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Moon Child said:
I watched it tonight too even though I wasn't caught up on the whole season...
Ted ends up with Robin anyway!? Yeah, I was a bit disappointed with that... The rest of the episode was great! Then that happened.
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I wouldn't even bother with the season now. They ruined it, it'll just make you even more disappointed about the finale.

You know what else sucks? Forgetting the circumstances and just taking that final scene by itself, it was really well done. If that was the final scene of a series like Friends, where the main couple is supposed to end up together, I think I would've been happy.

It also pisses me off that they cast someone to play the mother when she was no more than a plot device.
 
These are all valid points.

That said, this episode gave me all the feels. It was beautifully executed, regardless of one's opinion about that ending.
 
Oh yea, it was emotional and everything.
The part before the ending could've had me in tears, but as soon as I realized what they were doing it quickly turned to frustration. So that got ruined.
 
Eh,

The show had a built-in problem from the beginning: it's called "How I Met Your Mother" but the entire show is about Ted and Robin. What the daughter says at the end of the finale is exactly true: this was a story about Ted and Robin. The finale answered both the question of the title ("When the hell is he going to meet the mother?") and the story question (Will Ted and Robin end up together?). Personally, I think it was an absolutely brilliant end to the show. A bold move that paid off emotionally and thematically.
 
I always saw it as a show about Ted getting over Robin, so he could meet someone who was more suited to him. Especially since they spent so many episodes (one of which was literally the previous week) showing that and explaining why they don't work. Thus, the ending contradicts what the point of the show was, for me. I suppose how you interpret the show is going to affect your opinion of the finale. Which is unique for sitcoms, I'll give them that.
 
OK, after sleeping, I think I figured out my opinion on this :p

For a long time I wanted Ted and Robin to end up together. Then they decided to actually introduce the Mother as a main character (FARCE!), made her nice, quirky and lovable and then killed her off to make way for Robin. It's just very cruel and irritating. If they never introduced her, I probably would've gone along with the ending.

It was kinda stupid making a big deal and basing the whole season around the wedding only to split up Robin and Barney so fast, but in the end I never thought they were made for each other. I feel that Barney got a proper and more logical ending. No complaints about Marshall and Lily either.

When they said that the Mother is sick I already connected the dots and knew he's ending up with Robin. Now that I think of it, that whole scene after "and that's how I met your mother" was such classic Schmosby. Him telling this whole story to his kids to get their approval for dating Robin doesn't surprise me at all.

Bleh. It's still too soon for me to decide whether I like the ending or not. It was an awesome episode, but the last 3 minutes... dunno. I was just about to tear up when he revealed that she was sick, but they ruined the emotions of it with the kids scene.
 
I am more a casual watcher of the show. I thought the ending was well-done and made sense thematically for the reasons NP states.
My wife and daughter watch it all the time. They were disappointed because "Robin isn't right for Ted."
My take was she wasn't when they were younger because she had too many things to accomplish and too many things to work out.
But in her 40s, after doing what she needed to do (in the end it looks like she was settled in New York taking care of her family of dogs) she's done those things and worked out those issues. Maybe then, the timing for them was finally right.
 
Mosh said:
I always saw it as a show about Ted getting over Robin, so he could meet someone who was more suited to him. Especially since they spent so many episodes (one of which was literally the previous week) showing that and explaining why they don't work. Thus, the ending contradicts what the point of the show was, for me. I suppose how you interpret the show is going to affect your opinion of the finale. Which is unique for sitcoms, I'll give them that.
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I get that, and it is incredibly unique. Just part of the reason why HIMYM will be remembered as a revolutionary sitcom. As far as that episode goes, they also spend the entire time saying how, "Love doesn't make sense, it's what we do." That's what happened in the finale. Ted found his soul mate and life took her away. So, what does he do from there? Nothing? It doesn't make sense to us because Ted should only love the mother now, because she was perfect for him and vice versa. But after all of it, Ted still has some love for Robin because love doesn't make sense.

Night Prowler said:
For a long time I wanted Ted and Robin to end up together. Then they decided to actually introduce the Mother as a main character (FARCE!), made her nice, quirky and lovable and then killed her off to make way for Robin. It's just very cruel and irritating. If they never introduced her, I probably would've gone along with the ending.

