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.

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?

Don't You Forget About Me

80’s montages kill me.

After the drunken night following the last episode, Barney finds his way down the highway, accosts two losers—I mean, young men—and finds a strip club sooner than it takes Ted and Robin to find him again. He takes them on one last go-round the night before his wedding, ensuring protégé might exist in his place.

But I wanted to be that bro in training.

Also, it says so much when you realize he passed on the Playbook in sticky-note form. He had it memorized—although, perhaps, that in and of itself isn’t such a surprise. The most important takeaway? "It's not legendary unless your friends are there to see it."

While Ted and Robin trail the beach to find him (far, far off their mark), we finally witness Ted’s failed journey to find Robin’s locket. In essence, he must relive his three most influential girlfriends on the locket’s trail, only to watch it chucked off a bridge by the crazy Jeanette in the same manner he lost his childhood balloon.

I’m still not clear on WHEN he had the time to fly to Los Angeles and back from the east coast. Perhaps I’m missing something. All the same, he learns to let go of Robin, finally, on the morning of the big day. And in grand John Hughes style, no less.

We never learn who was in the car with Lily. But, we see Lily and Marshall break up, though not before choice warnings on Ghost Lily’s part: marriage isn’t a competition. And if you make it one, the only one that will lose, is you. Don’t make your spouse the opposite team; make them a team player.

Analogies aside, even Marshall and Lily bury their seven-year hatchet on the ceremony’s dawn. Now it’s a countdown to see just how long they can stave off the season—and series—finale.