OH MY GOD THERE ARE SO MANY SPOILERS COMING UP HERE.
SERIOUSLY. SERIOUSLY, GUYS. THERE’S SPOILERS.
IF YOU KEEP READING, THERE WILL BE SPOILERS.
I CANNOT STRESS THIS ENOUGH.
Are you sure you want to keep reading?
Really?
REALLY?
Look, I’ll even insert this gif of an older How I Met Your Mother moment just as a buffer so you don’t accidentally see anything you don’t want to.
Ok? Good. If you’re still here, be it on your own head.
The finale of How I Met Your Mother has aired in the US, and people have exploded with feelings about it all over the Internet. And not a lot of people are happy about it, either. In the final episode, we speed forward through the years to come, stopping briefly in the big moments of the gang’s lives. Barney and Robin wind up getting divorced after three years of marriage. Lily and Marshall welcome child number three, and Marshall finally gets the judgeship he desired (Judge Fudge!). Barney backslides into the womanising train wreck he originally was, until an unexpected child arrives and changes that. And as for Ted, he meets the mother, Tracy. They have kids together. They enjoy each other. And then, at some point, Tracy passes away. The final scene, involving Ted’s teenaged children saying something for the first time in seven years, shows Ted finishing the story of how he met their mother, only for the kids to encourage him to, once again, ask out Robin.
So after nine seasons, we’re back to where we started. Ted, happy, confident, full of hope, enacting on what he knew to be true the moment he saw her 25 years previously.
Twitter went into meltdown.
The finale, scheduled to air on Channel 7 at a yet to be determined time and date, might not have necessarily been what people were looking for. But it was a beautiful, poignant, rounded way to cap the series off.
Happiness isn’t always what we think it should be. Sometimes it’s something we’ve known all along without realising it. For Ted Mosby, it was never about finding “the one”, as he so often expressed. It was about being the truest to himself as he could possibly be. He found that in Tracy, absolutely. But more significantly, he found that the very first time we met him. It was Robin. It was always Robin. And that was the perfect, honest, and truest way to cap off nine seasons of this remarkable little sitcom that some of you loved and some of you hated.
But, as always, you guys can make up your own minds. That’s what makes stories like this worth telling.
