[Warning: Major spoilers for the complete run of How I Met Your Mother follow.]
Can a bad finale ruin a whole series? The popular (and proper) answer to this is no. Any TV show worth its salt understands that the age of endless Internet chatter about TV series overvalues endings in the grand scheme of things. The pleasure—particularly in a sitcom—is all in the journey. And that should be more than true for How I Met Your Mother, a series that was all about how the journey turns you into the person who is ultimately worthy of love when the right person finally lands in your life.
And yet the show’s series finale is a strange beast, one that tries to serve all masters, both suggesting that life is not fair and has no happy endings and yet grafts a happy ending onto the end of that message, as if the series abruptly remembered it was a sitcom. Though the finale can’t invalidate the pleasures of the show’s run—particularly its first four years and substantial portions of seasons five through seven—it does create the impression that the series’ creators were telling a vastly different story from the one they seemed to be, and it provides the ending for a story that much of the audience wasn’t aware it was even supposed to be watching. Does it ruin the show? No. But it’ll make it play more strangely in syndicated reruns.
The ultimate takeaway from the final season is that series creators Carter Bays and Craig Thomas were at once too good and not good enough to tell the story they ultimately wanted to tell. In the former category comes the fact that the pair are terrific at casting and can absolutely nail emotional moments, like when series protagonist Ted Mosby (Josh Radnor) meets Tracy (Cristin Milioti), the woman he will marry, in the rain at a train platform. Both the introduction of Milioti to the series’ cast—which felt increasingly tiny with every passing season—and the way the scenes between her and Radnor were written gave the show a vital shot of life. Similarly, Bays and Thomas, as well as their writing staff and series director Pamela Fryman, spent almost all of the final two seasons trying to convince the audience that playboy Barney Stinson (Neil Patrick Harris) and Ted’s former girlfriend Robin (Cobie Smulders) were right for each other, culminating in a lovely scene of naked emotion from Barney, in which he insists he’s done lying and playing games. He wants Robin and only Robin.
This is all well and good if the story the series is telling is that of the show’s title. But it’s not. The story the series ultimately settled on was that of not just how Ted met Tracy (and told his kids all about not just that but also several seemingly unconnected adventures) but also how his kids told him to get out of his own head and start fucking Robin again after his wife had been dead for a socially acceptable period of time. And this isn’t something Bays and Thomas pulled out of their ass to give a series that ran too long a happy ending! One of the key scenes of the episode is Ted’s kids telling him to run off and pursue Robin, and that scene was filmed early in the show’s run, when the actors were still young enough to believably portray teenagers. (That it plays as a cover version of the end of Definitely Maybe, which came out after this scene was filmed, is all the weirder.)
In short, Bays and Thomas got trapped by a plan that eventually consumed much of the back half of the series whole. Ted’s endless attempts to rekindle his romance with Robin, say, or the creators’ unwillingness to introduce the Mother before the final season (and then their reluctance to use her in this last run of episodes) are re-contextualized not as a series revisiting story material out of desperation, but as the show trying to prime the audience for an ending the creators did a terrible job of laying the groundwork for. Bays and Thomas simply looked like shitty long-term planners, unable to understand that getting the audience so invested in the Barney and Robin coupling or in Tracy as a character would make it all the harder when the series finale abruptly dissolved the former and treated the latter’s death as an aside in the narration. That the show never seemed to suggest Ted mourned her feels like a vital betrayal of his character.