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wordssometimesfail · 4 years

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An Extremely Belated and Unasked-For Dissection of the HIMYM Finale

So, I recently hung out with a teenage cousin of mine. He told me that he had just discovered How I Met Your Mother on Netflix, and was a couple of episodes away from the series finale. Since the show’s been finished for a while and the internet fallout was so prolific, I asked him if he’d been spoiled for the ending. He said no, but then began insisting that I tell him what happens. 10-15 minutes of begging later, I finally relented and gave him a bullet-point summary of the finale.

He burst out laughing, said I was a bad liar, and asked for the real ending.

Instead of digging in my heels, I shrugged and told him he’d just have to watch it, so, y’know, that’ll be hilarious. But it got me thinking.

I, like everyone else, felt so fucking betrayed by the ending of HIMYM. Because it affected me so much, in fact, I became a bit obsessed with it. I went back to the show not long after the finale aired, just to watch old episodes again. This was partially because it had been a “comfort watch” for me for so long, and partially because I felt a deep-seated need to dissect the show as a whole.

And the thing is, if you rewatch the show with the ending in mind, it is very easy to see that they kept the ending in their heads the entire time. It’s decently, if subtly, foreshadowed. While the characters’ behaviour in the finale is frustrating, it is actually fairly consistent with their established personalities. And the misogynistic subtext of the finale was, unfortunately, a mainstay of the show long before that point. We gave C&C a lot of shit at the time for the ending coming out of nowhere, but outside of a few minor timeline/continuity issues, honestly? It didn’t. The groundwork was laid, and the clues were there all along.

So... why did it feel unearned? Why did almost no one see it coming, even avid, weekly watchers? Why does it sound so much like a bad lie?

I think the main problem came in when the showrunners realized that they were likely not going to be cancelled until the story was done. If you look at the first 4 seasons, you can see where they left themselves lifelines to complete Ted’s story if the plug were preemptively pulled:

Cancelled in Season 1 - Victoria becomes the Mother. Robin and Ted have feelings for one another, but because of timing and circumstance, they never pull the trigger. The audience was (presumably) rooting for them all season, so seeing them end up together years after Victoria’s death is satisfying, and feels like the resolution of years-long tension. You CAN love again after losing a beloved partner! (In hindsight, considering the ending they went with, I kinda wish the series had ended here.)

Cancelled in Season 2 - Robin and Ted break up earlier than they do in-show. Ted meets the Mother at Marshall and Lily’s wedding, which also happens earlier than it does in-show. While in this timeline the audience HAS seen Robin & Ted as a couple and there is less UST to resolve, the toxicity of their relationship has not yet been explored, so seeing them get back together has more of a “they’re finally ready for each other” feel.

Cancelled in Season 3 or 4 - Stella becomes the Mother. The “Shelter Island” wedding ends in a reception and a honeymoon, and the pacing is drastically altered. Again, Robin & Ted have not really relapsed in this timeline - they broke up and are both miserable about it, regretting what they did but both being too proud to admit as much, until it’s too late and Ted has fallen for someone else. The Barney/Robin hookup in S3 makes this a bit messier, but basically works. The rift caused by their hookup (+ Robin begging Ted not to marry Stella before the ceremony) kicks off the dissolution of the gang, and either...

Barney doesn’t catch feelings in this timeline and that’s the end of it.

Barney doesn’t catch feelings, but they continue a FWB relationship that eventually implodes as Robin realizes she wants what she had with Ted again, she can’t do casual anymore.

Barney does catch feelings, but upon accepting that Robin will always be pining for someone else, “relapses” and goes for the Perfect Month. (This one works whether they do the FWB thing or not.)

Ultimately, the tragedy of poor timing strikes again, and there is still some narrative satisfaction to the Ted/Robin endgame.

Barney’s finale plotline (unplanned daughter changing his life) would’ve worked if the show had ended at any of these points, since Barney’s secret desire for romance & family wasn’t really explicitly explored until later. Marshall & Lily’s finale plotline (ascent into picket-fence bliss at the expense of their beloved status quo) works no matter what, mainly because that was their overarching plotline for the entire show.

While the original ending concept was showing its wear as we approached the end of the actual S4, there was still some time to salvage it after this. The death knell came, not when Barney expressed romantic interest in Robin, but when Robin returned that interest.

And this isn’t about to turn into a screed about how Swarkles should’ve been endgame! Upon rewatching the show, I actually like Swarkles a lot more in theory than I do in practice - the showrunners went out of their way to make the pairing seem great, but act toxic. They have FANTASTIC moments, but those moments are strung together by poor communication, self-destruction, and Robin at her most insufferable (her desperate attempts at getting Barney to like her again in the first half of S8 were... *shudders*). They, much the same as Ted and Robin, are clearly shown to Not Work.

