So after 9 seasons and a year-long wedding, How I met your mother came to an end. In the worst possible way.
I agree pretty much with everything said in this post, but summing up: it basically undid everything after season 3 and treated the mother very poorly, just to fit with an ending they had planned years ago when the series wasn’t so long and so many things hadn’t happened.
Had this happened at the end of season 3? Yeah, it would have been good. But in the meanwhile, Ted had given up Robin (several times), Barney has changed and evolved from quirk into main character, and Barney and Robin got into a pretty real relationship (helped by the fact that NPH and Coby Smulders have awesome chemistry).
To get back to the originally planned ending, the writers had to:
- destroy a wedding that they built up for literally one year, making both parties miserable in the process
- make Robin emotionally distant, AGAIN
- make Ted fall in love with Robin, AGAIN, after the super corny ‘floating away in the sky’ scene from three episodes ago
- make Barney into a one-dimensional womanizer, AGAIN, only to turn him into a slut-shaming asshole
- put Lily’s career into arts into the fridge, AGAIN
Notice the number of AGAINs in there? That’s because the story wasn’t pointing there any more. The characters had to regress in order for that ending to fit in.
Worse than that, how are we supposed to take Ted seriously when he says he loved the Mother, since they barely spent time together and all he can think about is getting back with Robin?
Yeah, in story-time, they’ve been together for 10 years at least, and six years have passed since she died. But in screen time, they’ve been an item for less than an hour, most of which they didn’t spend alone but with Ted’s friends (apparently she doesn’t have any).
This is a great disservice to the character and to the actress, and reduces the role of the mother to simply a macguffin to deliver the children that infertile Robin cannot give to Ted, rather than, you know, the love of his life as she had always been advertised.
In my head canon, the story ends after Ted and the Mother talk under the umbrella in the rain. That, kids, is the story of how he met your mother. Anything after that is bollocks.