How I Met Your Mother

You know what life isn’t?

Television.

Perhaps I should have planned for this article somewhat later, after I had time to digest the passing of a wonderful nine-year series. But in my first reflections, both nostalgic and happy and melancholic and puzzled, I can argue to the best of my ability one thing for certain: season nine, implicitly, prepared us for the series finale.

Because season nine prepared us for the moment. And to live in the moment. And not to follow Ted and his tragic-hero mantra of what-if’s.
Because if Ted had spent the season asking, what-if? If the wedding hadn’t happened, and if we as an audience hadn’t been forced to sit and examine the nitty-gritty details of one moment, one weekend, in time, we too would have constantly thought about the future. If How I Met Your Mother tried to show its viewers anything, it was to live in the present, and not to spend it thinking about the future.

In doing so, you can better tackle the future objectively and unabashedly when it comes. When it is time.

Barney showed us successes can still be finite and successful.

Robin taught us not to budge from the truth.

Lily told us to be here—here—for the big moments.

Marshall demonstrated the power of patience.

And Ted, the power of the present.

Really, all those lessons combined into the LAST moment, the last ten minutes for anyone who counted, when Ted finished his story, said goodbye, and picked up the phone. All those lessons culminated into the story’s finale. Ted’s success happened to be finite, but he went for it anyway. He stayed for the big moments, and kept creating bigger ones. He was patient, he was now, and, in the end, he got what he wanted next.

Yes, I could critique parts of the episode, its ending, or the series’ ending.
But how poignant is the message of our disquiet? Shouldn’t the unsettling teach us something as well?

Because life isn’t television; life isn’t perfect. How I Met Your Mother knew this from the start and gave us a finale to reflect only the real.

Vows

Robin lives through her long-time-coming wedding freak-out, Ted delivers the locket (but not in the way you think), Lily and Marshall renew their vows (for now), and Barney and Robin get married. It’s the second to last episode of How I Met Your Mother.

Admittedly, I didn’t think Ted went back into the water to fetch the locket in Central Park, but I was naïve enough to think Robin would believe that Barney found the locket and that would be that. Not a chance, not on THIS second to last episode before the whole series finale.

After Robin gets the truth out of Ted, she relives her exi-Stinson crisis and wonders whether Barney is really the right match for her. Ted said some amiable things—he always does—but in the end, didn’t stop Robin from fleeing the coop.

Or rather, trying to. Before she ran headlong into The Mother.

The Mother, ever useful (and almost more useful than Ted himself), encouraged the would-be Bride to take three deep breaths. Because those, she wisely counseled, could change everything.
The conflict resolved as one WOULD expect a conflict to resolve right before the series end, however: with Barney making the vow he should have promised all along. The vow of honesty.

Thirty minutes later, Barney Stinson and Robin Scherbatsky were finally married.
And they had a ring-bear. Bear.
Robin loved it.

Barney decided one true vow was better than many false vows, and Lily and Marshall decided evolving vows were better than vows left in stasis. Married life may not have been as glamorous as they imagined, but it ended up being married life. After realizing they broke most of their wedding vows by natural course of action, they borrowed the altar before the wedding and renewed their own vows, promising to keep renewing them as their marriage changed and evolved and grew. Aww. Vow dare they stay so perfect?
I’ll stop.

The previews almost slayed me. Next week can’t come slowly enough…but yes. Yes, next Monday will air the last ever, new episode of How I Met Your Mother. The kids can finally get up off that couch and change clothes.
Now that I think about it, Ted raised really polite kids, considering they seldom interrupted and, you know, never just got up and left.

"Happy Something Or Other!"

This episode takes place three days following Robin and Barney Stinsons’ wedding (no word yet on if Robin takes his name or not), and Ted has asked the Mother out on their first first date. Yes, first first date. It’s still adorably awkward.

I realize now that anyone but his future bride would have turned tail the second the words “Let me tell you the tale…” left his mouth. We have nine seasons’ proof.  This story, in succeeding most other stories (to leave room for the series finale’s big wedding ceremony), focuses on maybe-good-guy Gary Blauman.

Gary Blauman. The man some people love, and some people love to hate. Whether or not he took your curly, or helped wreck your marriage, he brings to focus what really makes a man worth loving, or hating, or using to re-examine your own trials.

As the tale-telling progresses, we discover The Mother isn’t as ready to date as we’d (or Ted had) hoped, but the night reveals many firsts and many highlights regardless. We get to see Judge Marshall in action. If he’s not a judge in his own right later, we know now he would have been fantastic. We learn what really gets Barney’s goat. We…never quite learn if Robin actually likes Gary Blauman or not. I’m not sure on that point. And we re-learn Billy Zabka’s name. I know you all Googled it like I did.

Gary Blauman stays at the wedding—even exercising Marshall’s seat-arranging mastery—but the highlight to this quiet little gem of an episode has to be the air the episode carried through the whole half-hour: things will work out. And things will work out; James and his partner got back together, Robin and Barney married, and holding off their Scottish-Mexican-fusion restaurant foray didn’t stop Ted and the Mother from realizing they were ultimately compatible. Sometimes good things really are just worth the wait.

