How I Met Your Mother- Episodes 9.23/9.24 "Last Forever" Review- The final slap is delivered, from the writers to their fans

There are bad finales and there is the How I Met Your Mother series finale, a finale which essentially ignores all the character development over the past 9 seasons and the plot of the last season, a finale that may have worked back in season 1, 2 and 3, but not after, say, seasons 7, 8 and 9. It crams 20 years of progression in 43 minutes and it just rushes to the end line, adding a plot twist that seems there only for the sake of shocking it audience.


When I finished watching it I was both crying and laughing, not because something funny or something poignant happened; I was crying by how I felt that I spent 3 years following this show so that the meaning I gave to the show- so that the reasons that I watch the show- could not only be proved to be wrong, but many of the episodes I loved (“No Pressures”, “The Final Page”, “Platonish”, “Sunrise”) which were about Ted letting Robin go are now meaningless. My favorite episodes of the series are ruined forever.

The saddest part is that it was up to a good start: at the wedding Barney recognizes The Mother and he wants Ted to meet her, but Ted is set on getting going to Chicago, so they go outside to have a poignant goodbye, which includes the epic high 5 Ted and Barney gave each other (they broke their hands, but it was worth it!, totally worth it!).

Then, the next day, Ted doesn’t actually move to Chicago, he met a girl and he is happier than ever. One can see in Josh Radnor face that everything is working out great for Ted, upon meeting this girl he is incredibly happy. On the next 2 seconds it is already 2015 and the mother is pregnant; it was an abrupt jump, but ok, things are going smoothly. Then we have yet another jump in less than a minute to 2016, where things just start falling apart.

15 minutes and 25 seconds, that’s the moment Robin tells the gang that she and Barney got divorced. WHAT?! After 22 episodes this season focused on their wedding, after Barney setting up a beautiful proposal (“The Final Page” screwed), after burning down the Play Book for Robin (“Weekend’s at Barney’s” also screwed) and making every sacrifice there to be, their relationship just implodes within minutes. And why? Just because Robin is working so much and that isn’t working for their marriage.

Robin actually got to be with her true love all along: her career. She has never sacrificed anything to be with Ted or with Barney, she is so focused on her career that she is not even willing to find a solution to her marital troubles, she just gives Barney an out… What happened to the girl who chose Don over her career? It seems like she never existed, and man, once she gives Barney an out everything goes downhill.

Barney regress to his season 1-3 self, the player who screws around. What happened to the moment in which Barney said “I slept with over 200 women and that left me feeling nothing but broken!”? I guess the show is expecting you to forget that, because Barney is that broken man again. It’s incredibly sad in so many levels that I can’t even begin to describe.

Marshall and Lily don’t have the best sendoff either, with Lily often upset that they don’t get to see Robin anymore and Marshall back at corporative law. After a Halloween Party to say farewell to the apartment, as Lily and Marshall are moving out to a bigger house, Robin sees Barney hitting on someone and Ted being happy with The Mother. She doesn’t want to stay because the gang for her is a married couple with children who she barely sees, her ex-husband flirting on floozies and “The man who she probably should ended up with the beautiful mother of his child”. Then she leaves and Lily is left alone sobbing, as her best friend goes MIA for quite a while.

That line, right there, so filled with jealousy made me hate Robin. Wasn’t she the one who always pushed Ted away? Yeah, she told Ted on “The End of The Aisle” that she should be with him, so when I go back to see that episode I’m supposed to believe that Ted should have ditched Barney and escape with Robin? Because it seems as if the wedding makes no sense whatsoever. Did she ever love Barney to begin with? We watched 22 episodes dedicated to a wedding destined to fail! In the end it would have been for the best if in “Platonish” The Mother and Barney never met, that way Ted and Robin would have been together sooner and this thing wouldn’t have happened. But no, they had to go through all the pain. And guess what? After that Halloween party the gang almost never saw Robin again.