Even so, from the S4 finale onward, the show began to build toward Barney and Robin’s wedding, and that killed the planned ending. I say this began at the end of S4 because, as I said before, it isn’t until Robin explicitly returns Barney’s feelings that Swarkles becomes a threat to Ted/Robin - or, at least, a threat as perceived by the audience. Beyond the fact that this inadvertently turned Swarkles into a fan-favourite pairing, and was a large part of why the ending was poorly-received, it effectively changes the story.

Before canon Robin/Barney, no one other than Ted was really presented as a viable romantic option for Robin. She wasn’t interested in getting serious with anyone else, she didn’t have that electric connection with anyone else. In S1′s “Zip, Zip, Zip”, Robin turns Barney down (despite him offering the casual, fun fling she purports to want) because she’s hung up on Ted. In S3, Robin sleeps with Barney but is uninterested in doing so again, and her attentions are quickly back on Ted (though at this point it’s more unspoken). No matter who Robin hooked up with, even when it was another principal character in the ensemble cast, the primary tension was always between her and Ted. But as soon as she develops real, romantic feelings for Barney, that tension is gone.

And it... never really came back in the same way.

Other than their FWB arrangement in S4′s “Benefits” and a couple of near-misses later, Robin and Ted are not involved again until the end of the series. In fact, in “Benefits”, neither Ted nor Robin are interested in taking their relapse further - they only want casual sex, and are so romantically disinterested in one another that Ted ends the arrangement for Barney’s sake in the same goddamn episode. Though Ted does express that he still has feelings for Robin as early as S5, at no point does she reciprocate in any meaningful way. All of the romantic tension between them after the fact is one-sided. Robin is no longer romantically interested in Ted by approximately the midpoint of Season 4, her attentions are firmly on Barney (and later, other serious romantic interests) by the end of Season 4, and she isn’t interested in Ted again until the final episodes of the show.

The problem here isn’t that Robin had other serious romantic relationships, but that Ted was no longer a serious option in her mind for so much of the show’s run. Starting in S6, the wedding build starts in earnest, meaning that for four whole seasons (S6, S7, S8, and S9), the audience knows that someone is getting married. We’re told that Ted meets the Mother at the wedding, so there’s Zero chance of any of his relationships working out during that 4-season period - the tension is gone from his love-life, because we know that we’re waiting and we know what we’re waiting for. Suddenly, Robin and Barney are the center of the romantic tension of the show, and... Robin hasn’t been interested in Ted for a year. She and Barney are involved in a love quadrangle plot of which Ted is only an observer. By the time it’s confirmed, it’s painfully obvious that Robin is the bride at the foretold wedding, even with Barney’s red-herring girlfriends tossed in the mix. We spend all of Season 8 building up to the wedding. We spend all of Season 9 on the wedding weekend. Barney and Robin actually address the more toxic aspects of their relationship, and resolve to work on them (something Ted and Robin never actually did). We meet the Mother, and spend a season gleefully building up to the Mother meeting Ted.

Remind me... why are we supposed to want Ted and Robin to get together in the end?

There are other issues with the finale that bother me, but are not the focus of this rant as I don’t think they’re the Biggest Problem:

The gang was always going to drift apart, but they seem to stay in frequent contact with one another in flash-forwards that we see earlier in the show. This is... not super supported by the finale. (Ex. If [roughly] kindergarten-age Luke and Penny drew pictures of times they hung out with Aunt Robin, why does the finale imply they barely got to know her until after their mother passed?)

We knew for several seasons that Barney DID want a wife & kids, he was just afraid to admit it or pursue it because he thought he was too far gone. Yet we’re supposed to believe that his “relapse” after his breakup with Robin was him going back to the “real Barney”, and that despite having had 3 meaningful, serious romantic relationships throughout the series, one of which led to a marriage, he could not be arsed to so much as learn the name of the mother of his child. Despite getting 4 seasons of significant character development re: vulnerability, love, and relationships, he is supposed to have learned nothing, and changed not a whit. (NPH’s stance on this, that you may “want” Barney to change but some people don’t change, is... lame, imho, since we didn’t just want Barney to change, we were told and shown that he was actively changing, even if he wasn’t fully there yet.)

On that same note, the fact that Barney didn’t “really” change until his daughter was born implies that things might’ve worked out with Robin if she’d been able to bear him children. Also, implies that his speech to his mom about how Robin means more to him than the possibility of having children was insincere or at least misguided. Gross.