Did you know Teddy Roosevelt went skinny-dipping during the wintertime in the Potomac River?
Now you do.

"It's...kind of insane how much happened a day in a half."

We finally discover who was in the car with Lily.

Or, rather, whose car it was at all. When Lily called none other than the Captain for help—and Ted was so close, too—she wasn’t calling for an emergency smoke break. No, she wasn’t even calling for someone to talk to.

She was calling to confirm whether or not she would have another child she refused to make a consolation prize.

For all those that thought Marshall getting his way seemed a little unfair, congrats: he, Lily, Marvin—and Daisy (two flower names, all)—will spend one year in Italy as a forever-family. Grazie.

Just in time to witness the spilt secret, Robin’s mother braved a plane flight to make it to her daughter’s wedding. Last episode already told us she would supply Robin’s bridal breakdown; it just failed to mention it would come in the form of confirming her worst Freudian fears. Lily now plays two roles: secret-keeper extraordinaire and the one to tell her best friend that, no, of course you’re not marrying your father, stop listening to your mother! Goodness. Someone needs to learn their manners.

We catch up with the Captain one last time, presumably, before the grand finale. He met his match, proposed to her too, and hired the Von Trapps to tend to his house. What’s more, we discover he would be hopeless at a game of Clue. Colonel Mustard, with the candlestick, on a boat.

CBS did not fail to make clear that there were just three more episodes total: two new, then the finale. Three short weeks before our lives are over for good. Or, so we said when F.R.I.E.N.D.S ended. And Breaking Bad. And, at the end of the day, it makes us wonder what new friend will find their way onto our networks next?

Why?

It’s a little hard to say if this episode served a long-lasting purpose, or if it really was just filler. As of late, the writers address and re-examine recurring issues within the sitcom. This time around, they slide Howard and Sheldon’s relationship under the microscope. It’s a rather cramped petri dish.

On the other side of the viewfinder: Amy and Raj, spotlighted in their own plot. When Raj decides to retry online dating and respond to a profile, Amy offers to chat up the lucky lady in question before Raj’s antics take center stage. I’m also not sure if the romantics are his front anymore—he may require a very, very amorous partner. Nevertheless, his plan backfires when the woman misreads (or reads perfectly) Amy’s gesture to mean Raj is too shy and passive. A Raj of five seasons ago, potentially. Nowadays, he’s more than happy to burst down the door of a coffee shop to prove his date wrong and ruin Amy’s budding friendship in one fell swoop.

Howard takes steps to rectify his 9-year-11-month-and-3-week-old transgression by starting afresh with Sheldon on a weekend trip to Houston, where he will speak at NASA headquarters. We never see them make it. No, they don’t detour to South America. On the flight over, Howard and Sheldon hit a second rough patch—of turbulence, that is. Nothing says bonding like hasty apologies on death’s doorstep. And would you look at that? Neither of them needed that bag. A little disconcerting if you ask me.

Penny, still living her full-time acting plot, turns down the Serial Apeist sequel to hold out for a more IMDB-worthy role, just in time for her car to break down. Not one to be unsupportive, especially after he’s said more than one thing that sounded very unsupportive, Leonard replaces her totaled car in a very sweet gesture and plot twist. Now Penny can afford to become the next Meryl Streep.
She should really consider modeling.

My Magic Suit

Ted and the Mother might come to know each other’s stories, but—even if he shouldn’t live in those alone—the best stories can be told and heard again and again.

Just like How I Met Your Mother reruns come the end of March. I’m a mess.

Robin’s both too cool for school and too cool for Lily on the morning of her wedding day and, despite Marshall’s half-hazard help, can’t wait for Robin to have her wedding “moment;” be it a hair raising (shaving) freak-out, or sentimental break down. Determined to coax the stereotype out of our heroine, Lily bombards Robin with a ready-made Love Story Scrapbook. Next, Lily tests the limits of Robin’s relaxation by bringing up her borrowed photographer and threatening to wear her own wedding dress during the ceremony.

Lily just doesn’t know how Scherbatsky’s work—or that the most pivotal of moments, for them, lie with family. Robin’s mother came to the wedding after all, in a much-appreciated plot twist. Jersey and all.

Robin may be ready for her big day, but Barney shares anything but the same luck. After Ted traced him to “Sue Top’s” room, he discovers Barney narrowed down his suit choices to all of his suits, forcing the best man to step in and help. Finding an, ehem, dis-attached suit proved to be a chore. Ultimately, Ted persuaded Barney to pick the tailor-made suit because the memories were still “ahead.” Ted has the romantic touch Lily lacked with her wedding counterpart.
Don’t tell Lily.

Next episode: belts!

Not really. Next episode, another tie-in to the future Ted and the Mother hold together, and another episode closer to the looming series finale. Did February have to end so quickly?