Ten Years On, This Sitcom’s Finale Continues to Leave Fans Perplexed

Though it’s often put in the category of all-time popular sitcoms like Friends and The Office, it’s safe to say How I Met Your Mother’s finale left a lot of fans dissatisfied.

Spoilers for How I Met Your Mother ahead!

Since the pilot, the show built its suspense around who the titular mother in question was, with her identity finally revealed in the last season. To contextualize things, the “mother” is the lead character Ted Mosby’s (Josh Radnor) eventual wife, and together the pair have two children, Luke (David Henrie) and Penny (Lyndsey Fonseca), who appear throughout the show in short montages set in the future.

The two-part series finale aired ten years ago, on March 31, 2014, as creators Carter Bays and Craig Thomas tried to answer a series of fan questions. The season 9 finale focuses on Ted and Tracy McConnell’s (Cristin Milioti, the mother) first meeting, which happens at a train station where Ted is waiting for a train to get back to New York. As he bides his time in the rain, he runs into McConnell, a bass player who played at Barney and Robin’s wedding and is at the same station carrying the iconic yellow umbrella, which we knew belonged to the mother as early as season 3.

The two hit it off instantly, and Ted, in typical Ted fashion, decides to forego his trip to Chicago and breaks the news to his best friends, Marshall and Lily. The pair got engaged two years after meeting and finally got married in 2020 after seven years of waiting, as they called off their wedding the first time because of Tracy’s pregnancy. However, their union is unfortunately short-lived, as Tracy passes away from an unspecified illness in 2024.

All that build-up, only to watch the mother die? A tragedy, indeed.

Meanwhile, Lily and Marshall leave New York for Rome for Lily’s art consultant job, only to return after a year, after which Marshall realizes his dream of becoming a judge. On the other hand, Barney and Robin divorced each other three years after their wedding, with Barney fathering a daughter with another woman in 2020, and Robin finding a lot of success in her work with World Wide News.

At the very end, after completing his story, Ted is coerced by his kids to ask Robin out. After initial reluctance, Ted relents and shows up in front of Robin’s apartment with the blue French horn, concluding How I Met Your Mother with an epic (though much-criticized) callback to the first episode.