How I Met Your Mother (Season 9)

By: Robert Murphy

(May contain some spoilers, you have been warned)

Like many of you out there, I tuned in each week for many fall shows but none excited me more than the final season to the show How I Met Your Mother and Barney and Robin prepare to tie the knot and get married. On top of this we finally get to meet the long speculated and hinted at mother and the future Mrs. Mosby that Ted’s been looking for since the first season. All of it comes together in a series of misadventures in Farhampton during Barney and Robin’s wedding weekend with many family dramas, shocking reveals and glass shattering so let’s dig right in.

For starters I loved the show through all it’s seasons and for the most part this final one as well but looking at it as a whole it has many issues to it for me that came together once I watched the shows final episode that I’ll talk about later. The whole season takes place as I said in Farhampton over a very long weekend, episodes sort of take place at different parts of each day leading up to the wedding. Now while this is a bit of stretch, it is exceedingly well done with the classic How I Met Your Mother humor we have seen before. Perhaps one of my favorite characters of this season had to be Lilly (Alyson Hannigan) who has always been a fiery character but even more so this season with her new affinity for breaking glasses with her bare hands when she is angry. Then there was our newest character, the mother, Tracy McConnell (Cristin Milioti) was a great addition to the show and performed amazingly. Initially when she was first introduced last season I wasn’t a fan but as she started to appear in various episodes throughout the show I fell in love with her as a character, funny, spunky and weird just like her future husband.

The mother in fact appears in many of my favorite episodes of the final season especially when they involved going back to her past and moments where Ted came into her life. Some of these moments include when her roommate Cindy told her all about Ted Mosby after her date with him and finding out all his quirks and then finding out she’s just as quirky. Another moment similar to this happens when Tracy is on the train to Farhampton and helps Lilly out when she’s freaking out about not seeing baby Marvin in weeks. This gives us more insight about her and how much her and Ted are alike, specifically when Lilly recounts how she hates Ted’s driving gloves and finding out she has her own pair of driving gloves just like them. The mother perhaps makes up many of my favorite moments throughout this final season and saves most of it for me.

Now many of you who have seen the concluding episode to the show may be wondering what I have to say about it and I fall under the category of not agreeing with the decision the writers made. Many people have there opinions on it and I just couldn’t go for it mainly because it debunks the whole final season of the show and this is where I find all my fault with it as a whole. Needless to say that the main focus of the last season was all about the wedding of Robin and Barney but the last episode completely contradicts that in a matter of seconds and makes all the build up not worth it. What I mean by this is that everybody has their happy endings one minute and its thrown upside down the next, the new happy couple is married and starts their lives, Ted has his new wife and will have kids on its way and then Lily and Marshall are well still the same which is happily together but then a monkey wrench is thrown in and it all changes. I look forward to buying the DVD version of the series and seeing the alternate ending that the writers have said will be on there and hopefully being satisfied with the other way the show could of went.

In conclusion, if things had ended differently I could of really loved this last season of How I Met Your Mother but it didn’t, now I tried my hardest to explain myself without spoiling it and hopefully you’ll see what I mean when you watch it for yourself. It was the fact the I felt 90% of what the last season was all about had gotten thrown away once we find out what happens in the end and you know what I don’t like what happens with Ted either who gives a final voice over in the end to conclude everything with his kids (bet they need to go to the bathroom after sitting there so long.) What I did like about the show though was the mother and finally getting her story in all of this, getting to know her and how she ticks all leading till the moment she meets Ted.

Good:

- Still have your solid laughs we’ve always had in the show

- Tracy McConnell beat my expectations to a pulp with her great performance as the mother

Bad:

- The final episode was ultimately a disappointment for me as it undoes everything that the final season was about in my eyes

- The finale was already written before the rest of the season so I feel that everything was  plopped in so you can just get to the end

Scully Rating: 6.0 out of 10