Why I don't think the How I Met Your Mother finale sucked

Kids, I'm going to tell you a story, the story of the How I Met Your Mother finale. Before I begin, I will say that I love the show and have become completely emotionally invested in it, that's not something I really need to explain on this blog though.

But, about the finale (and I'll try not to make it too long). I've read the articles, and I even clicked on the Tumblr tag regarding the finale. The general consensus is that is it was awful. I spent a great deal of time thinking about it, having very mixed feelings, and I have arrived at the following conclusions:

Barney: When I first learned that he and Robin had divorced, my initial reaction was Lily/Daphne's "What the damn hell?!" I thought a lot about it, and I tried to justify it in my head. Whether or not you agree with this plot twist depends how strong you thought Robin and Barney were to begin with. I thought back to all the little moments over past episodes, and honestly, I could see the holes in their relationship. I saw the lies and manipulation it took for Barney to propose to Robin. I saw Robin's doubts about the fragility of her and Barney's relationship when she learned James and Tom had split up. And that never went away. I saw how Ted was always there first. He was the one who got to her at the carousel, he's the one who got her locket back, with great difficulty. As much as it pains me to say it, looking back over previous episodes, I can see it set up that Barney and Robin just did not work. Barney was always just too late. She was, in his words, "Too rich for my blood". Therefore, I could completely understand his regression and reversion to his season 1 self to get over the pain of losing Robin ("Can I just be me?"). I've always thought his womanising ways were a cry for help, and it is sad but that is how it goes sometimes. That said, I understood less the second plot twist about his "perfect month", and his getting number 31 ("pretty name, is that French?") pregnant. Although his moment where he meets his daughter Ellie is by all accounts, pretty damn beautiful.

Robin: As I've said, I always thought there was an underlying fragility to Robin and Barney's relationship. It never really went away. She always had her doubts ("You know what legendary means? It means not real"), and I think it's incredibly sad that her worst fears were confirmed and that she and Barney grew apart. They were similar, maybe too similar, who knows? It is sad but it's also realistic, as that sometimes happens, and I know that as well as anyone. As Barney said, it was a "Very successful marriage that only happened to last three years". The fact of the matter is, while I enjoyed Robin and Barney and enjoyed them being together, I also enjoyed Robin and Ted. Josh Radnor and Cobie Smulders have always had great chemistry, and while their characters were great friends, it was clear that it always came back to them as a couple. And there was always a key message of the importance of timing in the show. While Ted and Robin may not have worked in 2005 or even 2013, maybe by 2030 they would have. Maybe they were just making the best of bad situations, maybe they were just fulfilling the deal they had to be each other's back up. I'll throw my hands up, I had no real strong feelings about how it ended, but I was all the time trying to understand what the writers were trying to do, and Ted's thought process. I even made my peace with the really long dragged out wedding weekend for the final season, because I understood that that was how it felt to Ted. I'm not saying it made for perfect viewing by any stretch of the imagination, but I did understand. And while Robin and Barney did get married, there was always the matter of her career, which was swept under the carpet in what we saw on screen but ultimately wasn't going away either.

Tracy: Bloody hell, how perfect was this character? She is exactly the woman I want to be. I loved her and she and Ted had the perfect chemistry. Someone once said (I think this quote is normally attributed to Johnny Depp?) that if you fall for two people, you choose the second. Because if you really loved the first, you wouldn't have fallen for the second. I think this is what happened with Ted and Tracy, and there's no doubt in my mind that if she had not died, her and Ted would still be together in 2030. Call me naive, call me wrong, call me a "hopeless romantic", but I still want to believe that she was the main point of the show, because it shows the importance of the journey Ted took to become the person he needed to be to meet her. I'm just going to leave the following quote here, and honestly, it's my favourite minute and a half of the entire episode, if not the entire show. I think it sums up perfectly that she was not just "A surrogate" or "A plot device":

"Lily wasn’t wrong. It was at times a long, difficult road. But I’m glad it was long and difficult, because if I hadn’t gone through hell to get there, the lesson might not have been as clear.See kids, right from the moment I met your mom, I knew. I have to love this woman as much as I can, for as long as I can, and never stop loving her, not even for a second. I carried that lesson with me through every stupid fight we ever had, every 5 am Christmas morning, every sleepy Sunday afternoon. Through every speed bump, every pang of jealousy or boredom or uncertainty that came our way, I carried that lesson with me. And I carried it with me when she got sick.
Even then, in what can only be called the worst of times, all I could do was thank God. Thank every god there is, or was, or ever will be, and the whole universe and anyone else I could possibly thank, that I saw that beautiful girl on that train platform. And that I had the guts to stand up, walk over to her, tap her on the shoulder, open my mouth, and speak.”

Ted: I'm going to be the first to admit it: Ted at times annoys me. But like him, I'm a hopeless romantic, his journey mirrors my own, his attempt to put all the pieces of the the story together had made me think about all the pieces of the puzzle that is my own life. I don't really know what to say, I think that a key message of the show was the importance of timing, that the winds of change were always blowing. The kids themselves said it. "Mom's been gone six years. It's time". I don't think that Ted and Robin in any way negate what Ted and Tracy had, and the above quote alone makes me believe that and possibly rescues the entire show. The episode just shows that the winds of change are always blowing, and I can just see how the little moments from previous episodes all added up to give us the end picture.

Marshall and Lily: Okay, so they have always been the backbone of the show, they have always been together. I think Jason Segel's comedic acting is fantastic and I always laughed so much more when Marshall was on screen. I have no complaints about their story, although I have to say, their insistence that all the gang be there for "the big moments", saddened me. And I wish we had seen more of Lily fulfilling her art career, and not just "The kid" becoming "Fudge Supreme" by the end of the show.

Overall, I love the show, I always have and always will. And while the final season overall as well as the finale wasn't perfect by any stretch of the imagination, I do have to say this: I understood it.