5 Better Endings for 'How I Met Your Mother'
After nine long seasons and one very long wedding weekend final season, How I Met Your Mother is over. And that's not necessarily a good thing.
SPOILER WARNING: This article contains details about the series finale of How I Met Your Mother.
The show ended with a series of flash forwards chronicling the next several years of the characters' lives, most of which was entertaining and amusing. But the very end has left many fans furious: Future Ted finishes the story and we find out that, in 2030, the Mother has been dead for six years and the reason Ted is telling his kids the story is so they will be OK with him asking out Aunt Robin. Future Ted then steals the blue French horn from the "Pilot" and shows up to profess his love for Robin, who had divorced Barney after just three years of marriage.
It was an ending that many fans wanted...way back in season 2 when the HIMYM creators originally came up with it and filmed the scene with Ted's kids. Back then Ted and Robin seemed destined to be together. But then the show kept going on and on, Ted and Robin stopped and started their relationship about a dozen times and fans grew tired of it. Robin and Barney got together and made a surprisingly legendary couple. And the show cast Cristin Milioti as the Mother, instantly becoming the fans' favorite part of the final season.
So the ending we wanted back in season 2 wasn't the ending we wanted now. The ending we wanted now was for Marshall/Lily, Barney/Robin and Ted/The Mother all to live happily ever after. One out of three is pretty bad.
To make up for that, I've come up with five alternate endings that would've been much better. Well, at least they wouldn't have been worse.
Ted's Wedding Day
When Ted revealed that, five years after proposing to the Mother they still hadn't gotten married, I thought a perfect ending would be that Ted was telling his kids this story on the day of his wedding to their Mother. All you have to do is cut the hospital scenes and move their wedding scene to the end and it's done.
A Successful Surgery
When it became clear that the Mother was, in fact, sick, another possibility was that Ted was telling his kids this story while she was in surgery, and the episode would end with Ted going to the hospital, surrounded by Marshall, Lily, Barney and Robin, only to have the surgeon come out and tell him that it was a complete success and she would live a long and happy life. It's a bit sentimental, but to add one final joke, the surgeon could've been named Dr. Douglas Howser.
The Narrator Is Barney
In a crazy final twist, the finale could've revealed that the Narrator all along was actually Barney. You see, it turns out that "31," the mother of Barney's daughter, was Robin (who miraculously became able to have kids), but he kept that a secret from his friends until they were at the hospital because he loves lying and manipulating people. They got back together, but then Ted and the Mother both tragically died and Barney and Robin became Luke and Penny's legal guardians. It doesn't really make much sense, but neither did any of the elaborate cons Barney pulled.
Ted Is Crazy
After Barney and Robin's wedding, Ted went insane and was locked up in a mental institution. In 2030, it's revealed that Future Ted is talking to a pair of stuffed animals on a couch and he introduces them to "the Mother," which is just a lamp. The whole story was just the ramblings of a lunatic who never found true love, which is a terrible ending, but still better than the one they came up with.
Just Cut the Last Four Minutes
In reality, the best ending of all involves simply cutting the last four minutes of the episode entirely. Watch the episode again, up until the scene of Ted meeting the Mother on the train platform, an utterly beautiful, perfectly acted and written scene. They say "Hi" to each other after figuring out their connections, the camera pans back, the train rushes by, fade to black. And that's it.
We don't need to know why he's telling the kids the story, we don't need to find out whether or not the Mother is dead. Those questions can be left unanswered for the audience to decide. The only thing that was important was that Ted met her and loved her for as long as possible. If you stop it there, the series finale isn't perfect, but it's a whole lot better.
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For the last one I would add the Robin as 31 from No 3, or just skip the hole divorce right from the start!