LogFAQs > #963707027

My issue is this. After nine years, they'd built up this character as like the prime endgoal for Ted Mosby - he's married, he's old and he has kids with this woman. We're seeing all of these foibles with women who are just right for him, or who he doesn't get along with, with the idea that at the end of the show everything's gonna turn out okay.

And if it turns out that the mother of his children had died and he was asking his kids for permission to pursue another woman? That's not inherently a slap in the face.

The mother being dead all along isn't what feels insulting and contrived. It's the fact that they strung us along for nine seasons - nine years - during which Ted and Robin CONSISTENTLY get together and break up and where it's hammered in ALL THE GODDAMN TIME that they aren't good for each other as romantic partners. It's that three episodes before the grand finale, they have a final goodbye moment where Ted realises that he's being petty and jealous and he lets Robin go. He lets her go, and he's happy, and then he finally meets the love of his life.

And then NOPE, MY TRUE LOVE DIED, GUESS I'M GOING AFTER ROBIN AGAIN HUH?

Three episodes ago, they made a grand, sweeping gesture of Ted and Robin finding happiness apart. And they dismantled the entire happy ending of the season in two episodes to fit an ending they came up with when the show was first airing.

Every time they got together, the breakup was devastating. One of the last episodes of the show makes a point of providing closure for the pairing. They build up to Ted meeting the love of his life all season, Robin gets married, and in the final episode - the FINAL EPISODE - Robin and Barney break up, Ted's wife dies, and the closure they just provided for Ted and Robin as a couple doesn't mean shit any more.

And the reason it stings so much is because I grew up with the show, and I was expecting an ending that lived up to the promise of the show. And by the textbook definition, Ted met the mother of his children - promise fulfilled. But they barely have any screentime together, and then she dies so Ted can have some male pain and pursue a relationship that time and time again has been proven to be toxic and untenable for both of them. They could have pulled this ending halfway through the show's run, or they could have just not written a perfect closing for these characters and their relationships before taking a jackhammer to it. They could have pulled this ending if they didn't get Ted and Robin together four or so times over the course of the show, breaking them up in the most unceremonious, seething and petty of grounds to convince the audience that it was never gonna happen. Everything they did leading up to the finale made the ending completely untenable, and the only reason to keep it is because they filmed the kid characters at the start of the show reacting to this series of events. By the time they hit season 9, that ending just didn't work any more. So they didn't make a more fitting ending for the season, or a more fitting season for the ending. They tried to have their cake and eat it too, and it fucked everyone over.