and yet he couldn't get around to marrying her until after 7 years and 2 kids? The show ended up becoming HIMYMTTLHTFAEAWTAFYPIAOSYBCARAYL (How I Met Your Mother, Then Tragically Lost Her, Then Found an Exceedingly Awkward Way to Ask for Your Permission in Asking Out Someone You've Been Calling Aunt Robin All Your Lives).
ReplyDeleteThe conventional wisdom seems to be that the show's fate was set years ago, when they filmed the kids' reaction to the end of the story. (Apparently, the writers didn't think of maybe filming a few versions, just to give themselves some options.) But if they were going to turn this whole thing into something of a tragedy, why did it have to be the mother that died? They could've pulled basically all of the same stunts (e.g., having Ted choke up in "Vesuvius" when something is said about not being there to walk a daughter down the aisle), and then revealed that the entire show was a video Ted made before he passed. At least that route wouldn't have entailed turning the entire show into a "gotcha" moment by revealing that it all really WAS about Robin, after all.
I'm mostly just amused at how emotional and worked up people are getting over this. It was a tv show. It ended. It ended the way the creators wanted it to end. It didn't have to ignore the laws of physics to make that happen (though, in retrospect, my favorite tv finale had to do that, and it worked out fine). The ending was plausible. Those who think it subverted the whole narrative have a much greater faith than do I in the idea that our lives follow consistent narratives.
ReplyDeleteI was a little mad yesterday early on in the show when I realized, yup, yup going to put him together with Robin. BUT then while watching the whole finale and thinking about it overnight, I do not personally like or wish for this Robin/Ted pairing BUT if Robin and Ted are going to ever work it would be as later in life, post-kids (or at least kids basically grown up, if Robin is still travelling its not like they instantly elope becuase we don't know, so not really Robin as mom of tiny humans, just Robin maybe a little bit being a mom of almost adult humans who seem to be ok with lots of aunt Robin around or even still just being aunt Robin dad's girlfriend). I can see this Robin and Ted working.
ReplyDeleteAnd I don't think it negates the mother's place in Ted's life--like Marsha said clealry it was nothing but true, deep love. It does sort of minimize it for the audience because the story has ultimately been about Robin and Ted (which yup, that's what happened on the show) with the mother being a footnote on it, a footnote he doesn't need to tell the kids because they know a bunch of it. But it has always minimized it for the audience. ALWAYS. That's the premise! And even if Ted Mosby is a total doof, I like that the end message of the show is that we all have chances for love and second chances (or thirds or whatever many times) and that even doofy Ted Mosby deserves happiness again after a tragedy.
I don't think it was the greatest finale ever, but I do not think it was a bad finale or even really a con (ok, maybe a head fake). It was the finale this show was probably always going to have.
Also, those teenagers kept this secret for like 7 years!!!
I forgive a lot of stuff; perhaps because I hopped on and off and so everyone's N years of suffering were compressed for me, but the thing that absolutely did not ring true for me was the Barney/baby thing. Cutesy writing, but the trope of brief-exposure-to-baby-equals-love is dumb (see also: single child-neutral or child-negative people forced to babysit will suddenly become parenty - I'm looking at you, About A Boy The Sitcom) and was less believable (especially on Barney, even for a NPH-lover) than a lot of his other character evolutions (though this was saltation, not evolution ...)
ReplyDeleteTotally agree on point 1 - genius to have this in the can and has me more forgiving. Unless they also have the kids saying all kinds of random stuff "So that's when you found out 'aunt' means 'Mom' in Latvian!" "So I was Marvin?!" "She got eaten by a dinosaur" etc. - and boy kid said he came in to do some extra lines, so clearly it wasn't all exactly perfectly in the can).
Also wanted to see a Saget cameo somewhere in there.
It took some time for me to come around to this, but I think the ending works very well.
ReplyDeleteYou need to reflect on the whole serious based on Ted's endgame. Ted isn't really trying to tell his kids the story of "How I Met Your Mother". He's telling them about his life before he meet their mother. This would be fresh information for them because I doubt many discuss their pre-wife dating with their kids.
The entire series existed as a way for Ted to share his life prior to the mother and, in particular, this woman, Robin, who was clearly the 2nd most special person to him.
The obvious culmination is that he is asking his kids for permission to reclaim a part of his pre-mother life. To faciliate this, he would also need to explain Robin and Barney's complicated past.
If Robin is living with 5, 6? dogs in an NYC apartment, it's pretty clear she's no longer spending all her time traveling.
ReplyDeleteThere was a callback later on--turned out all the dogs were gifts from exes, and (at Ted's prodding) she gave up the dogs to her family in Canada. My assumption was that 2030 Robin was a wealthy/famous newscaster/anchor, and thus able to sustain a large number of dogs if she wanted them.
ReplyDeleteSure, I liked it. It was a good, comic reflection of how life can be messy, something HIMYM has done very well over the years. A neat threading of the needle concerning Ted, Tracy and Robin made it a nice , smooth , messy landing for me. My only point I didn't particularly care for was the kids cheering him on at the end, but whatever, it's a little thing.
ReplyDeleteI avoided the Internet as much as possible today and then watched the finale tonight. In fact, I finished watching it moments ago and came straight here. At this point, immediately post-watching, I hate it. I hate it I hate it I hate it. I really hope they weren't going where they went. I'll see how I feel in a few days but right now, well, I hate it.
ReplyDeleteIn re continuity: http://how-i-met-your-mother.wikia.com/wiki/Tracy
ReplyDeleteI'm racking my brain. What finale defied the laws of physics?
ReplyDeleteI was thinking of ST:TNG's finale, All Good Things, which relied on time travel. (I'll stipulate that maybe there are theoretical physicists who think time travel is possible.)
ReplyDeleteGotcha. Although you could argue the real time travel happens within his own consciousness. That doesn't explain how you get the three together, but it just so happens that I'm watching Cosmos right now, and with the anomaly...well, it's theoretically possible. Maybe.
ReplyDeleteBut if you can accept Q and the Traveler, I don't think they pushed very far further than they had already gone.
No, not at all. I was just joking about the fact that I used that phrase when, in fact, my favorite finale broke the laws of physics (as we know them).
ReplyDeleteAlso, FWIW, I think Picard had to be time traveling. Not in the Marty McFly sense, in which his body was jumping through time, but in the sense that his awareness -- his consciousness? -- was shifting among the three bodies in three different time frames. Also, I believe the anomaly was traveling backwards through time, which explained why it was larger in the past than in the future.
ReplyDeleteMatt, I think one major impediment to your position re: HIMYD is that the show would have to take place in the years leading up to 2012/2013. Not that HIMYM is highly focused on technology or current events, but I would think they'd want it to be set roughly contemporaneously with when it's airing.
ReplyDeleteApparently, if you do the math, Elie Stinson was born in 2020 (http://how-i-met-your-mother.wikia.com/wiki/Ellie_Stinson). That gives them 6 years of wiggle room/run time.
ReplyDeleteOh, duh. I totally forgot that was in the future. Idiot me
ReplyDelete