April 1, 2014

Finale Blues

I watched the first two seasons of How I Met Your Mother, but have only randomly caught episodes here and there over the subsequent 7 years. Even so, I decided to watch the finale last night. I did not enjoy the way they went with the story at all. Most of the feedback I saw on Twitter didn’t like it either. This is a good piece written by Alan Sepinwall about the finale and how the writers had trapped themselves. The inglorious ending to a long-running show brought back memories of LOST, and it made me wonder if all the tweets about “wasting 9 years” were valid.

The first 2 seasons of LOST were amazing. The next 3 were okay. The 6th season was rough, but I held out hope to the end that it would all come together. When everything was said and done, the LOST finale definitely ruined the series as a whole for me, but I still love those first 2 seasons in spite of it. I have to ask myself the question, was “wasting” 4 years worth it because I got to experience the first 2?

In this situation it would seem the best-case scenario would have been to watch the first 2 seasons and then stop. No time wasted… all goodness absorbed.[1] But LOST was a show about a mysterious island with lots of… mysteries. How can you not stick around to figure out what happens? When I do the math I think I came out ahead by watching every single second of LOST.

I’m not sure why I stopped watching HIMYM, but the whole gimmick of trying to figure out who the mother was didn’t appeal to me at all. It was a comedy that was funny sometimes and that is all that really mattered. I feel like the writers truly did a horrible job putting together the ending, but they did it in a way that further emphasized the ultimate un-importance of the titular statement. The fact that the mother doesn’t even enter the show until the final episode, and is killed off before it ends does say something about their intentions, but does it devalue any of the stuff that came before it? Maybe. I know I don’t have any desire to go back and watch the seasons I missed.

The times you laughed while watching HIMYM added value to your life, and that cannot be taken away. It gave you enjoyment. However, the show spent a lot of time with Ted “getting over” Robin and justifying why they can’t be together. That feels a little lame now that the finale is over. It was a funny show with a good cast, but it had the audacity to spend an entire season on one weekend only to speed through 16 years in the one-hour finale… invalidating a ton of character “growth” over 9 seasons. I don’t know if anybody wanted that.

… and what the heck happened to Bob Saget?
  1. This implies there was absolutely no “goodness” in the final 4 seasons of LOST, which is not true. I did enjoy parts of the final 4, but I’d rather not talk about it.  ↩


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