But if you really think about it, it is not hard to imagine Barney having a difficult time making marriage stick with any woman, even Robin. Sure, he promised to always tell the truth in that moment, and it was a very sweet moment, but we saw little-to-no evidence that this was a promise he could keep. And Robin’s wedding fears on the day of her wedding weren’t just a general nervousness about the future. She was concerned about whether or not she could trust her future husband, she thought she might belong better with someone else, she would have run away if she hadn’t run right into the Mother on her way out. These aren’t really the solid foundations for a marriage.
On the up side, for all of Barney’s issues and his clear inability to commit to a woman, it does not surprise me that he would fall in love with his daughter and want to dote on her and really help raise her, because he does have a soft, gentle side too. And that was beautiful to see. (Do you think having a daughter might change the way he deals with women and sex? It seemed like it in that one scene but one can only hope that isn’t a temporary thing like so much of his growing up over the course of the season turned out to be.)
Back to the main relationship at hand: Ted and the Mother. Life is full of ups and downs and this show has never pulled its punches when it comes to the downs. People die, suddenly, unexpectedly, or slowly and excruciatingly, they die old or way before their time. This show has dealt with death before. There was no indication that during his marriage with the Mother, Ted ever regretted his time with her or wished that he was with Robin. They were utterly happy and clearly raised two well-adjusted children who were much kinder and much more accepting than many children in their situation might be. If she had not died, Ted would have happily spent the rest of his life with her.
Life doesn’t always work out the way a person (or the viewers) expect it and bad things happen. How I Met Your Mother has always been full of surprised and twists and turns. If you really thought about it, you should have known that it never would have ended with Ted and the Mother walking off into the sunset. That’s not the show we’ve been following for nine years. (My other roommate’s exact comment was “it wouldn’t have been creative enough if they just ended up together and that was it, I wouldn’t have been satisfied.”) Part of what made this sudden turn, the fact that the story wasn’t about the Mother at all but was really about his desire to ask out Robin (again, this fact alone is not surprising if you watched the show) was that while Ted and the kids had 6 years to get over the Mother’s death we had a week of speculating and then only a couple minutes of actually knowing.
For Ted and Robin, the time is finally right. The Mother clearly liked Robin (she insisted that Robin come to the wedding, something most women would not be happy with, as we saw in the show). She would have wanted Ted to be happy and remarry. She probably would have even suggested that Ted go after Robin again, if she were perched on Ted’s shoulder whispering in his ear. In fact, I’m almost surprised this episode didn’t feature a big conversation of this sort of while the Mother was in the hospital. She tells him not to be alone and to be open to finding someone, he tells her he can’t possibly love someone else the way he has loved her. That’s exactly the conversation they would have had, the kind of conversation that the dying Mother would have insisted on, because she was romantic, but she was also practical.
And for Robin, who has always struggled with commitment and whether or not she wants children, this is the perfect way for her to be brought into a family–there’s no baby to raise, which might have overwhelmed her, but there are these two kids that she is clearly already very close to and clearly already loves. And they love her, so accepting her as their stepmother would not be all that difficult either.
So no, this might not have been the finale that people were expecting or thought they deserved, but in truth, this was the truest finale, the one that made sense with all of the things we had seen over these last nine seasons.
Now, for one last twist, wouldn’t it be awesome if we found out that the dad in How I Met Your Dad was Barney and the main character was Number Thirty-One?
What did you think? Was this a major disappointment or did it feel just right?
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