I dont think people have better ideas for the finale other than some tweaks here or there.

I'm sorry you didnt like it.

Agreed.

I'm more outraged that Bob Saget wasn't present day Ted. :)

Good news, I made it! Having a busy week and staying off social media completely was essential.


I was going through everyone's thoughts and multi-quoting for individual responses but this really summed up everything best. This could have worked well if they didn't spend a ton of time after season 4 or so completely destroying Robin's original character.

I'll say though, absent the actual decision of killing the mother and moving on to Robin so quickly, I really liked everything else up until that point. Thought the way they kept jumping forward to key moments was really well done.

Hadn't seen this posted and would have been a much better conclusion, and I'm not one for sappy romantic endings.

How I Met Your Mother Alternative Ending on Vimeo

How I Met Your Mother Alternative Ending from Ricardo J Dylan on Vimeo.

Yes yes

BTW I earned major points with my wife when the mother's name was revealed. Way waaaayyy back in the Thanksgiving episode where Ted and Robin go to volunteer at a soup kitchen and find Barney working there, they end up at a strip club for their Thanksgiving buffet. A stripper comes up to Ted, introduces herself with her stage name, then tells him his real name of "Tracy" and then you hear the Ted voiceover of "And that kids, is how I met your mother." Which leads to their shocked/horrified reaction, and he says that he's kidding.

I told my wife back then that the mother's name was going to be Tracy, since the kids believed him at first.

Not a fan of the alternative ending. I liked that they answered the question of why in the world is Ted telling the story of meeting the mother in THIS way?

But if they didn't go through 14 different instances of Ted still loving Robin in the first place, which was all in there so they could sell their ending, you wouldn't be thinking that.

Um... no. It had nothing to do with the finale or even the final season. But it was the fact that the story itself started like 8 years before the Mother even appears on the scene. What's the point of starting the story with the date with Robin if the story isn't really about "the Gang" or simply Robin herself. And if its about "the Gang" (which would be fine), the finale maybe should have (and you may like this better) shown that when Ted was in need, Marshall, Lily, Barney, and Robin stepped up and, as Barney said in the finale, acted like family.

As it became clear throughout the episode that they were actually going down this road, I was hoping the twist would have ended up as Barney's #31 being Robin...he goes back to her after a month of whoring around, upset with what his life has become and wanting to go back to the one girl who ever made him really happy. Robin getting pregnant is the miracle she always told Marshall never existed.

I don't know if it would have cheapened one of the best moments of the finale, where Barney meets his daughter...loved that. You could tell that was a lot of real emotion coming from NPH.

Was this a worse finale than Dexter

You can feel differently, and that's fine, but I personally started having issues with the framing device with the constant reminders of how much Ted loved Robin. Take those away and it works perfectly fine for a traditional ending.

I don't know how you can reasonably think the writers didn't botch this. Ted was in love with Robin on the morning of her wedding. She didn't love him. By the afternoon, Robin loved Ted and wanted to ditch her wedding for him. He no longer wanted her. That was shown to us months apart, in real time, for some reason. Take those out of the equation and I'm reasonably confident the reaction would be pretty different. If you followed along on the internet all year, the vast, vast majority of the audience was ridiculously fatigued by their "relationship" by this point.

Yeah, I feel like the writers wanted to please everybody, "Tracy" fans and "Robin" fans ... but were there really people who were still rooting for Ted and Robin to get back together? That never crossed my mind, and certainly not after seasons and seasons of them pushing Robin and Barney at us as a couple.

What amazes me is that they had this planned out for years, and yet this is how they executed it. If you had told me they threw this idea together last month I'd give them a B for effort. But the fact that they had years to get us to this point, and went about it this way, is mindboggling to me.

Yeah - the execution on this was horribly poor. Everything was so spread out all season for no real payoff (how many times did people bitch in here about things "dragging"), and then so much was crammed together in 60 minutes.

1 weekend in a season...16 years in 2 minutes.

That's fucked up writing.

Particularly if they knew the endgame was Ted and Robin getting back together, why make me sit through a whole year of Barney and Robin working out their issues? If the yearlong climax of your show is a wedding, you're giving a message that this is the real deal. and by showing Ted having a hard time getting over Robin, then ending up with her, you're suggesting he was never over her, even when he was with Tracy, which is a fucked up conclusion to his "love story".

I don't really think they botched it at all. Ted was in love with Robin, which is why he was leaving to Chicago (great scene when Marshall and Lily see Ted at McLaren's the next day) and had to leave the party early. Robin was starting to wonder later that day if she wasn't making a mistake when her mom asked he if she had someone should could count on (after Barney was drunk and missing).

