Revisiting the controversial “How I Met Your Mother” ending: Who Ted ends up with — and why the finale deserves more love

Warning: This article contains spoilers for the final season of How I Met Your Mother.

After nearly a decade on air, How I Met Your Mother fans finally learned who the mysterious title character is — and they’re still talking about it.

In some ways, we should’ve seen it coming. After all, the sitcom based on hopeless romantic Ted Mosby’s (Josh Radnor) quest to meet his soulmate launched with a jaw-dropping twist: In the future, an off-camera Ted (voiced by Bob Saget) tells his two teenage children his epic love story with their mother. The focus of the pilot is his pursuit of his dream girl (Cobie Smulders), then the episode’s final minutes reveal that she’s actually… Aunt Robin.

The nine seasons to follow documented the ups and downs of Ted’s romantic life with plenty of easter eggs hinting at who the mother might be. But the CBS sitcom ended in 2014 with a finale so divisive that some fans still hiss in outrage when it comes up in conversation.

Suit up as Entertainment Weekly explains why How I Met Your Mother’s ending landed like a losing slap-bet for some viewers.

After nine seasons of build-up, who ends up being the mother?

Tracy (Cristin Milioti), the musician Ted met at Robin and Barney’s (Neil Patrick Harris) wedding. (Her band, the SuperFreakonomics, formed when she was in business school.)

Was Ted and Tracy’s meet-cute as legend-wait for it-dary as his past romantic history with slutty pumpkins and tramp stamp removals and purple giraffes?

You know it! The audience first sees her face in the HIMYM season 8 finale, but she doesn’t meet Ted until season 9 when they start to fall for each other under the yellow umbrella of destiny.

As EW’s writer noted, the meeting came at a crucial moment for Ted, who’s pining for Robin as she prepared to marry his buddy Barney and planning a secret move to Chicago. But meeting Tracy at a train station in the pouring rain changed everything.

Co-creators Carter Bays and Craig Thomas knew that their choice for the Mother would have fans buzzing and worked overtime to keep Milioti’s casting a secret.

“The day I shot [my first scene], it was really on lockdown,” Milioti told EW. “All the extras in that train station are producers and writers of the show. It was so beautiful, because I got to meet everyone and they were incredibly welcoming.”

The good vibes didn’t surprise Thomas. “I kind of felt bad for Cristin because it was really like Jesus has risen when she showed up on the set,” he told EW. “The whole crew was like ‘Here she is, the woman we’ve been waiting for for 10 years!’ And she’s like, ‘I’m just an actor.'”

Related: The 50 best How I Met Your Mother episodes, ranked

Had Tracy interacted with the core characters before this long-awaited moment?

So many times! The final season jumped around time to show all the ways the gang had bumped into Tracy. She’s the woman in the drug store who helps Barney realize he wants to be with Robin forever, and she’s the train passenger who offers Lily (Alyson Hannigan) a cookie. Tracy hypes up Robin when the former Canadian pop star comes down with cold feet, and she gives Marshall (Jason Segel) and baby Marvin a ride to the Farhampton Inn.

She was also the roommate of Ted’s then-girlfriend Cindy (Rachel Bilson), and she was the student who laughed at Ted’s “shellfish” joke when he accidentally taught architecture to an economics class. And of course, at the club on St. Patrick’s Day 2008, she left a yellow umbrella behind that Ted claims and eventually forgets in Cindy’s apartment, thereby unintentionally returning it to its owner.

Tracy was an accidental part of everyone’s lives even before she became the Mother, in other words.

Awww, a happily ever after!

Not quite… Tracy dies.

Wait, what?

She gets sick. Like hospital-bed sick. And then she dies.

Wow. Did that make people upset?

Oh, honey. There’s a reason “Last Forever” landed on EW’s list of worst TV finales ever.

Plenty of viewers had been rooting for Ted and Robin to make it work despite his statement in the pilot that she’s an aunt to his children, so much so that introducing a woman who would please both Ted and the audience seemed like an impossible task.

Yet Tracy turned out to be a perfect match for Ted’s earnestness, dad jokes, and wide-eyed romanticism. And losing Tracy so soon after he — and we — found her “injected too much bitter into the bittersweet mix the show typically attempts,” as EW’s writer put it.

The social media reaction was also strong, with users not holding back on the angry caps lock over the reversal of the show’s premise. Of course, the misinformation in the leadup to the finale didn’t help; Milioti herself referred to “crazy conspiracy theories” when she was asked about fan speculation that Tracy dies.

She also offered a reason for the development, explaining that the creators planned this ending from the very beginning: “They’ve had this vision for nine years, and it’s in great hands. They know exactly what they want to do.”

Related: How I Met Your Mother: How the first and last episodes together make the perfect rom-com

How’s future Ted holding up after the loss of his wife and the mother of his children?

He grieved for her for six years, and then his children encouraged him to pursue Aunt Robin, the other great love of his life. (His a-little-later-in-life pursuit of her also included the blue French horn, of course.)

How did the ending affect the show’s legacy?

When the finale aired on March 31, 2014, it pulled the show’s biggest-ever audience: 13.1 million viewers, a 51% leap from the previous week, according to Variety.

As fans hit the internet to share their thoughts on the episode, Thomas posted a series of tweets thanking fans for their passion, referring to the show as “a comedy with dramatic elements till the very end,” and writing, “We did a finale about life’s twists and turns and that is not always what happens.”

EW’s Katie Atkinson was one of the critics who applauded How I Met You Mother’s exit. “A straightforward, fairytale ending for Ted and Tracy wouldn’t have served viewers, and it would have been beyond boring,” she wrote. “The story Ted tells the kids, and the series itself, is about the gang — Robin included. I would gladly sit down and watch a full spinoff about just Ted and Tracy. But in this series? In the deviously titled How I Met Your Mother? It has always been Robin.”

So the HIMYM universe ended there?

Nope! As time passed and we marched toward the year of Tracy’s death — 2024, if you’re keeping track — the creators pitched a gender-swapped spinoff called How I Met Your Dad, which never made it to screen. Then in 2022, a different spinoff hit Hulu.

How I Met Your Father starred Hilary Duff as Sophie, whose romantic travails unspool via Kim Cattrall in the Saget role as the 2050 version of Sophie, although Cattrall, unlike Saget, actually appeared onscreen. Although both Harris and Smulders reprised their roles in the mostly unrelated sitcom, HIMYF received middling reviews and was canceled after its second season — before audiences learned the identity of Sophie’s true love.

Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly