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.