Like a lot of fans I felt betrayed and disappointed by this steaming dump of a final season. For those of you who don’t know How I met Your Mother it is a show which as the name suggest involves a father telling his children how he met their mother. Despite taking a whopping nine seasons to get to the end of that story because he felt the need to fill them in on pretty much every incident from his mid-twenties on into his thirties this show was charming and entertaining in a way that no show has managed before except Friends. In fact this show really did feel like it was filling the void left by Friends.
We had eight seasons of teasing and hijinks as Ted Mosby became the type of man that ‘the mother’ would fall in love with. And many fans were excited for the airing of season nine because we were promised the mother. And I wish my dislike was just a matter of wanting something until you get it but no it’s far worse than that as I’ll cover as well go on.
First off the scenes with Ted’s future children were all filmed in advance which means that at least two people knew in advance how the show was going to end and they must have had some pretty heavy penalties in their contract to not reveal what happens in the fever dream that is this season.
It’s no surprise that the two part finale was the most watched and worst rated episode in the shows history. Clearly everyone else who stuck with the show through the years felt the need to see this thing through to the end. I wonder if they felt dirty as well.
The final season started airing September 23, 2013, and concluded on March 31, 2014 and I’m still mad. Quick side note, at Christmas I was picking what to buy for my fiancée and I decided to get her the HIMYM box set and I purposefully spent more money to get one that had only the first eight seasons and excluded the final one. And I thought to myself that while I’ll rewatch the show in time I doubt I’ll ever go back to the last season.
Now you might think I’m being overly critical and maybe I am. After all I am prone to hyperbole as it makes for better writing but I need to impress upon you that even though this season had a handful of gems it’s just not worth the effort and it provided absolutely no emotional payoff to the viewers after nearly ten years of investment in the characters.
But okay it’s time to get to the meat of what I want to discuss. Season nine changed the structure of the previous seasons. The entire season covers the events of roughly a three day period during which two main characters Barney Stinson (Neil Patrick Harris) and Robin Scherbatsky (Cobie Smulders) get married. Now I was as happy as anyone about them getting married. The entire previous season had all been Barney pulling off some master plan to convince Robin to be with him and over a few seasons we’d seen them grow close enough that them getting together wasn’t strange even if some people still thought Robin belonged with Ted. Whatever side you fall on the issue she was marrying Barney and we see in painstaking detail over the 24 episodes these two characters who I fully believed were meant to be married. All that effort and they get divorced. An ENTIRE SEASON of build up to their nuptials and and then in a flash forward they’re suddenly no longer together robbing a season worth of events of any real meaning as well as seasons worth of build up to them actually getting together in the first place. Again I don’t want it to seem as if I’m bitter. Sure I wanted them together but this also ain’t the reason season nine earns my ire.
Because as it turns out they weren’t just wasting our time with this season they were doing it from the get go. From the first episode the story has been ‘How did he meet the mother’ and they danced around it but finally in this season we meet her and fairly early on as well which surprised me. And she was lovely and cute and perfect for Ted in a way that none of the other potential mothers were. Despite them dragging one event on for a full season and then spitting on it by having them break up I was happy because they were finally together. And jeez they were even happy together.
We were all happy in fact right up until she popped her clogs. Now before I go on I want you to imagine something. The mother was dead the entire time he was telling the story to his children. So he must have sat them down and said okay kids I’m going tell you how I met your mother. Then he proceeds to tell them a long drawn out story about all the women he’s been with and everything else that happened in his life good and bad with his mother just being a side note. I’d be pissed if I were them. No I’d be distraught over my dead mom and be confused as to why he didn’t just say nice things about ‘the mother’ but instead told me about the time he got on a late night train to hook up with drunk chicks who just want to go home. Instead of reacting like that they clue in on why he told them the story in the first place and give him permission to date Robin. So he runs off and wins her back. And the mother is forgotten because Ted got what he wanted from her which was children because Robin never wanted any.
So I’m sorry if that’s unacceptable and what have you but they wasted all this time on someone who barely even mattered in the long term and I’m just so disappointed. But with that in mind go ahead and watch How I Met Your Mother because it’s a great show about some twenty somethings growing up with all the good and bad that life has to offer and like life the show has its good and bad. It just so happens they saved their worst for last.
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