How I Met Your satisfying finale
(This is Bringing the Heat, an as-often-as-I-feel-like-it feature where I say something that will probably get me yelled at on Twitter.)
The twist ending is a staple of thrillers, suspense movies, and any number of more serious methods of storytelling. It is not typically the approach of rom-coms. That’s why, when one attempts it, pulls it off, and manages to turn nine years of storytelling on its head, it spends the next decade getting excoriated for the worst ending of anything ever.
The How I Met Your Mother finale was good.
(Here be spoilers.)
For the uninitiated, HIMYM told the story of Ted Mosby who, over the course of several years, dated a bajillion women (seriously, stop telling your kids about your sexual dalliances) en route to finding the woman he would fall in love with, marry, and (not in this order) have two kids with, a woman named Tracy. The final season takes place entirely within the weekend leading up to a wedding (though with HIMYM’s trademark timeline-hopping, it had little trouble jumping around enough to make it work). In the final episode, Ted meets Tracy. We see over the course of the hourlong finale snapshots of their romance and marriage … and then Tracy falls sick with an unknown illness and dies. The episode ends with Ted’s kids, who have been listening to his nine-year-long story, helping him realize that he really wanted a relationship with Robin … who had been the bride in that season-long wedding that seemed like it was the happily ever after until it ended in divorce.
Obviously, there are a lot of twists and turns there. It’s a TV show. But you also have to realize, more than just about any other show in recent vintage (or ever?), How I Met Your Mother always knew what its endgame was going to be. We didn’t know if it would get there, because TV shows are sometimes canceled unceremoniously, but there is no doubt that the creators, Carter Bays and Craig Thomas, always knew Ted and Robin were endgame. They filmed the final scenes with the children (Lyndsy Fonseca and David Henrie) as early as Season 2. So when they were setting Robin up to marry Barney, were introducing Ted to Tracy, and everything else, they did it knowing where it was going. This wasn’t some tossed-together plotline to wrap up a show. This was the entire point of the exercise.
So Robin and Barney got married in the penultimate episode, and the show treated it like a happily ever after, only for them to announce their divorce a few minutes into the next episode. You know what? That happens all the time. Everyone thinks their marriage is the happily ever after. Sometimes it isn’t.
Speaking of the happily ever after, we knew from a few episodes before the end of the series that Tracy would die, and the die-hard fans more or less assumed it was coming from the early on in the run. It wasn’t a surprise that she died.
Really, the problem everybody has with the finale is that we had an unreliable narrator. The show, via Ted, set things up as a Wonder Years/Goldbergs/etc.-type show, with the main character narrating in a quasi-omniscient way, setting up a framework of telling a story after things have wrapped up. And the Ted narrating the show definitely thought that was the situation. But because the show allowed us to get to the point where the Ted narration is actually in the timeline, the story was able to continue past that, allowing the kids to point out the problems in Ted’s story and letting him realize that what he thought was the story of him meeting their mother (which it was) was also the story about how he had two great loves in his life, and one was still out there. And as arguably the single best TV show ever at jumping around in time and flashing back and forward, the show’s entire timeline suddenly expanding past what we thought was possible was the coup de grace.
We got to see The Mother meet and befriend all of Ted’s friends. We got to see snapshots of their romance and understand how they came to be together. Tracy got a full storyline, even if it was delivered haphazardly in bite-size pieces over the course of the final season. Was every episode and every step along the way perfect? No. It’s a sitcom, and one that lasted 208 episodes over almost a decade. To ask every step to be perfect is a ridiculous ask. But it told the exact story it wanted to tell.
When The Usual Suspects calls itself that and spends an entire movie talking about a heist and a group of criminals, you expect to be watching a cool heist movie. When in the last minute it literally turns out to have all been a fabrication of the real big bad, well, that’s cool, that’s a twist, that’s amazing.
When HIMYM calls itself that and spends an entire run of a show talking about a mother and a group of friends, you expect to be watching the story of a guy meeting his kids’ mother. When in the last hour it literally turns out to have all been a vehicle to get him to the next stage of his life, somehow that’s objectionable.
How I Met Your Mother made people believe it was a standard, run-of-the-mill sitcom, and when it ended up not being that, people got mad, instead of adjusting their own expectations to realize that they had seen something else entirely. What they had seen was in fact one of the greatest twist endings of all time.