Barney likes to make up stories though.

I thought it was quite the waste of an episode for a show with 3 episodes left.

Who gives a fuck about Blauman.

The actress who plays Robin because it's her husband? ;)

But yes...I agree. For a show with 3 episodes left they're sure taking their sweet fucking time on useless crap.

You guys missed the point of Blauman. Without him, Ted doesn't keep the conversation with the mom going. She asks him to come back and finish the story. No Blauman = no story and no story = no walk back.

This is a guy that's been telling his kids a story for 9 years. I imagine he'd fine something else to blather about without Blauman.

LOL yeah

Yep.

I liked the episode, because it was really a story about how Ted and the mom actually became an item when it was very close that they wouldn't be and it'd be a missed opportunity. The Blauman story was the background for that - and the linkage between right before the wedding (where they are on the timeline) and Ted and the mother's first date. I thought it was kinda clever.

I also like the goodbyes to minor characters at the end (framed in the we lose touch with people who once thought were important).

They've said they wrote the ending back in season 1. The kids have been unavailable for reaction shots since very early on because they no longer resemble kids.

There are only a few different shots with the kids. In all of them, they look bored or irritable. They do not look sad.

If this is reminiscing about a parent who's dead or about to die, that seems wrong. Again, I think that's way too much for network.

Given the synopsis for next week's show seems to be the usual fare for this season, we're down to the 39-minute finale to set something up. And a good part of the finale will involve the wedding.

So how do you get from telling irritable kids about a meeting to mourning a dead wife and mother?

You do realize he's a featured player on SNL?

And the next time I watch that episode, instead of always getting a kick out of that punchline, I'll think of how they used this character near the end.

Again, he was in this episode only because he's married to Robin in real life. All the stories they told about him were made up for this episode. They used him as a character a couple times previously, and made no mention of any of those stories. They could have just as easily used any other barely used previous character, or made up someone new, and the episode could have played out exactly the same.


So is Kenan Thompson. If he had a bit part in the show 7 seasons ago, would they base next week's show around him?

Well, knowing Ted - it is likely he tells this story every anniversary day of the mother's death. So they may have heard this story 10 times already - so they are bored and irritable because while they are sad their mother died, they really don't want to hear the story again and again and again.

I have a feeling though that if the mother is dead, the reason the story tells so much about Robin, Barney, Marshall, and Lilly is that they were the ones who were there when Ted was depressed about the mother dying - and the 'lesson' will be that family is who you chose it to be.

I think you're making a lot of massive leaps to defend a show you clearly care very much about. Which is fine of course.

But is that really the premise you would want to build an entire series around? Telling a story to your kids for the 10th time?

I'm not sure why you would consider it "massive leaps to defend" anything? I'm strategizing out loud how it possible could work if that's the ending - you know, things people have been doing for many seasons now. I mean we don't even truly know what the ending is going to be, it's all speculation and discussion.

I would be surprised if the ending were anything other than the moment they meet.

And since the kids were involved in the filming, early on, their reaction is likely the last thing we'll see. Maybe they'll even smile for the first time.

I'm not looking for any twists and turns here. This one seems relatively safe.

Surprised by the lack of any thoughts on the penultimate episode. Maybe the rest of you were as irritated as I was by the Ted / Robin stuff again.

It was a good episode, there really isnt much they can do before the season finale.

everything ted/robin is annoying, and most things barney/robin are annoying (robin's comments about everything barney has ever done in their relationship involving him lying horribly are very true)... but somehow I found the episode not that bad, by HIMYM's standards at this point.


The song played during the wedding, btw, was Future Days, off of Pearl Jam's new album that got released last fall. My least favorite song on the album probably (I really really like most of it), but I liked hearing it there.

So, a few hours earlier, on the morning of her wedding day, Ted told Robin he's moving to Chicago because he can't stand the idea of seeing her married to a close friend (though not close enough a friend that he actually supports their engagement).

Robin mulled it over, then said she'd like to move to Chicago with him, realizing that there's no getting past leaving this friend at the altar.

Ted then said "gotcha" and insisted that the marriage is for the best after all - he still plans to move away out of heartbreak, as far as we know.

An hour later, he will meet a new woman and they will be in insta-relationship wedded bliss.

It's best not to think about this stuff - 19 minutes of isolation and all - but it needs a Seinfeld-like mass jailing to have it all make sense.

Generally speaking HIMYM has been one of the more creative shows from a storytelling standpoint. But there is a huge difference between taking chances in an episode versus taking chances over an entire season. Unfortunate for them that this "weekend wedding season" will forever be an albatross on the franchise. It's still not Roseanne-won-the-lottery bad, but the storytelling has been atrocious.

That said, the relationship triangle doesn't bother me, but the timeline does. All of this happening in a weekend doesn't make sense. If this had just been a normal season, it wouldn't make all the characters seem like such neurotic d-bags.

It's going to be good money after bad one last time.

So tonight is the end. I'll be needing Ted's sensory deprivator though, as I'm heading to Boston now and won't be back until Thursday. My wife and I are going to wait to watch it together. Despite the recent struggles, this show has been part of our relationship since day 1, and not watching together just wouldn't feel right.

I'm looking forward to tonight.

I'm going in with no strong expectations about who may or may not be dead when Ted is telling the story. Just going to keep an open mind and hope to see a really good conclusion.