I think the majority was fatigued by Ted and Robin because they were like "This isn't going anywhere; don't show us this!", when in light of the finale, it WAS going somewhere.

On the contrary. Ted did get over Robin, which is why he was ready for Tracy and the person Tracy helped him to become (some dude who was content living with the woman of his dreams and not having some massive wedding for like 7 years). After Tracy died, the person Ted became and the person Robin became in the interim allowed them to be right for each other at that moment. That doesn't mean Ted was in love with Robin when he was with Tracy.

That's a theory, yes, but not one they supported very well by their execution. We went from seeing Ted still torn up by Robin on her wedding day, to what 20 minutes later, asking her out? As someone said above, they could have dwelt more on the relationship with the mother, then bring Robin back in the picture, if they wanted to give that impression, Isiddiqui.

For example, what if they had spent the last season detailing Ted's life with Tracy, and the way the gang drifted apart, back again, etc. We would have see his love for Tracy, the fact that he was over Robin, the difficulties of sticking with your old friends. By showing us Tracy dying, then him telling the story to his kids, over six, seven or eight episodes we could have seen him and Robin coming back together. I dont' see why they wanted that ending at all, but if they did, that would have been a way to sell it. Instead they spent the whole season pulling Ted and Robin apart.

I'm not sure that they didn't. You had the flash forward of the first date a few weeks back. You had flash forwards of the dinner while Tracy was revealed to be sick. You had like, oh, 3/4ths of the finale where Ted and Tracy were together and happy - Ted being happy for the first time in years (since at least Victoria).

He's telling the kids the story of How He Met [their] Mother (which he tells them close to the end of the finale). I mean you could try to do all that in flash forwards, but I think it'd be somewhat difficult to fit the entire marriage story in flash forwards... it'd still have to reference some stuff before the meeting to make it narratively fit

Right, well his life with Tracy all happened before he's telling the kids the story, right? So I'm not sure what you mean. Rather than spend the whole season on the wedding they could have spent it on the years after the wedding, but before the scene with the kids.

I always treated it as Ted telling a really long story about his life and how he reached a point to where he met his Mother. I thought it was a cool concept and the final scene meeting the Mother would be the cherry on top of his story. How all these events somehow led to him being at that train station years later with her.

How Ted met the mother was right after the wedding. Ted constantly tells the kids about how the story is about how he MET the mother. The story has to end with that - the only way to describe the life Ted had with Tracy is through flash forward that way.

I see what you're saying. I suppose I would agree with you, except for the whole added part they introduced of her dying and him telling the story after that. To me that begs for some explanation of their time together. If you don't want to focus on that story, don't have her die!

I started to watch the show on Netflix and got tired of the Ted/Robin plot in season 2. I saw people mentioned it was still being beaten to death in season 8, so I stopped watching. I think at some point fans had to expect Robin being involved in the end. This only seemed to get reinforced during Robin and Ted's wedding. The only needed details was how.

I was fatigued with Ted/Robin stuff yes, but seeing where it went only makes that worse. It seemed to me, and apparently to many people, that beating us over the head with repeated Ted/Robin stories was to make sure that 100% of the viewers realized that Ted/Robin were AWFUL. That they were toxic, that any ideas we may have had in season 1 about them getting together should be completely long gone. That they were doing this so that we wouldn't compare the mother to Robin, so that we'd have a chance to like the mother and the ending instead of just comparing her to Robin.

They did a wonderful job with that. They made me 100% convinced that Ted/Robin being together is the stupidest thing that could possibly happen, that Ted/Robin even being friends was toxic for them, and for the group, for Ted and Barney's friendship. Ted and Robin have been shown to be so utterly bad for each other that there is no possible way to accept the idea of them being together.

I thought all along that was the intent of the writers. They succeeded at that, supremely well. Which made the ending baffling and stupid and awful and generated the type of anger we're all seeing now.

Enormous +1 there.

I feel like Isiddiqui and the rest of us were watching two totally different shows.

You do realize that a good portion of the Finale was about show that people grow up and change in various different ways (see: Barney). Ted and Robin the late 2000s doesn't work. They are very different at that point in time. And that is one of the reasons Robin & Barney didn't work - Robin was too focused on being a success in her career to be a success in her relationship.

In 2030, they've grown a LOT. Ted is much more calm about romance. Much less stressed out - I mean the guy who was so pining for a perfect wedding was so content with his fiance and kids that he waited 7 years before getting married on a random Thursday (her schedule showed Tracy was free). Robin also changed and grew as well. In 2030, maybe Ted and Robin are far better for each other. But 25 years earlier they weren't.

