Image Soirce: CinemaBlend

How I Met Your Mother (often abbreviated as HIMYM) is a CBS sitcom produced by Craig Thomas and Carter Bays. It was an award-winning comedy series that taught young adults about friendship and soulmates. The finale, on the other hand, has remained a sore subject for many fans to this day. Was it a massive flop or a perfect reflection of reality?

How I Met Your Mother premiered in 2005 and continued for nine years and nine seasons, until 2014. For nine years, Ted Mosby (Josh Radnor), Robin Scherbatsky (Cobie Smulders), Lily Aldrin (Alyson Hannigan), Marshall Eriksen (Jason Segel), and Barney Stinson (Neil Patrick Harris) navigated life and love in New York City, all while recounting the story of how Ted met the mother of his children.

It made an impression on television by taking a typical sitcom and turning it inside out. It tells the story of Ted Mosby, a Manhattan-based architect hunting for love in all the wrong places, from the perspective of a much-older Ted telling his children the story of, well, how he found their mother in 2030. Ted, walks his children and the audience through the entire story of how he met their mother, including all of the obstacles he encountered.

This sophisticated framework gave the show its own distinct flavor and mythology. Ted's attempts to sanitize his past ("eating a sandwich" has nothing to do with sandwiches whatsoever) or his forgetting important details (like an ex-girlfriend he refers to as "Blah Blah") make this a show that requires you to watch it in order and pay attention, or you may have trouble understanding the intricate narrative.

At the end, How I Met Your Mother is a show about love, and the five main characters' relationships go through a lot of ups and downs over the course of nine seasons. Ted, the protagonist, is a hopeless romantic who notices Robin across the room and immediately falls in love with her. The two start dating in the second season of the sitcom, but when they realize they want completely different things out of life, they break up and stay friends. Following that, they each date other people, and Ted's procession of women keeps the audience guessing as to who might be "the Mother." 

After meeting the Mother, played by the incredibly adorable Cristin Milioti, at the end of the eighth season, fans yearned for more, and this episode provided all of the Mother backstories they required. Finally, viewers were given the chance to experience the entire story through the eyes of the Mother. The episode successfully contrasts her life with Ted's, as she mourns her boyfriend's death and moves on with her life, ending in a tragic rendition of Edith Piaf's "La Vie En Rose" on a balcony directly across from Ted's hotel room.

Given their shared sense of humor, shared interests, and seemingly unbreakable love, it was clear when the Mother was finally revealed to the audience that she was the right fit for Ted. Throughout the ninth season, however, it became increasingly clear that the Mother was on the edge of a sad end, and the majority of viewers' fears were verified after a plethora of evidence 

and theories. The Mother passes away in 2024, only four years after marrying Ted Mosby in 2020, leaving behind a bereft husband and two children, Penny and Luke.
The show's climax, which seemed to toss out the entire idea by killing the Mother and pairing off Ted and Robin, who'd realized multiple times throughout the show that they weren't meant to be together, was unsurprisingly immensely and noisily unsatisfied. How I Met Your Mother seemed to destroy all of the goodwill it had built up over nearly 10 years in less than an hour, making it all the more heartbreaking that this ending was intended from the beginning.

Many of HIMYM's episodes begin with a shot of Ted's children sitting on a couch, listening to their father's story; however, because those children grew older over time, most of those shots are quiet, as they were shot years before the conclusion. For the same reason, showrunners and creators Bays and Thomas filmed the last sequence — where Penny and Luke tell their father to go after Robin — at the start of the show, cementing the ending despite the show's multiple twists and turns in subsequent seasons. What about those kids? They had known the outcome the entire time.

The show's creators, Carter Bays and Craig Thomas defended the conclusion and reaction. “We wrote a comedy with tragic elements all the way to the end,” Thomas said on Twitter, before adding that the ending was about life's twists and turns. In an interview, Josh Radnor noted that Bays told him that How I Met Your Mother was a sitcom that didn't shy away from the truth. The play had a lot of sorrowful parts, and it wasn't all about happy endings.

The outcome of How I Met Your Mother has enraged many people for seven years. Personally, I'm still a fan of the show. It has had a significant influence on my life, and the characters are fantastic. Yes, the ending isn't quite what I had hoped for, but that doesn't take away from the show's overall greatness. It's like being promised there'll be a big race with a huge prize at the end that everyone will love, and everyone will be cheering you on while you run the race, but when you win, all you get is a block of chocolate. It's great; I understand; I don't mind, and I'm not bothered. It is, after all, chocolate. 

I'll keep watching How I Met Your Mother, and I hope that those who have given up will do the same. The end should not eclipse nine seasons of excellent acting and storytelling. And if you haven't seen the show but have read the key spoilers in this piece, especially the contentious conclusion, and are now interested, I strongly encourage you to do so. "Is it worth it if the finale stinks?" you might wonder, but it isn't; it's simply not the overall picture that everyone envisioned. It can be simpler to swallow if you know what happens. There is a select handful who love the conclusion; perhaps you will be one of them. What are the possibilities?