It was kinda stupid making a big deal and basing the whole season around the wedding only to split up Robin and Barney so fast, but in the end I never thought they were made for each other. I feel that Barney got a proper and more logical ending. No complaints about Marshall and Lily either.

When they said that the Mother is sick I already connected the dots and knew he's ending up with Robin. Now that I think of it, that whole scene after "and that's how I met your mother" was such classic Schmosby. Him telling this whole story to his kids to get their approval for dating Robin doesn't surprise me at all.
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The pace was the issue with the ending, I agree. We actually came to love the mother over this season and then she was taken away from us. If this had played out over the course of a few seasons or even a movie, I think people would be okay with it. But it was so quick that we feel cheated because after nine years, we wanted Ted to move on from Robin. But Schmosby can't do that, not with Robin.
 
I disliked the reunion of Ted and Robin but it does make sense when you look at the whole picture. I liked the finale. Can't say the same about the season. Would've been much better if the season was dedicated to the matters of the finale instead of a wedding of a future failed marriage.
 
MrKnickerbocker said:
I get that, and it is incredibly unique. Just part of the reason why HIMYM will be remembered as a revolutionary sitcom. As far as that episode goes, they also spend the entire time saying how, "Love doesn't make sense, it's what we do." That's what happened in the finale. Ted found his soul mate and life took her away. So, what does he do from there? Nothing? It doesn't make sense to us because Ted should only love the mother now, because she was perfect for him and vice versa. But after all of it, Ted still has some love for Robin because love doesn't make sense.
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I understand that and it seems nice on paper, but it cheapens the Mother and season 9 in general. Now I know why ending the show the original way they planned it, revealing the Mother in the final episode, would work. Before I figured that wouldn't be as special because we don't even know the character, but now that I know what their endgame really was it makes sense. The Mother was just a plot device. But it doesn't work in season 9 because they made her a character and let us get to know her over the course of an entire season. If they would've ended it the way they did but last season instead, I think I would've been fine with it.
 
Mosh said:
I understand that and it seems nice on paper, but it cheapens the Mother and season 9 in general. Now I know why ending the show the original way they planned it, revealing the Mother in the final episode, would work. Before I figured that wouldn't be as special because we don't even know the character, but now that I know what their endgame really was it makes sense. The Mother was just a plot device. But it doesn't work in season 9 because they made her a character and let us get to know her over the course of an entire season. If they would've ended it the way they did but last season instead, I think I would've been fine with it.
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Absolutely. The one thing pretty much every HIMYM fan can agree on is that the show went on for too long. It's clear that they were padding out the episodes, just waiting to get to this finale.

Especially since that ending was filmed way back in season two!
 
The show definitely dragged for too long. Only reason I kept on watching since Season 7 is the history and connection I had with the show. The amount of fillers had become unbearable. In first two seasons, first four seasons even, I had memorized the names of every episode because they were almost all significant. I have no idea about the names of episodes starting from Season 6. Stretching the wedding was a bad idea. Ted should've met the mother somewhere in the first 10 episodes and all other storylines of the finale should've been carved to a certain degree (Marshall's path to Supreme Court, stuff leading to the problems on Robin-Barney marriage, The Mother's sickness). Could've been much better. Like I said before, the finale was pretty good and the Robin twist wasn't all that bad, the problem was the build up to the finale. To be honest, if the series ended with the yellow umbrella scene, it'd be fantastic.
 
I half-expected it, and am neither for nor against it. Like Mosh I saw the show as "Ted finding someone he loved more than Robin, forgetting her", and like the kids I did wonder why telling the story of meeting his wife was so long and didn't involve her for such a long time, but there was many many hints that there was a permanently unresolved thing between Robin/Ted.

During those final 3 minutes though, my main thought was nothing to do with that.... it was "Why does old Ted still sound like young Ted.. when the rest of the 9 seasons he hasn't!"
 
Either way, I'm sad that it ended. (Though due to declining quality, it was time, but still.) It'll certainly remain one of the best sitcoms ever.

