TV

The Five Stages Of Grieving For That ‘How I Met Your Mother’ Finale

It should go without saying: SPOILER ALERT.

by Alasdair Duncan  2 April 2014

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Warning: this piece contains the greatest spoiler of them all. Read on at your own risk.

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So there you have it, How I Met Your Mother fans. After nine years, seven slaps, countless drunken nights at MacLaren’s Pub and one wedding that seemed to take forever comes the big reveal: The Mother has been dead this whole time. She is no more. She has ceased to be. She’s shuffled off her mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the choir invisible. SHE IS AN EX-MOTHER.

In a way, we all knew this was coming. In its final weeks, How I Met Your Mother did its best to let us know that we probably shouldn’t get too attached to the title character. Future Mother’s conversation with Future Ted, in which she choked up while asking what kind of mother would miss her daughter’s wedding, all but came with a flashing neon sign advising fans to break out the Kleenex.

When this scene aired in early March, it became pretty clear that How I Met Your Mother was laying the groundwork for Ted to get back with Robin, the object of his singular obsession since the very first episode. Around the time of the finale, hard core fans began splitting into two groups: Team Blue French Horn, for the musical instrument that Ted stole for Robin on their first date, and Team Yellow Umbrella, for The Mother’s signature accessory.

umbrella

Sure enough, yesterday’s finale brought with it a tear-jerking montage showing the mother’s short but happy life with Ted. It turned out that The Mother had been gone for years by the time Ted began telling his long story, which was more a case of How I Was Really In Love With Your Aunt Robin All Along.

At story’s end, the kids urged him to go get her, and the series ended as it began: with sweet, hapless Ted standing under Robin’s window.

Needless to say, a lot of fans found this ending to be a major bummer (… “Major Bummer.”) Some felt that the show had ended on an easy cop-out. Some were angered about the fact that the whole of Season Nine focussed on Robin and Barney’s wedding, only to have them divorce in the opening minutes of the finale. People raged on Twitter, created memes and, in typically restrained internet fashion, called for the deaths of the show’s creators.

How the hell to we make sense of it all? There are five stages of grieving for The Mother’s death.

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1: Denial

As of right now, a lot of How I Met Your Mother fans are rocking back and forth, arms wrapped tightly around their knees, trying to convince themselves that the finale was just a big April Fools prank, and none of it really happened.

Theoretically, there’s still time for CBS to pull another surprise episode out of the bag, in which The Mother survives, Barney and Robin remain blissfully in love, and the MacLaren’s Pub gang grow old and grey together. I wouldn’t count on it, though.

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2: Anger

And then, as the reality of the finale began to set in, fans began to feel pretty pissed.

A lot of very colourful language was thrown around.

E Online’s Leanne Aguilera declared herself “deeply pissed off”, while The Huffington Post’s recap went with a choice ‘final nail in the coffin’ joke. Fans got pretty sarcastic too.

Many felt as if the show had personally attacked them.

And those who dared to say they actually liked the finale were shut down pretty fast.

In fact, the show’s creators had probably better watch their backs for the next few days.

From a certain perspective, the anger about the finale is understandable. The whole of season nine set Ted up for a new life, post-Robyn, flashing forward to key moments like his first date with The Mother, and his romantic lighthouse proposal in Farhampton. To skip right over their years together in the space of a single montage and put Ted right back where he was at the beginning of season one felt to many like a betrayal of everything the show was and every story it set up.

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3: Bar(ney)gaining

When being angry at Ted and Robin’s last minute reunion got too much to handle, a lot of fans switched their anger to Barney instead. In fact, Barney’s characterisation throughout much of the show’s last season was a gigantic mess, and his particular thread was probably the worst part of the finale. He gave up his womanising ways to marry Robin, only to backslide after their divorce, only to become a doting father after knocking up an unnamed woman. He even managed to make the joy of fatherhood seem creepily sexual.

Vulture’s Margaret Lyons vented her anger at this last-minute twist, pointing out that Barney’s big push into maturity amounted to little more than him lecturing young women on how to dress and behave, instead of hitting on them. Others put it more succinctly still.

Over the course of Season Nine, Barney went from inveterate horndog to loyal husband to inveterate horndog to doting dad, many of those things in the final hour. He basically became How I Met Your Mother’s human version of a ping pong ball.

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4. Depression

How I Met Your Mother always knew how to tug the heartstrings effectively – just think back to the episodes following the unexpected death of Marshall’s dad, or the one where Robin found out she could never have children. As the reality of The Mother’s death began to sink in, so did a big case of the sads.

Pretty much everyone looked like this.

Pretty much everyone looked like this.

The show was very clever in its casting of Cristin Milioti as The Mother. The writers knew she was going to die all along – this was a foregone conclusion as far back as Season Two, when the ending featuring Ted’s kids was shot – so they knew they had to make her character count.

cristin

With her big eyes and her open, friendly manner, it was very easy to fall in love with Milioti — and therefore very easy to feel miserable when she was ripped away from us so quickly.

‘Well, That Happened’ went the headline of TV.Com’s downbeat write-up of the episode. Why couldn’t we get more time with her?

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5. Acceptance

As the dust started to settle and fans began making sense of How I Met Your Mother’s traumatic finale, one Reddit user summed it up thus:

guy

Given how important The Mother was as a character, we saw very little of her during the show. She only showed up for the first time at the very end of season eight. From there, we caught the odd glimpse of her, and in one key sequence, we heard her perform ‘La Vie En Rose’ on her ukulele.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6eHX7N2KmuI&feature=youtu.be

We never got enough time to spend with The Mother, but I’d argue that this was really the point all along. The audience wanted more time with her, and felt cheated that they only got to know her so briefly — but this is exactly the way that Ted felt, too.

The AV Club’s recap of the show was one of the more positive, and took the line that, for all the finale’s problems, the show consistently wore its heart on its sleeve until the end. They, like many viewers, just wanted Ted to be happy — and in the finale, they got their wish.

When all was said and done, the finale was How I Met Your Mother in a nutshell. It was rambling digressive and at times deeply frustrating, but also uplifting, with its big, goofy, sentimental heart firmly in place. Goodbye, The Mother; we hardly knew ye.

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Alasdair Duncan is an author and freelance writer who has had work published in Crikey, The Drum, The Brag, Beat, Rip It Up, The Music Network, Rave Magazine, AXN Cult and Star Observer.