Please Don’t Yell At Me: A Defense of the How I Met Your Mother Finale

“I don’t spend a lot of time thinking ‘What if?’ I guess that’s happiness.”

That’s a line that didn’t make it into Last Forever Part 2, the final episode of How I Met Your Mother. There’s a deleted scene that takes place about six or seven years in the future. Ted and Robin are having lunch. They’re reconnecting after a few years of not seeing each other. Robin brings up the old pact they made, that if neither of them is married by the time they’re 40 they’ll marry each other. But Ted isn’t interested. He’s in love. 

I’ve got a theory as to why this scene didn’t make it into the final cut of the finale. For one, it’s a little too on-the-nose. But beyond that, I think including this scene would’ve deprived Ted of the opportunity to end the series with a moment befitting his most defining character trait.

Great characters, no matter what genre of fiction they come from, make choices. Oftentimes when you’re bored watching a work of fiction, it’s because things are happening to characters. The exhilaration we feel from a great moment almost always comes when a character makes a choice. Memorable moments aren’t telegraphed. Memorable moments aren’t accidents. They happen when characters we love make tough decisions.

There’s a lot I can say about Ted Mosby the character. A lot of which negative. A lot of that because I think he and I are dangerously similar. But one thing no one can say about Ted Mosby is that he’s afraid to take risks. When Ted Mosby makes a choice, he goes to every possible extreme to make that choice. He doesn’t just choose; he plunges.

Which is one reason why I don’t think this scene works. If Robin was the one who opened the door, that would’ve robbed Ted of his stupid, giant, romantic gesture. He needed to come to the realization on his own. He needed to initiate the reunion. He needed to be 100 percent sure that he made the choice to follow his instincts and do what he thought was right.

In the version of Last Forever Part 2 that aired, Ted made that choice.

He made the right choice.

Defending a TV Episode Everyone Hates

In this long, glorious decade of sitcoms, I don’t think there’s been any single episode that has drawn more criticism than Last Forever Part 2. On IMDB, How I Met Your Mother’s finale has a rating of 5.6 out of 10. That’s the lowest rated episode of the show. Lower even than the disastrous misstep that is Bedtime Stories. To put that in perspective, 5.6 is also the rating of the episode of Two And A Half Men that replaces Charlie Sheen with Ashton Kutcher. That’s the company Last Forever Part 2 is in.

And here’s the thing: I understand why all these years later people are still frustrated with the way HIMYM ended. The finale feels both abrupt and drawn out. After a season that spend upwards of 20 episodes fixating on one weekend, we get one hour to explain about 11 years. We get one sentence of dialogue explaining Tracy’s death, but we get a full season of back-and-forth between Ted and some random lady on a bus bench. The entire episode is fixated with “not missing the big moments,” but all we ever see is characters we love sitting around and talking about big moments. We never actually see the big moments, save for a brief glimpse at Ted and Tracy’s wedding that’s drowned out by voiceover.

Most importantly, there’s Ted’s choice. I understand why a fan might be frustrated by the series ending with Ted going after Robin one more time. We spent nine years listening to the most dramatic, romantic and convoluted love story ever told, only to have the show end with a relationship we had spent nine years being told could never happen.

As I said, I understand if you think this way. But I don’t. I think Last Forever Part 2 is more than just an ending to a series I loved. I think it was the right ending. I think any other ending would’ve felt cheap. It would’ve felt fake. Because at the end of the day, How I Met Your Mother was never a show about being happy. It was a show about chasing happiness. It’s only right for a show all about the pursuit ending with one more quest.

Like it or not, How I Met Your Mother was a messy show. There’s a significant quality dip after Season 5. If I’m being honest, three of the five best episodes of How I Met Your Mother that aired this decade came in January of 2010. Girls vs. Suits, Jenkins and The Perfect Week aired back-to-back-to-back as the first three episodes of the decade. The only episodes after those that remotely live up to that standard of quality are The Final Page and How Your Mother Met Me. 

But I don’t call How I Met Your Mother messy as a commentary on its quality. I think the show was messy more in the way that none of its characters were ever perfect. For a show that has often been accused of being a Friends ripoff, I think one major distinction (salute: major distinction) between the two shows is the characters on How I Met Your Mother lack a lot of the polish that the characters on Friends had. Ross and Rachel and Joey’s flaws were played for laughs. Ted and Robin and Barney’s flaws were played for character development.

The characters on Friends aged. The characters on How I Met Your Mother grew up. And I think that’s the main reason a lot of fans hated the finale of How I Met Your Mother. Most great network TV shows don’t ask their characters to grow or change. Chandler was always a smart-aleck. Joey was always horny. Monica was always Type A. Phoebe was always flighty. Ross was always the hopeless romantic. And while Rachel changed a lot on the surface, she was always the one who made rash decisions, whether she was running away from her wedding or getting off a plane to abandon her new career on a new continent.

On HIMYM, the characters grew. That’s what made the finale so hard to watch. We were watching messy people grow out of their early 30s and into true adulthood. It might’ve been rushed, but we got to see Barney graduate from lothario to father. It might’ve been rushed, but we got to see Robin live out her dreams and realize her dreams didn’t make her as happy as she’d hoped. And, most importantly, we got to see Ted in his element, finally being the loving husband and loving father he always wanted to be. 

If the characters in the finale didn’t feel like the characters we’d spent nine years watching, it’s because they weren’t. They grew up. They became actualized versions of themselves. 

Season 9 of How I Met Your Mother is bad. Real bad. It’s the Be Here Now of sitcom seasons. All the hype in the world couldn’t prevent it from being a bloated mess so far up its own butt that it forgot to prioritize substance over style. But all that said, it ends on the right note.

In the moment, I struggled to find the good in the finale. I remember watching the episode as it aired and I couldn’t speak or move or do anything but blink for about five minutes after the show ended. I was shocked. I’d spent a year watching Robin and Barney’s wedding, and they got divorced 30 minutes in. I’d spent nearly a decade rooting for Ted’s happiness, and it lasts about 45 minutes before the woman of his dreams dies.

None of this seemed fair. This wasn’t the happy ending we wanted.

But the point of How I Met Your Mother was never to be happy. To go back to Ted’s quote from that deleted scene, showing Ted when he’s in the throes of happiness isn’t compelling. It might be satisfying in the moment, but it isn’t memorable. And more than that, it isn’t real. 

Real life is messy. Real life takes twists and turns we don’t expect. Most people don’t get their happy ending. And if they do, they only get it for a few fleeting moments. Happiness is elusive. 

But great characters — and by extension, great people — never give up on their quest to be happy. Ted Mosby is the ultimate symbol of that. He’s a hopeless romantic who is never shaken from his belief that true happiness is always one grand gesture away. 

That’s where the show had to end. Not on Ted finding happiness. But on him looking for it.