'Night, Mother: How It Ended

(This is an updated version of the original post.)

Okay, I saw the last episode of "How I Met Your Mother." And I must say, not since the series finale of "M*A*S*H," which also aired on a Monday that happened to be the last day of the month (February 28, 1983), has a series finale of a CBS show captured as much attention as this one. The biggest surprise was not The Mother's name or even what finally happened to her, but the fact that so many of the plot lines came full circle and showed how, the more things changed, the more they stayed the same.

Marshall and Lily eventually end up where they'd hoped to be earlier. We learn that, after Marshall gives up his opportunity to be a judge and moves to Italy with Lily for a couple of years, they return to New York and Marshall returns to work as the type of corporate lawyer he always hated being, and he and Lily have a third child. Then he becomes a judge anyway. Against her - and her mother's (her mother!) - better judgement, Robin marries Barney, but as soon as she becomes a successful, globetrotting TV news reporter, their marriage suffers when Barney can't stand being alone or going with her to remote locales. So, while in Buenos Aires in 2016 (where Robin, I assume, is covering Pope Francis's homecoming), Barney decides he wants a divorce. By 2020, Robin is globally ubiquitous for her TV reporting but, ironically, completely absent from the lives of her friends, largely because of her onetime feelings for now-taken Ted.  And so, while Robin successfully resumes her journalism career, Barney returns to his playboy debauchery - complete with a new playbook on how to pick up girls (not women).

And Ted and his future wife? They meet on the railway platform after Robin's and Barney's wedding, but the moment of their actual meeting is preceded by scenes from their marriage . . . and before. They move in together and have their two children before they get married. (Their daughter Penny is born in 2015, Luke in 2017.) They get married in 2020, seven years after meeting, and Robin shows up unexpectedly for the wedding along with everyone else. Returning to the moment of their meeting, we learn that Ted's wife is named Tracy. And then, when Ted concludes his long story to his kids, Penny Mosby reveals what many Himymaniacs had long suspected.

Not only is Tracy dead in 2030, she's been dead for six years.

When Penny and Luke point out that their father's story revolves around Robin (whom they refer to as their aunt, even though it's only a term of endearment), it suddenly becomes clear; though Robin was the reason Ted met Tracy, Robin is still the love of his life, which necessitates the story of how important Robin has been to Ted. With his children's blessing, he pursues Robin, once again impressing her with giving her a blue French horn he'd stolen from a restaurant, as he did in the first episode.

The ending left me dumbfounded and disappointed. A good deal of "How I Met Your Mother" had always been about the unresolved romantic/sexual tension between Ted and Robin, though it was only part of the ongoing story about all five of these friends. Marshall and Lily's evolving relationship and Barney's perpetual immaturity were also part of the mix, and so in fact were Ted's numerous failed attempts at finding true love. Supposedly, Ted's search was what the show was about at its core. Ultimately, though, it wasn't about Ted meeting the mother of his children and having the romantic fulfillment he thought he'd never have. It was about how Robin was the beginning and ending of his romantic aspirations. Although we got to know Tracy as a sweet, sensitive woman who deserved a man like Ted in her life, series creators Carter Bays and Craig Thomas only explored the surface of her personality. Tracy turned out to be a mere vehicle for Ted's and Robin's ultimate pairing, a minor plot device. It's not that Ted didn't get to live happily ever after with Tracy, an outcome that some viewers have defended as a fact of life. It's that Tracy didn't get to live much as a character. For that reason - and also because of the emotional investment they put into this show - many fans were left feeling empty and cheated. It was especially dismaying that, even after all that had happened to Ted and Robin (and the others as well), not much had changed.

On paper, the finale of "How I Met Your Mother" hit all the right notes. It had some genuine laughs, the writing was as witty and sly as always, and the humor was still evident. But while the show had always a balance of the surrealistically absurd and the sentimental, the balance swung heavily toward the latter here. Tracy's death and Ted's subsequent return to his feelings for Robin had the sort of sweetly sad bathos that would have embarrassed Erich Segal. And while viewers could only enjoy the show's more absurdist episodes by suspending their disbelief, no amount of disbelief suspension could have validated the idea of Robin still being single fourteen years after her divorce and suddenly rekindling her relationship with Ted, six years a widower. It was completely implausible. As the saying goes, you can't reheat a soufflé.

I have to give credit to Bays and Thomas for this much. Although I didn't like the final plot twist and the mushy conclusion, they did a great job keeping the ending into themselves for so long. Once "How I Met Your Mother" was renewed after its first season, they filmed the part of the finale scene with Lyndsy Fonseca and David Henrie, the actors who played Ted's children Penny and Luke, while they were still teenagers - as passingly noted in my previous post - and kept it under wraps for eight years to use for the plot twist they'd been directing the show toward all the while. Bays and Thomas weren't making things up as they went along; they knew in 2006 how they wanted to the show to end, whenever that was. They almost succeeded in keeping the ending a secret, as someone on the Internet had them sussed and rumors of The Mother's death ensued in the weeks leading up to last night's broadcast. It turned out that Bays and Thomas were better at keeping Tracy's name a secret then they were with keeping Tracy's fate hush-hush.

(I was also reminded about the episode of "How I Met Your Mother" [called "Vesuvius"] where Robin's mom [played by Tracey Ullman] arrives at her wedding, saying, "What kid of mother would miss her daughter's wedding?" Cut to Ted in 2024, about to cry. I remember that scene; it turns out to have been the clue to the show's twist ending. I shrugged off that idea, thinking it was too obvious, but that's actually where some of the rumors regarding Tracy's fate - which were accurate - started. But some of these same rumors had been going on for years before. I remember thinking that this scene indicated that Tracy might have been ill, or even that it may have even referred to her own mother missing her wedding to Ted, but perhaps I subconsciously caught and rejected the actual clue rather than missed it. Because Carter Bays and Craig Thomas wouldn't have conned us like that, right?)

But, even though I liked everything else in the finale, I disliked how its ending ruined my enjoyment of the rest of it. People will argue with my assessment, but that's fine. "How I Met Your Mother" was and remains one of those shows that's good enough for people to care and argue about it. Its fans give a twit. Will the series finale of "Two And a Half Men," if it ever finally gets to that (probably in, say, 2030? ;-) ), provoke such passion and disagreement? I don't think so.

One last thing: Barney's life is changed when, after having slept with a different girl every day for an an entire 31-day month, he impregnates Woman #31 and sires a daughter, named Ellie. In what can only be described as monumental irony, the mother's identity is never revealed.

I think this actually might be the basis of the coming spinoff, "How I Met Your Dad."

Good night. MacLaren's is closed.