**Major spoiler alerts ahead for anyone who hasn’t seen the season finale of How I Met Your Mother. You have been fairly warned.**
I finally watched the series finale of “How I Met Your Mother,” and at first thought to myself: Well, that is it. I guess it’s over.
And then I remembered that I have a blog, and nothing is ever really over until it has been blogged about, amiright?
Not to mention that I have a blog that is all about the story – and the season finale episode of HIMYM is definitely a story, for better or for worse.
It was en episode that took me from anticipatory to happy to sad to joyous to distraught and then some. They packed a lot of story into under an hour.
And that is my complaint: they had an entire season. Why did they need to cram ALL OF THAT into a single episode?
The story itself in the end didn’t bother me. In fact, I like most of it very much: Marshall slowly becoming a judge, Barney having a daughter and becoming a different person, Ted learning that a perfect wedding still wasn’t the best dream he could dream …
The story itself was beautiful. It just wasn’t allowed to be complete.
I wish that the writers had developed the story in a reasonable timeline. It took us eight years to finally see Ted’s wife’s face, and then they meet, get married, and she dies all in one 45 minute episode.
The franchise robbed its viewers of the full story.
A good story is never the same if it is told poorly. In fact, I argue that a poor storyline – when told well – can be elevated to the level of good story. I think this was done with Elizabeth Gilbert’s “The Signature of All Things,” which I wrote about in February: the story itself was mediocre and ultimately un-fulfilling, but it was the unfolding of that story that was magical. The way the story was told is what kept me reading far longer than I would have were it told any less poetically. But since Gilbert tells the story with such beauty, I couldn’t help but keep reading.
The How I Met Your Mother series finale did not unfold with grace and dignity. I kept thinking to myself: This cannot be happening so quickly.
Barney and Robin get married in one episode and divorced in the next.
Lily and Marshall move to – and back from – Rome, have two children, and Marshall becomes a New York State Judge in the span of two episodes.
Ted meets Tracy, gets engaged (twice), has two children, gets married, loses his wife, and reunites with Robin in two episodes.
The entire Season Nine drug on and on, recounting wholly unimportant details about Billy Zabka and Gary Blauman … but we never get to see Ted meet his children for the first time. We never got to see Barney recover from the divorce. We never get to see the friendships develop between Tracy and the gang.
In fact, we never get to see any of Tracy’s gang at all. As much build-up there was that let to meeting her, we still know nothing about her: What she did after she quit playing bass in the band. Why she loved “La Vie en Rose.” Where she bought the yellow umbrella.
I feel emotionally let down – about a television show! I haven’t felt this way since the season finale of Felicity, which I thought was the biggest let down in the history of television until now.
The verdict on the season finale of HIMYM: the story was good, it just wasn’t told.
What are your thoughts? Did you watch the show? Do you feel letdown, or was it all that you imagined it would be?