So after that, Barney goes back to his old self, and guess what! He gets a girl pregnant! And her name is #31, whom we never see, isn’t that the best thing ever? Now, Barney holding his baby girl is probably the highlight of the episode; it’s a touching moment delivered with perfection by Neil Patrick Harris. His baby girl has changed his world and that is really poignant, but he has to endure being a single father for life, unless #31 is actually around, but we don’t know that, after all, why bother? Barney got back to his season 1-3 self so now he needs a life changing experience to make it feel like he progressed. Why was that needed? If they just stuck to his season 9 persona (even his season 7 persona was ready to date other people seriously not named Robin) this could development could have come organically with someone he came to love (Nora or Quinn, for instance), but instead this is just forced and downright unnecessary.

But we haven’t got to the worst part yet; the whole episode builds up Ted and The Mother as the perfect couple, just as every single episode of this season in which The Mother appeared. We finally get to know her name (Tracy), we get to see her love Ted and interact with the gang. Ted is happy, she is happy, but wait… remembered that crazy theory that said The Mother was actually dead? Turns out it was right on the money. Tracy got sick in 2024.

Forget all the tenderness of this couple; the show has been selling us for 9 years that Tracy is the woman of Ted’s dream that she is everything he dreamt of and we came to love her when she was presented to us. But she had to be ripped apart, she has to get sick and die, why? All so that Ted gets to tell this story to get permission from his children to go get his true love, Aunt Robin. The End.

That is so wrong in so many levels… the show played us, the show always made a point that Ted and Robin just were never going to work out, Ted wanted a family, Robin did not, Robin wanted to travel everywhere, Ted did not. When they tried to move in together it was a disaster, they couldn’t coexist like that. As a couple they had some good moments back in season 2, but the finale gets Robin so absorbed in her career that it makes it impossible to believe- to me at least- that she is ever going to change. I can see her regretting getting together with Ted in 2030 and then go screw around with Barney two days after, because that’s the kind of character she is now, a person who can’t commit to anything that isn’t worked related. Her work was more important than her marriage with Barney, so what makes Ted think that is going to be different this time around? Why does he have to chase the woman who hurt him so much for 8 years? Anyone else would be better (Victoria, anyone?).

I haven’t mentioned it, but we actually get to see the moment when The Mother and Ted meet, and it is beautiful, filled with sparks of chemistry and innocence that makes it all the more painful that it came right after we get to know that Tracy is dead.
I watched the finale 2 times and by watching a second time I came to be even more depressed than I was already on my first time. The pacing is horrible, it feels like it rushed to the end, fast forwarding every little moment, but the main issue with this finale is that it negates all the character development over seasons 4 to 9, it is an ending that the creators foresaw in season 1, but that only works for early seasons, and inserting it later just denies the progress the characters have made.

It is sad, and tragic, and I don’t have a trouble with sad endings (my favorite book “Brave New World” ends with its main character killing himself), but it’s not the story the show sold us over the years. No, the show changed over the course of the seasons, and so the finale should have changed too. This feels awfully out of place, season 9 dedicates a full season to a wedding that doesn’t work out (“Didn’t Ted told us last week that it was ‘legendary’, LIES!”) and all of that is thrown into the garbage can.

What hurts me the most is that there is only one right way to watch the show: you have to buy Ted and Robin as a couple. If you don’t, you are going to hate the ending. That would’ve been ok if the show wasn’t so set out on breaking them up every time, if the show didn’t make countless points to why these two don’t work out. I always believed that How I Met Your Mother was a show about a man who would eventually meet the love of his life and it would make all the pain in the process worth it, that it didn’t matter how much Robin hurt him because he got Tracy. But he doesn’t, in the end he only has The Blue French Horn and Robin up in the window, a relationship that may not even last a day, while the yellow umbrella doesn’t mean anything anymore and fades into oblivion.

