I’ve been threatening this post for forever, so I may as well go ahead and write it, especially since I’ve had time to calm down a little bit and so the word “motherfucker” will probably not appear in this post 200 times, which it certainly would have had I written this the day after the show aired like I originally intended to.

Let’s start, though, by talking about why I was still watching the goddamn thing.  I’m 38 years old, which puts me a year or two older than most of the characters and probably right around Barney’s age.  My wife got me into watching it early in our relationship, when the show was still in is infancy.  Lily and Marshall got married in 2007; Bek and I got married in 2008.  Our son was born in August of 2011; theirs in May of 2012, which means their TV pregnancy happened right after my wife’s real one.  In some significant ways these characters’ lives have paralleled our own.  It tends to create a bit of investment in a show.   There has only been one other program– and that’s in my entire life– that I jumped into as early as I did on this one and stuck with through to the end: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, interestingly also starring Alyson Hannigan.  Walking Dead might eventually count.  That’s gonna be about it.

This sense of loyalty is probably the only reason I managed to stick it out through this season, which I have more or less hated from the beginning.  For those of you who don’t watch the show, the entire final season took place during, oh, maybe the week or so leading up to Barney and Robin’s wedding.  Every damn episode.  I swear there were episodes that took longer to air than the events they described took to happen, which meant that they dragged out a wedding that they started teasing two seasons ago for, literally, months.   The only thing that kept me going was the occasional glimpses that they gave us of Ted and The Mother’s future together; we saw him propose to her before we actually saw them meet, for example.  Cristin Milioti was amazing as The Mother, and the way they doled out “…and that’s how <character> met your mother” moments throughout the season was great.

And then the finale came along and blew it all straight to hell.

Let’s do this with bullet points:

• They spent the whole season going practically minute by fucking minute up to Barney and Robin’s wedding, and they were setting scenes at that wedding as early as Season 7.  Their fucking marriage lasted twenty fucking minutes of screen time.  Fuck you, show.  (At this point I realize that getting through this without tons of swearing is still going to be impossible.)  And for those of you who are going to go the “But marriages break up! It’s realistic!” route: fuck you.  The show was set in fucking New York City and had like three black characters with speaking roles in nine years, one of whom was another’s father and none of whom managed to show up in more than fifteen out of over two hundred episodes.  Fuck “realistic.”  Three fucking seasons put into this goddamn wedding and it lasted twenty minutes.  Fuck you.
• They killed the mother off.  Here’s the thing, guys: you could have gotten away with this.  There have been hints since the beginning of the show and there was a moment two or three episodes before the finale where “she’s dead” was basically the only sane conclusion to draw.  But they killed her off as a fucking afterthought.  We don’t see Ted having to mourn her; we don’t see him and his kids come through that.  It’s just “Oh, right, she died, remember?” and there’s not a trace of sadness from any of them about it. Oh, that was six years ago.  Mom?  We hardly even remember that bitch.
• And the worst thing of all:  We’ve just had the perfectly-realized “Ted meets the mother” moment that we’ve been waiting to see for nine. fucking. years.  And the kids tell Ted that, well obviously this whole story was about you wanting to go back to fucking “Aunt Robin,” and Mom’s been dead for six years anyway (fuck that, mom had been dead for five minutes) and, ah, fuckit, go screw Aunt Robin; we’re good.  Fuck that.  Fuck that so fucking hard I can’t even stand it.  How the fuck did the actors not riot at this bullshit?    They recorded the ending nine years ago?  Who the fuck cares?  It sucks, shoot another one.  I don’t give a fuck if the kids are older now.  Put ’em in the same fucking outfits and use the same “make people look younger” bullshit tricks you’ve been using for nine fucking years.  No one will fucking care.
• No, really, this “six years” thing is utter bullshit.  They had less than five minutes of screen time between “this character you’ve fallen in love with over the last season and have been waiting for for nine years is dead of, well, something, we didn’t bother coming up with any details” and “It’s aaight, Dad, go fuck this other ho.”    Fucking asshole show.
• Robin, meanwhile, has apparently had no fucking changes in her life whatsoever since divorcing Barney.  Despite the show repeatedly showing us that she’s a big jet-setting anchor now, she apparently lives in the same goddamned apartment she did at the beginning of the series and once again has– again, despite being out of town all the fucking time, so often that she had to divorce her husband and no longer sees any of her friends– seven or eight dogs.  Any of you fuckers remember the dogs?  Ted’s allergic.  They made a huge plot point early in the series about Robin having to get rid of her dogs for Ted.  But, hell, I guess she’ll just do that shit again because this fucker’s outside her window waving around a fucking blue french horn again.  Robin’s single, obviously; there’s no chance that she developed her own fucking life after leaving the McLaren’s crew behind, none at all.
• And, worse?  Ted and Robin haven’t been a thing for years, and the show has gone to pains repeatedly to show us that Ted and Robin were not and never are going to be a good couple.  Not to mention spending the last three seasons leading up to her marrying someone else and putting Ted together with the woman who was supposed to be the love of his life.  But nah, fuck all that, we filmed five minutes of footage nine fucking years ago so everything in between now and then has to have the reset button hit on it.  Be happy!  These characters who are terrible for each other are together again!  Until 2015, when “How I Divorced Your Stepmother” starts airing because, oh, yeah, right, Robin and Ted want completely different things from their lives and always have.  And Robin and Ted apparently haven’t fucking seen each other in six years and guess what, motherfuckers, people change.  Unless the writers decide they can’t.

Yeah, I’m still mad.  Fuck this show. Fuck it, fuck it, fuck it.  Assholes.