Following a television serial for 10 years, give or take, is no joke. The characters sort of wind up becoming your friends, and the weekly appointment with their shenanigans is a bit like catching up with your BFFs over coffee.
This sort of loyalty probably started with Friends, the ending of which had 75 per cent of the adult world weeping into their handkerchiefs as the six besties parted ways forever in a slice of realistic life decisions that usually have no place on television.
To a certain extent, the season finale of How I Met Your Mother (HIMYM), which fans have been following for a decade, followed the Friends ethos, I suppose. With one massive difference – it made a right pig’s meal out of the whole thing, leaving fans (including myself) feeling like they had been punched in the stomach.
I insert a huge spoiler alert warning before proceeding further. If you have not yet watched the episode and intend to do so, move on to the next page fast.
As for the rest, you will probably join me in asking creators (and frequent script-writers) Craig Thomas and Carter Bays the following question: are you flipping messing with us here?
In less than 30 minutes, the very final episode of the serial managed to destroy everything that it had built throughout these years, effectively delivering one moral to the story. We’ve all been following a bunch of losers who wasted 10 years before they could really start life as they were meant to. Oh yes, and all that rubbish about finding The One, which was sort of the whole point of the serial? It was just that – rubbish.
Thomas and Bays created a show whose popularity revolved around the ideals of ever-lasting friendship and true love. The show’s very title was a manifesto to this ideal: How I Met Your Mother. Also known as ‘how everything in my life led to the moment when I met The One’. Or, ‘how every single bad thing that happened was worth the pain because then I found you’.
But that’s not real life, I hear you say. It doesn’t matter – this is a sit-com we are talking about, and real life does not enter the equation. The feel-good factor on which they based the story does, though. To remove that feel-good factor at the eleventh hour, before pulling down the curtain for the last time, is a cop out. No wonder most fans feel cheated.
After 10 years leading up to the grand moment of a happily-ever-after with the Mother of the title, what is supposedly the romance of the century gets condensed into the last two episodes. And the Mother dies at the end. And the hero of the story goes back to courting his old flame, Robin.
The season finale of How I Met Your Mother followed the Friends ethos
The One indeed. Thomas and Bays managed to kill off the idea of true love in one fell swoop, reducing what was supposed to be a labour of love into a 10-year-long excuse to hit upon an old flame.
As if killing off the raison d’etre for the whole show wasn’t enough, the friends grow apart and Barney and Robin get divorced. Bear in mind that we’ve just spent this final season plodding through the longest wedding ever (episodes 1 to 22, to be precise), with the writers doing their best to convince us that Barney is Robin’s The One. Using episode 23 to tell us that it ended in divorce anyway is a tad rich.
They should have called it How I Hit on Aunt Robin, instead.
rdepares@timesofmalta.com