I have four older brothers. I spent a lifetime having someone offer me something only to pull it away at the last second and tell me I can’t have it. This can happen over and over again and gets quite annoying. Then when they finally get tired of the game, they give it to you and you wonder why they went through all that trouble when they could have just given it to you in the first place.
That’s the Ted and Robin storyline.
Now imagine in the midst of all this, they tell you that they have something else for you. Once you get it, they rip it away and throw it in the trash. You were just SO. FREAKING. HAPPY. to have that thing, but now it’s gone.
That’s Ted and the mother.
And that’s why the decisions that “How I Met Your Mother” creators Carter Bays and Craig Thomas made for last night’s finale bother me today. It may make sense to some viewers, but they went through incredibly great pains to tell us why it made no sense to the point that they made Robin float away like Jesus. Then they did it anyway because they decided to seven years ago and didn’t realize that when the old footage of the kids saying Ted should chase Aunt Robin played, they could have easily filmed Josh Radnor saying:
“At one point, I thought that too. So did she. And it might make sense to some other people, but the story isn’t about how I have the hots for her. It’s about how I used to feel that way and how the experiences I had with Aunt Robin and our friends gave me what I needed to meet your mother. It’s about, no matter how clichéd it sounds, you sometimes find what you need when you’re not even looking. Your mother is the love of my life and losing her hurts me every day, but I can go on because of you two and because of friends like Aunt Robin. That’s why the story focuses so much on her and Uncle Barney and Aunt Lily and Uncle Marshall. They didn’t introduce me to your mother, but I couldn’t have met her without them.”
That’s an ending on par with Ted’s 45 Days speech and the two-minute date and Lily telling Marshall about his father dying. That’s the emotion that set this show apart, not a jagov who screws everything up with grand gestures making the cheesiest grand gesture of all that undoes so many plot points that had been painstakingly laid out since the pilot.