We all know about the Mother = Uterus shit, and while I don’t necessarily dislike the idea of the Mother having been dead all along, the idea that Ted and Robin couldn’t be happy together either until some other woman bore Ted’s children is also gross.

In general, super sexist, and it’s not a twist when you directly contradict what you have told/shown your audience. It’s bad writing.

But with all that said, if the show had ended somewhere between Seasons 1-4 (with minor to major tweaks - *reluctantly salutes*), the planned ending would have been fine. At least, it would’ve been fine with regard to Ted/Robin (and Barney’s character). The tension between them was still there, they still had audience support, and it made sense that, after all that buildup, Ted’s kids would be hoping for some closure to his tumultuous relationship with their Aunt. The problem is that, in the show as written... Ted and Robin do get closure. Ted, just like Tracy, is able to let go of the love that has consumed him and arrested his romantic development for so long, and that is what finally opens him up to meeting the love of his life. His relationship with Robin, even the unrequited mess it became later, not only led him to the Mother, it made him ready for the Mother. When he shuts Robin down in the penultimate episode of the show, Ted closes the door on that chapter of his life. That’s the closure. That’s the resolution of the Ted/Robin tension.

And that’s a huge part of why the ending feels flaccid. They attempt to resurrect a dynamic that no longer holds any narrative weight - Robin pining after Ted in a happy relationship, lamenting what she’s lost, is not only something that we’ve seen before, it’s something we’ve seen Robin get over before. She didn’t realize “too late” what she had with Ted, or what she could have had. She had it, lost it, mourned it... then decided she didn’t want or need it again, and found something new with someone else. They wanted to throw the audience off the scent, but by killing all the tension between their endgame couple, and spending literal years building up relationships between other characters, they destroyed any momentum that that storyline had in the first place. They told a will-they/won’t-they story, and while there were moments where they subtly hinted that “they will”, more than half their text was dedicated to showing their audience, “no they won’t”.

In the Season 2 episode “Something Blue”, Barney hears that Ted and Robin have something to tell everyone. When he begs them to tell him, they give him a story piece by piece detailing what happened. With each part of the story he gets, Barney guesses how it ends. Every time he guesses, Ted smiles wryly and tells him, “the story’s not over”. This implies to Barney and the audience that each of Barney’s guesses is wrong, because he doesn’t have all the information yet.

Except... Barney does correctly guess the end of the story. He guesses that Ted and Robin broke up, Ted smiles wryly, says “the story’s not over”, and proceeds to continue to tell it, only for the story to, in fact, end with his and Robin’s breakup.

This plot is emblematic of the problem with the end of How I Met Your Mother. One of the biggest running themes of the show is that until a story is over, you can’t turn it into a narrative. You don’t have the full picture, you don’t know who the bad or good guy is, you don’t know what story you’re living. Barney doesn’t know what story he’s being told until it’s over - except he does. And because Ted isn’t finished telling the whole story, he implies to Barney that he’s wrong. He throws him off, so he can end the story on his own terms. That’s what the showrunners of HIMYM did, too. They wanted so badly to tell the story as they conceived it, but in order to keep that ending as a twist, they couldn’t telegraph it too obviously. This, to them, meant throwing the audience so far off the scent of their plan that they obscured their plan, that they deflated the central narrative, made it look like there was no way it would happen, because we were being made to look in another direction. No, we clearly didn’t have the whole story. But we had the story that was unfolding before us, one where Robin didn’t want Ted romantically anymore, one where Barney was trying so, so hard to be better, one where Ted needed to let go in order to be happy. And that story doesn’t feel complete when it ends the way that it does, because the ending we got is the end of the story we saw in Season 1.

The story we saw in Season 1 was of a man who hopelessly pined after a woman who loved him back, but wasn’t in a place to reciprocate the way he wanted. Years later, they reconnect and are finally able to make it work. That’s the story that HIMYM thought they were telling. But, because they never got cancelled and got free reign to tell this story for as long as they wanted, and because they didn’t want us to guess that darn twist, they gave us a whole whack of misdirections, plot threads, and character growth that ultimately gets nullified to make way for the ending of the “real” story. There is no momentum carrying us to the finale as planned, because the finale as planned was meant to be the ending to a much shorter tale.

Everything else was just filler.

#how I met your mother #himym #himym finale #himym meta #listen this essay is a rambly mess and I apologize for fucking nothing #this was meant to be my last meta of the decade but I forgot to finish it oops

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