You'll find out for sure if she dies.

Great article. A must read for every fun, I think.

Yeah - I shamelessly stole this from your FB wall and cross-posted it over here.

Didn't realize till after I did that it was yours (the new FB walls with the huge pictures make me not notice who does the posting as quickly).

According to comments from Alyson Hannigan

:mad:

I guess it's ok... ;)

The writer lost me with her pretentiousness.

Heaven forbid we actually evaluate television as an artform like movies or books :p.

Just be funny, as we kick it to the basement... that's why crap like 2.5 Men actually gets high ratings, meh.

I officially regret ever giving this show my time.

I thought it was a great ending. Though I would have liked to see #31. But that would go against the show.
I will miss this show.

+1.

Not the ending I wanted.

What did you guys want? Ted standing over her 60 pound cancer stricken body sobbing? Or maybe at her coffin? It's a romantic comedy.

I think people would have been plenty happy at this point with him meeting the mom and living happily every after. It's like the writers felt fans wanted them to end up together ala Ross and Rachel, but at this point I really don't think that they did anymore.

The simple fact is I ultimately hate these characters. They're really, with the possible exception of Marshall, horrible people. The last several seasons have turned them so much that they just don't have redeeming characteristics. In addition, those kids would be traumatized by that story.

+2

It had its moments - up until the whole phonecall thing I thought it was cute with the whole interconnections at the train station (although I wasn't happy with Barney & Robin breaking up), and there were a few too many jumps in time for me (which I don't find annoying), but the last scene made me vomit in its lameness TBH. Cheapens the mother immensely and smacks way too much of "we were just fucking with you for the last 10 years."

They should have just let the mother be dead. The "coda" at the end there was weak-sauce.

Look forward to the internet's reactions.

Exactly.


Yeah - they really blew up the characters over the past couple years and made them really unlikeable.

Would have been better if Ted & mother just ended up together living happily ever after. Nobody would have begrudged them that even as much as we dislike the characters now.

But to break up one relationship and then kill off the "mother" just to shoehorn Ted & Robin back together is just lame.

Did. Not. Like. After what this show was at first, and even what it showed glimmers of this season (though all in all this season's been a let down for me), this was just a pile of suck.



The "twist" at the end was just too much vom.

Also, the mother's real name is "Cristin." I knew she was trying too hard to be cool.

/tk

I know I shouldn't be pissed about a tv show but I really am. An entire season for a wedding you tank in 15 minutes in the finale? Of course, that fits with tanking an entire 9 years with one episode. Not to mention -- what kind of tramp is Robyn at this point? What kind of friends just pass a woman back and forth? Thanks to the mom for being able to give Robyn kids to make her ending happy. Arrghhh. I hate that I now will always look at this show with pure disappointment.

What you said - and OMG..."vom" was totally the word I used to describe it.

Way to make me feel like I've wasted the last whatever...7-8 years since Ted & Robin broke up if this was all just a "Ted & Robin end up together" fucking thing.

The mother was a surrogate or she died too soon?

Oh yeah. I realize they filmed the scenes with the kids like 10 years ago, but the lighting differences in the back and forth, nevermind the dynamic...it was just awkward, felt badly edited. MEH.

/tk

P.S. GET OFF MY LAWN. ;)

+1...I think your last point is what I liked the least...they did the whole Robin can't have kids thing which ruled Ted out for her husband...This was just all too neat and tidy

I would have liked it better if at the very end it showed the mother meeting Bob Saget with the final line then being... and that's how I met your mother...

Great point from this review:


So the whole thing was just a colossal waste of our time.

Don't read any of this post if you haven't yet watched the finale (of course, if you are reading this and you plan on watching the finale later, you probably deserve to be spoilered).



I was certainly wrong about that one.

So, the entire ninth season was about a wedding for a marriage that lasted just three years, all to set up a very different meeting than the one they've been talking about for nine seasons now.

I guess they couldn't write anything better for the meet than silly bantering over the fact that they have the same initials.

Then they trashed that meeting within one minute by having the kids (keeping in mind this was filmed at least seven years ago, so it's not like they didn't have time to get this right) say they would like him to date the bus lady after all (presumably someone they've seen very little of, though since she acquired five dogs, maybe Barney's daughter's birth spurred a career change - perhaps to dog breeder - that caused her to return to New York and spend more time with the gang).

Though that did produce maybe the best joke they've written in nine years - Barney greeting his daughter as "Ellie" - presumably a nickname for "31" in l33tspeak.

That whole Barney/Robin divorce thing made the ending possible, and made Tracy's death less upsetting.

It also means the writers were dead serious (and not just failing badly with humor) when they had Ted and Robin mooning over each other on the morning of the wedding. We really are supposed to think this is the right ending. Tracy is simply another in the long line of also-rans.

OK. I can accept that this show is about five people and five people only. We don't necessarily have to be convinced that Ted and Robin work together.

What I really don't like about it is all the filling in we have to do to get from point A to point B and all the romanticizing of the unnamed mother in past seasons.

It's really just an April Fool's joke on all of us, since Ted winds up right where he was 8 1/2 years ago in the pilot episode - holding a blue french horn outside of Robin's apartment. And we know how that turned out.

That's cute writing, not good writing.

Anyone else feel violated?