Devout “How I Met your Mother” fans watched the show for the final time last week with a little less enthusiasm than expected. Just a warning to all-many spoilers will be spilling out of this article.
The mom dies? Robin and Barney divorce? Ted goes back to Robin?
Whoa, wait. No.
Fans took to Twitter and other forms of social media pretty quickly after the finale aired to put in their two cents.
One tweet from @SnarkOff read, “I just feel like I just found out that my favorite love song was written about a sandwich.”
Another negative tweet came from fan @JakeHarris4, saying, “How I Threw Away 9 Years of Character Development.”
Needless to say, fans did not show much appreciation to co-creators Carter Bays and Craig Thomas’ ending that “they’d mapped out from the beginning,” according to Entertainment Weekly. Bays also threw in, “Not everyone is going to like it, but that was never the guarantee anyway.”
Though a “satisfaction guarantee” is never promised, fans proved they wanted a lot more out of the show than they were given.
Throughout the show, an ongoing relationship with Ted and Robin is obvious. However, as a fan, we were rooting for Robin and Barney to end up successfully, instead. Seeing this relationship fail after all the emotional tugging they put on their audience feels like a hit below the belt.
Maybe the better way to say it is that the writers have insulted their fan base.
As for the mom dying, reassuring the fans will be difficult. You can only build up the show for so long (nine years) to just ruin the title itself. They might as well rename it “How I Met Your Mother Barely and Then She Died So I Moved on to My Ex-Lover.”
Wordy, but at least it’s factual.
According to “Rolling Stone” this week, Bays said an alternate ending is out there and is said to be included in the season nine box set.
Bays said, “Sixteen days ago today, we were in the HIMYM edit room, trying to decide between two very different endings. We only shot one script, but through edit room magic, we had two possible outcomes for the series. We chose the ending we chose, and we stand by it. But, we loved the other version, too.”
So, for all those out there who still want a little more pep in their step and security in their HIMYM relationship, the writers have been made aware and are planning to accommodate.
