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Why the How I Met Your Mother Finale is better than you remember.
A thread
(Note: this thread contains spoilers so if you've not seen the finale or don't want to ruin you're experience, I'd recommend seeing this after watching the finale)
(1/2)
RT's appreciated
A thread
(Note: this thread contains spoilers so if you've not seen the finale or don't want to ruin you're experience, I'd recommend seeing this after watching the finale)
(1/2)
RT's appreciated
I'll start of with this dialogue from Barney,
At the time I thought this sentiment was preposterous. I didn't actually hate the ending like a lot of people did but I really thought this line was based on some terribly flawed logic.
At the time I thought this sentiment was preposterous. I didn't actually hate the ending like a lot of people did but I really thought this line was based on some terribly flawed logic.
But looking back at it with a much cooler head I actually understand the point it was trying to make. It's just an extension of the themes the finale is set on portraying and those are themes the series as a whole has flirted with.
And that's why the line actually makes a lot of sense both filmatically and for the characters involved. But before we delve into that we have to cover the elephant in the room. A lot of people hated the ending, I mean HATED IT.
For the most part I think this is because it doesn't conform to how you would expect a sitcom to end. There's no one big happy ending, there's no Ross chasing after Rachel and finally getting her.
But most of all people were really peeved off that in a series called “How I Met Your Mother” Ted doesn't actually finish the series with the mother. Instead she dies and he eventually falls back in love with Robin.
In short, their take on the finale was that it was telling them that Ted had always been in love with Robin and that the mother had just been some consolation prize while she was otherwise occupied.
But not only is that a very simplistic interpretation of the episode, it actually flies in the face of what the series had been about from the beginning. It's what made How I Met Your Mother such an endearing show.
When the weekly episodes drifted in later seasons, the overarching character arch stood out far beyond for many sitcoms before or since have provided.
For every episode where Barney dances on the roof of a car singing about suits, there are episodes that deal with far more real situations than anything we typically expect from a sitcom.
How can anyone forget the devastating emotional gut punch that was the death of Marshall's dad, not only was this heart-wrenching, it had actually been foreshadowed almost an entire season prior when a flash forward to the Thanksgiving table showed him absent.
Another great example of this show being unafraid to get more serious with the audience is when Ted is left at the altar by Stella.
Now in itself this is something that quite a few shows have done, but the way it's handled is different. See, Ted doesn't do anything wrong, he doesn't cheat on the bride or say Rachel at the alter.
No, Stella leaves simply because Ted isn't the one who is meant to be with her. The show makes this clear by literally having Ted realise and narrate that she simply left because that whole season's arc isn't actually his story. It was her's.
It was a story about how she reconnected with her true love by being in a relationship that let her love again. In a sense, if she hadn't fallen in love with Ted, she never would have been able to fall back in love with her ex either.
So it wasn't that she didn't love Ted. In the moment when they were together, she did. But the lesson the show continues to put forward is that life happens, and as a result people change with it. And this is seen in the seasons following Ted's abandonment at the altar.
The event scars him so much that he effectively becomes as callous and whimsical in his relationships as Barney had in the first season of the show. They switched roles completely, their characters evolved to reflect the major events that shaped their life.
As we move forward with our own birthdays and life events, this same exact thing happens to us. Life changes and we change with it. This is something we rarely see in sitcoms.
I love Friends but it's fair to say that you can tune in to that show week in , week out and Chandler will always be sarcastic and awkward, Monica neurotic and controlling, Joey hungry and a bit dumb or Phoebe totally fricking awesome.
The characters' circumstances change whether that's their job or their relationships but they never really evolve themselves, and that's a safe kind of week to week story telling that I think a lot of people expected out of the Himym finale.
So imagine the shock when the finale starts jumping forward through time and as it does we see that our characters are slowly drifting apart. They don't stay together like they were through their late twenties and their late thirties.
All this culminates in Robin's teary eyed speech at the end of part 1 of the episode. It sucks, like many of the high points of the show before, this moment is real. As we grow older, many of us are going to experience a similar drifting apart.
The people we loved in our twenties and thirties begin to fall away. Maybe not all at once and maybe not all of them but they do. Whether it's because of kids, moves to different cities or countries, new jobs or yeah even sickness.
It's never going to be how it was. So we get back to that quote about divorce from the beginning of the episode. People, myself included often leverage the complaint that this did little justice to the three seasons prior that had set up Barney and Robin relationship.
And although the instant time jump is a bit jarring, I now have to disagree. You see, the meaning of the quote is all the more powerful because it also applies to what Ted is going through later on after the mother dies.
The divorce happens because yet again life gets in the way. All of a sudden, Robin is constantly globetrotting; she is never around. And this fundamentally changes the dynamic of her and Barney's relationship. So they break it off.
But in the moments they were together, they really were deeply in love and their marriage really was great. The divorce is just an end to that. But it doesn't change the fact that they did LOVE eachother for those 3 years.
They had a successful relationship but life meant it had to come to an end. And that's an exact reflection of what happens to Ted later on.
He was deeply in love with his wife so much so that he cancelled the move to Chicago for a new job the very day after meeting her.
So yeah, in the end he's with Robin, but that doesn't take away from the fact that he had a successful marriage for years. But life intervened again, his wife passed away and 6 long years later he's finally able to move on.
Doesn't lessen how much he loved his wife, he's just at a different moment in time. And in the end that's what Himym was always about.
It could be dumb and silly or real and emotional but in the end the entire show is based on the premise of a dad telling his story to his kids.
A story of the small and big moments in his life that led him to where he's now. That's what the show is all about, special moments, snapshots of our lifetimes that we'll always remember. The stories we'll tell our kids.
I mean the opening credits are literally snapshots of characters at the bar as if it could be any more obvious.
And so no matter what life throws at us, no matter who we end up with and no matter how far we can eventually drift apart from each other. Those snapshots capture a moment when our laughs, tears and loves will always be real.
What we felt in those moments will always remain unchanged even if we do not. Himym's finale had the guts to take this concept to the ultimate conclusion. It was a story about moments in time.
How the characters felt while they were experiencing them and how they changed afterwards.
Because as much as we can be afraid of it when it happens. As much as it can piss us off when we see it on TV, that's what life has always been about - Change.
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