How I Cried During the Finale

Charles Fernandez
Social Media Editor

    I want to start off by saying that reading this review will probably last longer than the finale of How I Met
Your Mother and I am notifying all readers of major spoilers ahead! You have ben warned! I have so much to say about this finale that I didn’t like and the mother’s death was the least of the problems, so I’ll leave her off for later.

    First of all, Barney’s (Neil Patrick Harris) ending was horrible. The fact that Barney started crying happily about having a baby made me very disappointed with its ending. The problem with this scene was that it made Barney completely fall out of character in a very unrealistic fashion. It isn’t even character development since the change occurs in an instant. Let’s recap on what Barney said related to having a daughter: “I’m about to tell a sad story," he began. "Glad someone can be happy on a day of a tragedy ... My life is over. Happy Notafather’s Day!”  When the doctor asked if Barney would like to see his daughter, he responded with, “Nah, I’m good”. THIS is Barney. Barney only asks for 3 things throughout his life: Number one is to sleep with as many women as he can, number two is to always have a suit near him and number three is to have a legendary life. Robin (Cobie Smulders) was the only case that managed to change Barney’s craving for a woman in bed every night, but even that took nearly 7 seasons to do. However, if anything were to stop Barney from achieving any of these three things, he would be 100% against it.
Barney would look at a baby and only consider it a thumb-sucking nuisance and a roadblock to getting women in bed with him. A baby, in Barney’s eyes, SHOULD be the epitome of bad luck. But instead, the show passes the touching scene over as if he has matured and really grown up. Of course most people would like to believe that, but in all honesty, as soon as he went back to sleeping with women, Barney reverted to his previous self. If you recall the Halloween party Barney was a part of in the finale, Barney said, “Marshall (Jason Segel), guess who’s digits I just scored? The slutty police officer-“and then he notices Robin, “ -er‘s tax attorney! Haha, saved it…”

    Maybe the new “I’m- in-love-with-Robin” Barney would have been crying and happy to have a baby (which is still a bit questionable), but the development from committed to player occurred to quickly to be believable.  Barney, as a player, is the last person who would be crying tears of joy and telling his arch-nemesis, “You are the love of my life”. It was touching, sure, but it should’ve never happened. When Lily (Alyson Hannigan) questioned Barney for the man he was, Barney replied with my favorite quote of the episode, “That’s me. Can I please just be me?” It saddened me that Barney’s ending didn’t even allow him to be himself. I can see that without the addition of the baby, Barney would have remained a very static character and not have changed from the beginning of the plot to the end. Yet, the whole baby scenario was a very unrealistic and bad way to go about making him more dynamic.

    Number 31 was a total excuse for Barney’s better ending! As heartless as it may sound, Number 31 was literally just a “baby carrier” misled by Barney, as all other women are, who didn’t get any screenplay, much less even given a name. This may very well be, the cruelest and most forced way of using a character I have ever seen in my life. And Barney thought HE had a sad story to share, but the heartless manner of using Number 31 for Barney’s personal story makes it funny and this is a comedy show. So, I’ll give kudos to that, I suppose.

    The scene I hated the most in the finale was when Marshall turned around to speak to the weird kids behind their booth. Nothing was more irritating than watching Marshall say, “Hey, you kids! Do you have any idea what happened right here in this very bar?” The kid asks him what happened and Marshall replies with, “Just… all kinds of stuff.”… What? I know some people took this scene as really cute to say, but this just felt like we hit a whole new level of corny, that it even became uncomfortable to me. Just all kinds of stuff? Care to elaborate on that, Marshall? All kinds of stuff happen around the world every day. All kinds of stuff are going on in Russia. All kinds of stuff are happening inside our bodies. All kinds of stuff happen inside a bathroom. I was left confused about the whole scene when the kid just turned back around to talk to his friends, as if telling Marshall, “Cool story, bro”. A much better replacement for that scene could have been with Marshall telling the gang, “I’m really gonna miss spending time with you guys here. ‘All kinds of stuff’ has happened in this bar.” Sure it’s a cliché scene, but then again, so is the majority of the show, which isn’t necessarily bad.

    Robin was never able to stay in one place once she became very successful and that was the overall reason why Barney and Robin got divorced. So if Robin’s traveling is what separated them both, how will this even help Ted (Josh Radnor) when he wants to date Robin? Is Robin at her house at the end of the story because she finished working? Can she now stay in one place? If so, then why doesn’t Barney go back to Robin? Barney did tell Robin, after all, that he loved her and vowed he would always speak the truth. I don’t think the baby would stop Barney from being with Robin because Robin likes the idea of having a child, which was why she cried a lot when she found out she wouldn’t be able to have kids. And something really makes me doubt that Barney and Number 31 are in a loving relationship. So I still have no idea why it ended the way it did.

    Even the kids at the end of the story had their problems. In some mysterious way, the daughter deduces that the whole story was about how Ted loved Aunt Robin. This is apparent when the daughter says “This is a story about how you are totally in love with Aunt Robin.” I don’t think anyone can say that this 9 season long comedy show that followed the lives of a whole gang with many interesting adventures and troubling relationships was just about “how much Ted loves Robin”. She continues on saying, “And you’re thinking about asking her out and you wanna know if we’re ok with it.” I must be missing something here because the daughter has now become the detective Ted has always wanted to be. The son agrees with the daughter, so he seems to be a genius too. This whole scene just forces Ted to go and ask Robin out for the “happy ending”. This scene was  way too rushed, didn’t make sense, and was the lowest point for me in the finale. Also, what a huge insult on the mother this has been! Instead of this whole story being about her, Ted spoke about another chick he liked and barely spoke anything about Tracy. Nice going, Ted.

    All of my other criticisms are a bit smaller. I’m sure many of us viewers noticed that the Mother’s death seemed like a really forced scene, as well. We weren’t even given an explanation for Tracy’s death, only that she got “sick”. Hope none of the readers die during Flu Season. This came off as if Tracy was only an obstacle standing in the way of Ted and Robin’s happy ending. And gosh darn it; Tracy must be eliminated to see that happy ending!

    I didn’t like the fact that Ted had way too much in common with Tracy (Cristin Milioti). I was happy to know that Ted could relate to Tracy, but I wasn’t hoping for so many similarities. If there was ever anything good that came out of the mother’s death, it would probably be that Ted doesn’t have to live with someone exactly like him and it makes things seem a bit more realistic. The similarities were dragged on way too far to the point that it just got plain creepy. Not only do they share the same interests but they shared the same initials, too (T.M: Ted Moesby and Tracy McConnel). I may have forgotten this, but can anyone recall a moment when Ted asked out Tracy? I was not only hoping for them to meet, but I was also hoping to see how Ted would ask Tracy out on a date. But the only thing I witnessed was Ted and Tracy already going out with one another rather than how they got to that point. All in favor of the sequel “How I Asked Out Your Mother”? Maybe this time around, we can tell Robin the story and end it with both of them getting a divorce, too. Now that we got all of the negative aspects of the finale, let’s go to what I really enjoyed about the finale!

    The only scenes I loved were from the time Barney wanted to play one last game of “Have you met Ted” through to the farewell of Ted. I felt that by having Barney play one last game of “Have you met Ted” with the mother, it could have started off as a great closing to the show. Unfortunately, this was never really implemented into the story but the E.T. farewell had me cracking up as well as the most legendary high-five. That’s about all of the positive things I can say about the finale and this ends my rant- I mean review.