HIMYM Finale and Thoughts

*** SPOILERS FOR THE FINAL EPISODE OF HOW I MET YOUR MOTHER BELOW!!!***

As many people know, the show How I Met Your Mother ended recently.  Now, I had started disliking this show a while ago because there seemed to be a lot of events in the plot that were very unnecessary (ideally, for me, the whole show should have lasted a solid 3 seasons, as a relevant story about how a man met the love of his life should not take much longer than that, but that's just me).  For example, there were some women introduced in Ted's life, like Zoey, that seemed pointless for the premise of a man telling his children how he met their mother.  Also, the constant return to a relationship between Ted and Robin always bothered me as it seemed to diminish the relationship between Ted and the woman he married, especially since Robin had been labeled as the children's aunt from episode 1.

On a personal level, I would like to say that I did not particularly like the finale.  But from a critical point, I could see how it kind of worked.  Ted began his story with the day that he met Robin and the story, really, has always been about her.  In light of the last episode, it makes sense why Ted always came back to her.  And in light of the death of the mother, it possibly makes sense why he doesn't cower from talking about the woman he has been with and why he launches into this grand story about his life leading up to her in the first place.  The show is not so much about how Ted meets his children's mother, but rather of the person he was and how he got to be where he is today.

I didn't like the finale, mostly, because it wasn't what I signed up for when I started watching the show.  I was prepared to watch a show about the ups and downs a man went through before finding his happily ever after.  Now, I understand that there are no happy endings really, that there are happy middles and sad middles and that life goes on, but this theme is darker than what I was expecting from a goofy, ridiculous, feel-better sitcom.  The ending reminded me of the movie 'Definitely, Maybe', and while I really liked the themes of losing love and finding love anew employed in that movie, I believe that, if the writers had always been heading in that direction, the ideas could have been better executed.  Additionally, I was upset that the show had set up the premise of a man meeting the woman of his dreams, only to rip that woman away from us so abruptly in the end.  After all, with every mention from the narration of the mother and her little quirks and the reasons Ted loves her so dearly, the audience had been falling in love with this woman as well.  I just feel a little cheated that, at the end of the day, this woman that seemed to be at the center of the whole show was gone without time for a proper goodbye.