But maybe the new show of Cristin Milioti gets a nice boost! http://insidetv.ew.com/2014/02/12/how-i-met-your-mother-cristin-milioti-rashida-jones-pilot/
I would have loved an alternate where the kids urge him to have an affair with Aunt Lily or gay up with Uncle Barney. (Polygamy might have just been approved in Congress and they all get married?) I wonder if Alyson is going to have a guest spot on Grimm with her husband?
One thing I always thought was really interesting about the show was that Ted and Lily were always 100% platonic. Yet she met him at the same time she met Marshall. I always thought that was really cool. Nice to see some fidelity. And Ted was really close with her too, and they spent time alone together, and it was never weird.
I don't think that's weird at all. I hung out with a lot of people where there was no sexual tension. Some of my best friends from school were girls that I never dated, and some that I did date for a while. Just because there are two people of opposite sexes in a room, it doesn't mean that they are attracted to each other.
I've maintained that the Ted/Lily relationship was often the most underrated relationships on the show. It was always so much more than just his best friend's wife and I often thought that Lily was the only one of the gang to truly understand Ted.
<<Might not be weird in real life. But it's weird in a sitcom. >> Exactly! It flew in the face of rom-com sit-com convention!
Ted spent two decades thinking that he made out with Lily at a party, before he was eventually corrected. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_I_Met_Everyone_Else
Yes, and Lily covertly sabotaged several of Ted's relationships. All in the (subtextual) hope that Ted and Robin would end up together. Looking back, the mother's death was foreshadowed in the episode with Ted and Tracy in the coffee shop. It was the scene where she told Ted to never stop telling his stories. "What kind of mother would miss her own daughter's wedding?" I didn't get that the first time I saw it, but it screams at me now.
Subliminal. Liminal. Superliminal. That was superliminal. ... Sometimes Lily was sabotaging Ted because she and Marshall had an ongoing bet about Ted's future. Winning the bet, and what's best for Ted might not have always coincided.
I just rewatched the last ten minutes. If they cut the Tracy in the hospital scene, and the kids telling him to date Robin scene, and the Blue French Horn scene... you get: a loving montage of Ted and Tracy through the years, the actual scene of them meeting at the train station, ending with Future Ted saying "and that, kids, is how I met your Mother." THE END. Now THAT'S the ending I wanted (but cutting out Barney and Robin divorcing isn't doable without a lot of reshoots unfortunately. Unless you stick in a throwaway line about them getting back together a few years later)
I didn't follow the show from start to finish. But it seems that there is a bigger picture that the writers were working with that we as viewers were never privy to. It looks like all along they gave us little hints, here and there, as to the end of the story. That's big stuff for the fans to talk about endlessly, as we do, but regular people would not have caught on to it.
In last weeks Inside The Actors Studio, where the cast was interviewed and celebrated by their piers, James Lipton asked the "character" Lily, if she had any romantic affection for "Robin"? The two actresses finally made out for the joy of the audience. You're welcome.
There's a fan cut linked somewhere upthread that did exactly that and it is very nice and exactly the finale i (and it seems many other) wanted to see. I don't mind the divorce of Barney and Robin.. even though Barney is a good guy at his core (if you disregard how he lies to women at times to get them into bed) their relationship never seemed quite plausible as opposed to Marshall and Lily. It would have been more believable if Barney ended up with that british woman (forgot her name) because she made Barney change for the better initially and gave him stuff to think about. What i was trying to say is that sometimes relationships don't work out in the end even if they begin out of true love.. outside interference can throw a wrench into anything and if it happens often enough cracks may appear. As has been discussed the season box set set to appear in the fall will have a recut ending and possibly more scenes that were cut and i'm curious if they change anything or at best explain the finale we got a bit more. As it stands the death of the mother and Ted coming back to Robin just ruined it for me for the one fact that it seems that the Mother was just a stepping stone that Ted needed to get back together with the truel love of his life (even if it never worked out but it did with the Mother).
100% agree. The ending we got would've been an inspired, albeit rushed, way to conclude the show they were doing more than half a decade ago. At that point, the mother was the ultimate MacGuffin. She was nothing more than a plot/framing device for the Ted/Robin story, which at the time still seemed like something that might've actually had potential. I also agree with what this review has to say: I'm not opposed to sad series finales and bittersweet endings by default. I absolutely loved the Babylon 5's tearjerker finale. But, that finale made sense in the context of the series. It was coherent with the story the show was telling. The story HIMYM was telling was, in later seasons, that one cannot make a relationship work by pretending the person you love is someone (s)he is not, and that you *shouldn't try* - the person you'd want him/her to be might actually be out there, and'll have been worth the wait. Ending that story by killing off said person within a few seconds .. blargh. I'm kinda irritated by people justifying the finale with "life is not a fairy tale!" ... well, yeah, I'm aware of that. There are no real happy endings in real life. We all die in the end*. We've all known this for a long time, and spend enough time agonizing about it as it is. The only happy endings there are are stories you stop telling at the right point. It's just shitty story telling IMO to end the story they inadvertently were telling where they did. (*And then, a few billion years in the future, the sun'll turn into a red giant and destroy any traces there might be left of anything any of us ever did - and if we manage to escape the solar system, the heat death of the universe, the big freeze, the big crunch, or whatever will eventually do us in.) And hey, if they'd have let Tracy live, the more cynical among us could've still murdered her in their headcanon after the conclusion of the series.
Of course there are happy endings. When you die at old age after a fulfilled life and you can look back and say "I have no regrets". But dying in your 40s before you could see your kids getting married and having their own kids, etc... that's not a happy ending.