And that’s why I may never see a rerun of this show again, and if I do I may ignore the finale ever happened. I watched the show because I found it inspirational, I thought that you could love someone a lot and get over from him/her to find something even better. The finale, however, sets it up so that you are always chained to the person you once loved, you can’t escape. Barney is going to die alone because he didn’t get Robin (“if it didn’t happen with Robin, it won’t happen with anyone” he states), he only gets his daughter but no romantic partner, while Ted is going to get Robin because he never really got over her. So there is no hope, if you fall in love with someone you may never rally, you are chained to them forever.

How nice for HIMYM to end that way. How nice for it to change the meaning of the show on the last five minutes of what had already been an horrible finale, all so that they can ruin not only the final episode of the series, but the series altogether. Great work Craig Thomas and Carter Bays, I applaud you, 80% of your fanbase hate you for it, and the 20% that loved the finale are probably Ted/Robin shippers, people who love sad, tragic endings and/or people who saw the show as the quest of love of these two since the beginning and couldn’t care less about Barney being alone, Tracy dying or Ted lying about getting over Robin (even her daughter calls him out, the whole story was about how much he loved Robin, not their mother). All those who watched the show with different eyes got royally screwed.

My only hope is that someday I can come to forget the bitterness of this finale and watch the rest of the show and enjoy it remembering it for what it used to mean to me. The stain is there, and while the finale can’t take away my past enjoyment of the series it surely was able to take any future enjoyment of How I Met Your Mother for me. If the finale was just bad then ok, but when it changes the whole series, then it’s awful.

Grade: F

Season Grade (excluding its finale): B+

Stray Observations:
-If you liked/loved the finale, let me tell you from the bottom of my heart how happy I am for you: I mean it, no sarcasm, not anything, I'm truly happy for those who got to enjoy it, you have your favorite comedy there and it will always be there for you. Sadly for me, it ended. It's like breaking up in the worst terms possible; you get the fond memories of the past, but everything is stained with the bitter aftertaste of the break up.

-Marshall Fudge/Judge jokes were funny. I was sad that he had to go through corporative law jobs again, even if it was to make a joke, it was pretty sad to watch. What is this? Season 3?

-“Just be cool, lady, daaaam!” One of the best lines of the episode.

-I’m right there with Lily, watching the Playbook #2 was just too sad. Oh, Barney, what they have done to you?

-The photo of the group brought some nostalgia, but it doesn’t fix anything.

-Seeing Robin in her apartment with all the dogs took her all the way back to season 1, and she is probably still putting her career as priority. She probably had the biggest character regression along with Barney in the finale.

-Episodes essentially ruined by the finale: “Lucky Penny”, “The Leap” (who cares he got that teaching job where the mother was, after all she dies!), “Challenge Accepted” (New is always better? Apparently not), “The Bestman”, “The Ducky Tie”, “Disaster Averted”, “Tick, Tick, Tick”, “No pressure”, “Trilogy Time”, “The Final Page” (Barney proposes, but it doesn’t matter! He is going to die alone!), “Weekend’s at Barney’s”, “Platonish”, “How Your Mother Met Me” (as Penny says “this story wasn’t about mom!”) “Sunrise” (Ted never got over Robin in the end).

-Episodes mostly unaffected by the finale: “Three Days of Snow”, “Say Cheese”, “Subway wars”, “Last Words”, “The Perfect Cocktail” (mostly because they don’t center on Ted or Barney’s love life).

-“I kept this story short and to the point.” That would have been better than this.

-There’s no way I’m watching “How I Met Your Dad” after this.

-Stay tuned, soon a roundtable discussion will be made and both me and Shirleena Cunningham will discuss the aftermath of the finale!

About the Author - Pablo

I'm currently studying Psychology while also writing fantasy books (one already published in my home country, Chile, you can check it out on the facebook icon). I watch many different types of shows, including my favorites Revenge, Game of Thrones, Once Upon a Time and about 23 more. Currently writing reviews for Once Upon a Time, How I Met Your Mother and Community