Hey mom, I did it!

I have been hired on as a staff writer for Hidden Remote and here is my first article. I'll be writing about Doctor Who for a while! Check it out!

http://hiddenremote.com/2014/08/29/doctor-missy/

How I Moved On From Your Mother: A look at the finale of How I Met Your Mother

Beware.  Spoilers ahead.

The nine season long run of How I Met Your Mother has come to an end, and I couldn't be happier. No more beating around the bush, no more dragging us along, no more entire seasons focusing on one weekend (that turns out to be a pointless weekend anyway). Now that I've had a few days to digest what happened on the series finale, I think it's safe to share my view.

Don't get me wrong.  How I Met Your Mother has been one of my favorite shows for the past nine years.  It was basically the Friends: The Next Generation.  The series was one to remind you of the great times you had with your group of friends -- to remind you of the good and bad times with "the gang."  The show gave us long-running jokes that made us feel like we were part of the gang.  You start comparing your friends to the characters: "You're totally Ted," "Stop acting like Barney," or you simply say "Hallooooo," like Ranjit.  It's a television series that no matter how sad, funny, stupid, raunchy, or ridiculous it was, it carried a feeling of friendship, nostalgia, and always went back to the fact that the characters were lovable.

In my opinion, the show had been slipping in a few aspects for a few seasons. Although, I began to get more annoyed with the fickleness of Ted and the self-centeredness of Robin, I tended to like Barney more and more as the series went on (Marshall and Lily were always my favorite and that never really changed).  The last few seasons made me understand a purpose for Robin though.  She was great with Barney!  Neither of them wanted children, they were both independent people but loved being with each other, and most importantly: she brought out the best in Barney.

The final season brought us through the excruciatingly long weekend of Barney and Robin's wedding which ended up being what I (and many other fans) wanted.  Focusing on their relationship became more crucial to me at that point.  We knew that Ted would meet the Mother at this wedding, but I didn't even care much anymore.  Although I began to like the Mother throughout the season, my main interest was the Barney Stinson redemption story.  A man who only cared about himself, who manipulated women on a daily basis to sleep with him, and basically a man-child with most other aspects of life, was throwing away his womanizing past to be with one woman that he loved.  The penultimate episode shows us beautiful vows between Barney and Robin that show their honest love for each other.  Cue credits.  We're happy.

Then the finale came to hit us in the face in the true Slapsgiving style.

Barney and Robin get a divorce.  They break it to the gang nonchalantly and of course everyone else (except them) is devastated.  So basically those fantastic vows that they recited just an episode prior are meaningless.  Since it is a sitcom, I was expecting for it to just be a bump in the road and it would show in the future how they got back together.  But no.  Their marriage was so disposable that they hardly spent much time focused on the actual breakup itself.  The focus was more-so on "the gang" and how upsetting it was that they didn't hang out as a group like they did before.  But what about the love that we focused on for an entire season?  It was thrown away in mere seconds.  Barney's way of coping with the divorce was to fall back into his womanizing ways.  Sleeping with young women, drinking heavily, and acting like a man-child again.  The showrunners try to rewrite his redemption story.  What is it?  He gets a woman pregnant and she has a child.  How was that a redemption story?  We bring him from a man who had turned from his ways and stayed faithful to one woman, to basically forcing him to accept some sort of responsibility for his actions.  It almost seemed like they forgot who they wrote Barney into becoming.  They forgot the character that they had developed and pushed him back into an early HIMYM version of himself.

Moving on to a character that I didn't care for as much, Robin also went back to her old ways after the divorce.  She followed her dreams (how inspiring) and became a world-renowned news anchor.  She focused on herself, which can be good in some ways, but the problem is that she was known for being self-centered.  It is one of her biggest flaws that she is always so focused on her desires rather than the needs of people around her.  Example: Ted stealing a blue french horn for her (among other romantic acts) and she puts him through hell in their relationship.  She loves me, she loves me not, she loves me....  That's not to say that Ted didn't do his fair share of being self-centered.  I just haven't gotten to him yet.

Now the real kicker is the relationship between the Mother and Ted.  We see their relationship blossom throughout the season in little bites but we didn't get to feel it in full force.  Everything happened so quickly: they meet, they fall in love, then...she dies?  Of what?  Then, six years later, Ted tells his children a nine year-long story about how he met their mother.  Then they tell him that he should move on and be with Aunt Robin...so he does.  What?

HIMYM blew us away by using an entire season to cover a single weekend, but they describe most of a relationship, a sickness of a loved one, death, recovery, and then going full circle to have Ted get together with the woman he thought he loved from the first episode in about two minutes.  One of the worst parts is that the mourning period of the Mother is glossed over so we didn't even get to process everything that happened in an appropriate way.  We wanted to mourn with Ted and the kids because we did just watch an entire nine years of a television series for details like that!

The point that this finale made to me was to move on.  Ted moved on from the Mother, the woman the entire show was about, and it seemed like he was pretty happy.  So maybe we should take his advice.  Move on.  I'll happily move on from HIMYM for things bigger and better.  Let's hope that someone can achieve some of the things that How I Met Your Mother did, but with a satisfying ending for it's fans and not the delusions of the writers.

Progress

Just checking in. I'm still at work on my first novel Within the Quiet (old title was The Hiding King). I've posted before about my work on "Awkward Friendships" and other films I'll be working on with GivanMoore Productions. We'll be filming a new short film soon that is based on a Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale so be on the lookout for that! Also, I'll have a new essay series that will be posted on here pretty soon called Why Blank Matters which will feature essays on culture, film, television, and literature with a little bit of a twist.  Stay tuned!