‘Come again for Big Fudge?’

Sitcom series finale ends in shocking twist

Three years ago, I was introduced to “How I Met Your Mother” by a close friend. It has been one of my favorite shows ever since. Its cheerful and quirky humor mixes with its moments of depression to create a roller coaster of emotion. The series finale was no exception.

I always say that there is no such thing as a “good ending” to beloved shows. I have been disappointed time and time again by the endings from “Seinfeld,” “Lost,” “Dexter” and “Breaking Bad.” However, I found this series finale exceptional considering that the writers had planned it from the beginning.

If you have not seen the show, I highly suggest binge-watching the first eight seasons on Netflix over the course of a couple weeks and then coming back to read the rest of this article once you have seen the big finale of season nine.

***SPOILERS BEGIN HERE***

Barney gets a new girlfriend. Let’s zoom in on Robin. Lily and Marshall have a baby. Let’s get a close up on Robin. Ted finds the love of his life that the show has hinted toward revealing for nine seasons. Let’s kill off the mother and make the show completely revolve around Robin. This is the attitude that the writers of “How I Met Your Mother” have had for years.

Frankly, I have mixed feelings about the series finale. The writers presented us with this amazing woman named Tracy that seemed to be a perfect match for Ted in every way. They took the audience on a journey of emotional comedies and tragedies and made us fall in love with her as Ted did. Now, in the same episode that we get to see the two meet, Tracy dies and six years later Ted runs right back to the person that he met in the very first episode. This has left the Internet enraged with fans that have waited years to meet this girl only for her to die soon after she is officially integrated into the show.

Despite the rage, I understand why they did it. A decade ago, when the writers were already planning the finale, it probably seemed practical and charmingly ironic on paper for Ted and Robin to end up together, but it is not fair to the audience for so many reasons.

First, there is Robin who has basically been a jerk to Ted for the first eight seasons as far as their relationships have gone. Yet, she is the one who gets all of the attention all the way up to the final moments of the series finale. The majority of the show’s audience got over the idea of Ted and Robin together ages ago. They were forced to. They were led to believe that Robin and Barney were going to end up together for two seasons. That was what the entirety of the final season was shoving in the face of the audience. After the finale, the show might as well have been called “Why You Should Let Me Marry Aunt Robin” considering that is the apparent reason why Ted was telling his kids this story in the first place.

The thing that bugs me the most is that the girl viewers have been looking for has been here the whole time. As you can imagine, how cliché this sounds makes me furious because it was the last thing I would have expected. To be honest, I do not think anyone could have guessed what would happen.

So maybe the anger sensors of my brain switched on when I first saw the finale because I was forced to take Robin’s perspective on the previous two hundred episodes I had watched, but after watching the finale three more times since then, I have decided that it was one of the better things they could have done to end it. Apparently it was too much for my brain to handle at the time, which is kind of what anyone would expect from a series finale. After all, they did not have much of a choice because they had already filmed parts of the finale by the time the cameras started rolling for the pilot.

The scene with Barney meeting his daughter was probably the highlight of the episode. However, they never showed the woman that Barney had the baby with. Perhaps this will be an issue resolved in the upcoming spin-off “How I Met Your Dad” scheduled to air this fall.

I understand that it was not the amazing ending we had all expected, but at least everyone got to lead a long and happy life. Well, except for Tracy… too soon?