“How I Met Your Mother” set its course nine seasons ago with a pilot that played havoc with expectations. A sitcom with that title shows you a couple with chemistry like Josh Radnor and Cobie Smulders — people that are obviously perfect for one another and would be fun to watch — and then tells you, positively, no, this is not the mother of which I speak. It’s someone else.
In addition to being a surprise it sort of sabotaged the rest of the run — they each had to date much more unsuitable people; Jason Segel and ALyson Hannigan played their own rather childish couple, and more and more attention was given to Neil Patrick Harris’ singularly hateful cad, a womanizer with bad jokes and worse catchphrases who mistakes sophistication with wearing a tie.
Like most people, I drifted away pretty quickly. But checking back this season, the Neil Patrick Harris character was marrying the Colbie Smulders character, which even they seemed to sense was wrong. There is no way she would ever marry a person like him. This entire season was pretty terrible in that it stretched the wedding day to take up the entire season.
It looked like the wedding plans would disintegrate as recently as last week, when Cobie’s character Robin told Radnor’s Ted that he seemed like the guy she should be marrying. But he tries to tell her that, no, it’s too late, they were different people now (and besides, he began by telling his kids that she wouldn’t be the one who was their mother).
For the finale, they did one of those things where they project far out into the future on the results of what they did.
And — this must be grating to those who had been watching for all this time — he meets the mother (Cristin Milloti, only introduced late last season and identified as the mother) in the final episode. Viewers should be more frustrated than the poor kids who’d been supposedly listening to this yarn for years.
So they move the clock ahead: Ted never moves away to Chicago, stays in town with the new girl. They move in together. They plan a big wedding, but cancel it because she’s pregnant. They have a kid. Marshal and Lily have kids. They do live in Rome for a while, but come back to the apartment, which they have to leave because they’re having a third. Neil Patrick Harris’ Barney and Robin divorce after four years — she’s too much of a globe-trotter for her news job and he’s too immature to ever grow up. But he gets some (unseen) girl pregnant and falls in love with the baby. We’re supposed to say “aw” at this part, but we should be calling child services to keep him away from her.
Ted and the Mother get married eventually — at the bar where they should have been kicked out years earlier (how do these middle aged people continue to keep the prime central booth after all this time?). Robin is seen infrequently but shows up for this event. They have another kid and then she gets sick and presumably dies.
At the end of the show, the slightly grey haired Ted wraps up the story about how he met the kids’ mother. But they call him on the flaw in the story that any viewer had caught — he spent most of his time talking about Robin instead of the mother, so he is really in love with her, right? And if that’s the case, why doesn’t he ask her for a date? So he picks up his antique phone (more of a 1980s model than anything that would be used in 2020 or whenever), but then decides to go to her apartment (presumably the same apartment), and he lifts up a blue French horn, which gives everybody a warm feeling who gets the joke, but really it’s been nine years and probably a lame joke, so who remembers?
Honestly, I can’t ever remember this show ever actually making me laugh and it surely didn’t make me cry when it ended. But still, I missed it a whole lot when the finale was followed by CBS’ newest comedy, “Friends with Better Lives” whose biggest joke in the pilot had to do with oral sex. Funny stuff for seventh graders, but it was much more deadly than the show that just ended.