Tuesday, April 1, 2014

The Finale of How I Met Your Mother (Spoiler warning)

We just finished watching How I Met Your Mother.

It was probably better than the Seinfeld finale, but not by much.

I'm wondering if...kind of hoping...that it will grow on me.

I don't like depressing TV show finales whose main theme is our beloved characters drifting apart through the years. This is what happened on Will and Grace and Mad About You.  I didn't like either of those finales, and HIMYM goes down the same path.

The hour finale jumps through time and we see the friends becoming more and more distant. It was rather depressing, and also confusing.

Then Barney and Robin have some marriage trouble. Robin's having to travel too much, and it's a strain on their marriage. They get divorced. That was shitty, because this whole season was about their wedding. The previous couple of seasons were about their love.  Then it's all over in a couple of brief scenes.

As many predicted, and despite Cristin Milioti's denial, the mother dies. Like the divorce, it all happens very quickly. There's just one very short scene of her in the hospital.

She's dead.

Robin and Barney are divorced.

So now....

We cut to the kids on the couch.  The daughter says what many of us have been thinking all along. If this is supposed to be a story about how Daddy met Mommy, why is Mommy hardly in the story?  And why does he talk so much about Aunt Robin? The daughter suggests maybe he has the hots for Robin and this whole story is his way of letting the kids know that he wants to get back together with her.

The show ends with Robin and Ted getting together.

I wish I could be happy about that.

A few years ago, I would have loved for them to get together. But after all the Barney and Robin romance, and after all this destiny stuff with the yellow umbrella, I'm really not feeling anything for the Robin and Ted coupling.    

Sometimes, a writer comes up with a really great premise, but they fail to do any good with it. The idea is good, but the end product is crap.

I think HIMYM was the opposite.  It has such a ridiculous premise.  A man sits across from his teenage kids and burdens them with a nine season speech about how he met their mother, but his story's really not about that, and he reveals all kinds of private stuff that kids don't usually want to know about their father.  But despite this stupidity, the show was great.  It was beautiful, funny, touching, and surreal.   Until the last episode.  The last episode lived up to the crappiness of the premise.
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