How I Met Your Mother’s controversial ending was actually perfect

Ten years ago today, How I Met Your Mother infuriated fans with perhaps the most controversial sitcom ending of all time — but “that’s life, you know. We never end up where you thought you wanted to be.”

For nine seasons, Carter Bays and Chris Thomas tracked the “emotional endurance” of Ted Mosby, a hopeless romantic who unknowingly orbited the love of his life across nearly 10 years of breakups, runaway brides, and one fateful wedding. That night, as Ted waited for a train to a new life, the universe rewarded his (im)patience with Tracy McConnell, the titular mother he’d (and we’d) been waiting for. 

And just as we fall in love with her, she dies — and while you’re still winded from that gut punch, the show’s final moment places Ted on Robin’s porch, holding the fabled blue French horn. 

To many, HIMYM’s finale felt like one of Marshall’s slaps, one so hard and uncaring that its emotional pain echoes through eternity. It may not be the ending you wanted — but open your eyes: it was inevitable. “That’s the funny thing about destiny: it happens whether you plan it or not.”

This isn’t a total apology for the final season, by the way. Spending 22 episodes on a single weekend, before wrapping up in decades-spanning two-parter, isn’t satisfying storytelling — and, admittedly, it makes the rug-pull of the finale’s narrative decisions harder to pick yourself up from. 

Before ‘Last Forever’, a happily-ever-after ending was in sight: Barney and Robin (extraordinarily becoming one of the show’s best couples) beat the odds and tied the knot, the mother was on Ted’s horizon, the slap bet reached its long-awaited end, and Marshall and Lily are having a baby. But the show had other plans: Barney and Robin get divorced, with Barney regressing to non-stop, bar-dwelling infidelity, Robin becomes the most famous and solitary newscaster in the world, and Ted loses his wife (Marshall and Lily make it to the end unscathed). 

Here’s the thing: unlike Friends’ cozy, feel-good ending (untouchable, just to be clear), HIMYM dares to confront reality. Robin’s career was always a priority, and Barney never wanted to be a lapdog; as they said, it wasn’t a failed marriage; it was a successful one that lasted three years. Of course, Barney goes back to sleeping around — the white picket fence life isn’t everyone’s dream — but it’s particularly poignant that his pursuit of the Perfect Month leads to the anchor he never knew he needed, the only woman who could ever make him see sense: a daughter of his own. 

But that’s not the biggest point of contention: people hate that Ted ends up with Robin. To that, I say: what show did you hope you were watching? HIMYM is about a man’s long, winding road to meeting the woman of his dreams… through the lens of his evolving relationship with “Aunt Robin.” 

Ted and Robin ultimately got what they wanted: he fell madly in love with an impossibly perfect woman (Cristin Milioti deserves a lot of credit, as the grace of her performance is undoubtedly a massive factor in how upset fans were at her swift death), and Robin hit the apex mountain of her journalistic career. At that point in their lives — their early 50s, either consigned to grief or accepting the one that got away — why would they not cut their losses and allow themselves to sweep each other off their feet one last time? 

Tracy wasn’t a hurdle for Ted to get to Robin: she was a part of his life, the one person everything led to; but just as there was a before, there’s an after, and as Robin once told him: “If you have chemistry, all you need is one other thing: timing. But timing’s a bitch.”

In the meantime, find out what other binge-worthy TV shows should be on your watch list (or you can just start HIMYM from the beginning again).

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