I think that all the scenes where Alyson Hannigan cried were real. Best crying ever :p

One mystery remains... what happened to Cobie Smulders' hair in last few seasons? It's been such a mess lately.
 
I was so mad about the How I Met Your Mother finale until the last five minutes because I couldn't understand how Robin was such a huge part of Ted for eight years, and then she was barely in it. You wouldn't start a story to your kids about how you met your spouse with how you met an ex. There had to be a reason for it. And the series was to explain that him being with Robin after the mother passed wasn't just him throwing the mother aside, he wanted them to know exactly how much someone needed to mean to him for him to move on from the mother. People that still disagree with this, clearly have never watched the show very closely.

Also, people keep getting mad that Tracy was Ted's "second choice", but apparently they all forget, or don't care, that Ted is also Tracy's "second choice". She was engaged but her fiance passed away. Her love with Ted ended just as it did with her and Max. She got to move on after Max, why can't Ted move on after Tracy?

I agree with both those sentiments. Delivery could've been better, but the ending made sense.
 
300: Rise of an Empire. I will try not to be too geeky about this.

Eva Green is hot. And that made the movie watchable. I'd feel bad about saying this if the movie was not intended to only appeal to my juvenile self, but it was. Also, she got the only good line.

The original 300 worked because it was an outrageous fantasy film that toyed with chauvinism and fascist imagery in a way that made it so ridiculous you couldn't take it seriously. It was the California Dream Boys vs the Degradation of Darkness. The Persians in 300 were evil, seductive and without a shred of humanity, and that made them so enjoyable. In Rise of an Empire, all that is gone. The fantasy element is toned down to a point where it is virtually non-existent. About the only fantastic scene was the one in which Xerxes became a god, and that didn't even serve the plot in any way. I guess it was there to either answer questions raised from the previous film, or to set up a sequel. Other than that, the Persians were humanised and almost made likeable. Sure, both Xerxes and Artemisia were villains, but the cause for their villainy was explained, made sense and almost had you choose whose side you take. It was softened up, and therefore the idea of 300 was deconstructed.

The non-linear approach to story-telling did severe harm to the film. The entire first half of it was told in flashbacks, and sometimes you didn't even know it was a flashback. I know it was supposed to show that part of the events of this one took place parallel to 300. However, if you literally start out the bloody film with the last image of the previous one, it tells the audience that what follows now is the events coming after that. It's just poor style. Flashbacks are fine for an exposition, but you don't have to do it either. 300 started out with a scene that long preceded the events of the film, and that worked just fine. Why not start with Artemisia's origin story here? Or, if you must, the Marathon sequence. Although that wasn't necessary, in my opinion. Why suddenly give Xerxes a motive when he didn't have one in the previous film, and wasn't even a major character in this one?

Closing the film with War Pigs over the end credits was certainly unexpected. And having an anti-war song close a movie that glorifies war is also funny. But it was only Ozzy's vocal track over random, entirely unfitting epic music. You could have had a great metal moment here, but no, they chickened out.

Outside of my rating of the movie as a movie, I was bothered by the way they treated the history here. 300 was fine because it was a fantasy film full of outrageous stuff, but if you took away the monsters, blood showers and freak kings, what you got was still an astonishingly accurate re-telling of the Thermopyles story. In Rise of an Empire, almost all the monsters and freaks were taken away, but you also got a completely jumbled sequence of events that has virtually nothing to do with the history. The Battle of Salamis was a highly dramatic event that could have made for a perfect 300-esque movie, but they chose to ignore that and just use a bunch of clichés and worn dramatic techniques that made this a completely interchangeable action epic.

In short: Rise of an Empire completely lacked everything that made 300 good.
 
Regarding the HIMYM conversation, you might want to check this out. It was quite good fun.


After watching this, I've come to a conclusion. Will I ever connect to a TV show more than I did with HIMYM? I probably already experienced it with Friends. Will I ever connect to the characters of a TV show more than I did with HIMYM? Maybe. Will I ever connect to the main actors of a TV show more than I did with HIMYM? I seriously doubt it. My appreciation for the cast is probably the reason why I kept on watching the show without ever taking a break.
 
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