I'm very glad that he likes his show.

Yeah.

I'm not begrudging anyone who liked the finale - I'm glad it worked for them. In some sense I suppose I envy them that.

Didn't work for me one bit though.

But multiple viewpoints on it/feelings about how effective/whatever it was can coexist in this instance.

I'm not sure why you feel like Robin has grown at all. Is it because she got emotional when realizing Barney is a father or when Ted got married? There hasn't been any indication that she won't keep on screwing up the good things in her personal life. She's been a pretty horrible person since about 2010, real time.

:D

This didn't upset me as much as when Kevin and Winnie didn't end up together at the end of The Wonder Years.

I think Dexter set the standard for bad endings.

People change and grow, and everything that happened in the finale could totally happen in the real world.

But... we are the audience for a television show. Who your characters are on a TV show are *only* what you've shown us and properly conveyed to us on screen. If a character does something totally out of character, and the creator tells us "oh well in my mind this character was abused as a child and that justifies everything that he just did"... well, if you haven't done anything to set that up... if the audience doesn't know the character was abused as a child, if you haven't been able to successfully convey any issues with the character to justify what they've done, then you have a serious serious problem. You've either written things poorly, your actors are failing, or you're just telling a shitty story.


So if you spend 9 years telling me a story, and then in the final episode you tell me "well we flash forwarded 10 years, and hey look, they changed", then my perception is that you have failed in your storytelling. Many reviews that I have read discussing the anger over the death of the mother explain it like: "To the kids, the mother has been dead for 6 years. To us, she's been dead about 20 seconds, and now the kids are laughing and saying "YES GO BANG AUNT ROBIN ALREADY"." The perception of the viewer *matters*. The way the characters come about their change matters.

The things they showed in the finale were worthy of little 10 second end of series flash forward clips. But when done as the entire way to spend your series finale, it feels disingenuous and unearned. It is to me the very definition of bad storytelling. And its sad, because for 3-4 seasons these guys showed us that they could tell a *spectacular* story. At some point they just lost it, in my opinion.




I'm not trying to make you hate a show you loved, by the way. You loved it, I'm glad! But I sort of feel like you're saying that those who didn't like it are just dead wrong. I should probably bow out here, I feel like this is getting close to the way the obama thread goes, where people on opposite side of the fence just explain the same things over and over the same way, just louder and with more words each time :)

Does anyone else have a hard time believing her as a successful reporter? Her character doesn't seem smart enough to be a globe-trotting reporter to me.

I'm still mad that Brandon Walsh and Kelly Taylor never ended up tying the knot.

On the contrary, the people who didn't like it appear to be saying I can't believe how anyone could like this ending!!!1!

Wow, I don't agree with this at all. They aren't limited because of the title. They could've had Ted meet the mother in last season's finale, then have a scene where he tells the kids, "but wait, there's more!", followed by their irritated reactions. It's not like people would've stopped watching because the title is suddenly inaccurate.

When I tell people how I met someone, I usually go beyond the single moment where we first met, and it's the same for the stories people tell me. They weren't limited in the way you suggest at all.

You have seen Wolf Blitzer's turn on Celebrity Jeopardy, right? ;)

Nobody's saying that. Multiple people have said that they're glad that you enjoyed it.

Obviously the Creators felt they needed to end with the title's point. FWIW, I usually don't go much beyond the meeting day for when someone asks how I met x. My story for how I met my gf is pretty brief and, sometimes I'll go further and talk about the first date (which btw, was brought in to the story 3 or 4 weeks ago).

Next time, start your story nine years before you met your girlfriend. It's a real hit at parties!

My bad then :) I like the critical discussion of these things, but I don't want to ever beat on a point so much that it ever comes across as crapping on the opinions of those that do enjoy it.

Saying that one was glad that I like my show (I know it wasn't you who said it btw) seemingly implies delusional view... not sure that's entirely sincere ;). I do think that complaining the the writing was a "pile of turds" or "fucked up writing" (which you did say) seems to go beyond the 'in my view the writing didn't work', don't you?

I almost forgot the "I don't know how you can reasonably think the writers didn't botch this" as well...

You've been ok, FWIW, from what I recall.

Nope, not at all. It's expressing my opinion/view that the writing didn't work.

Unless you're the writer (or a relative/friend) I don't see why you'd even raise an eyebrow at that, to be honest.

Uh huh...