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If you choose to continue, be warned
That you are missing crucial elements
Of I Am Not's design.

~The correct way for How I Met Your Mother to end

Monday, October 19, 2009

The correct way for How I Met Your Mother to end

I mentioned earlier that I've been watching How I Met Your Mother. Very good show. I started watching around Thursday or so. I've only watched the first two seasons so far, so this opinion may change, but I'm convinced that there's only one correct way for the show to end.

I'm speaking, of course, about the question of how Ted meets the kids' mother. (If that means nothing to you, then you aren't watching the show and won't be interested in this post.) Some people say it should happen only at the very end, some people say it should happen some time in the last season, some people say it should happen long before the end and there should be more story after that, some people say it should never happen at all. I'm with the people who say that he should only meet her at the very end. But I'm going to be more specific, and say he can't meet her until the last minute of the series.

The final episode needs to bring back discarded plot points and characters from every single episode. The plot needs to be so outrageous that it lets the random details of continuity throw the characters to places no viewer could ever have expected, and which only make any kind of sense because of the many years of episodes building up to that moment. In the last minute, as they're knee-deep in the chaos of all their continuity crashing around them, Ted meets a girl we've never seen before who just so happens to be in that place at that time. And they either have the most bland meeting you can imagine, or an actively hostile one. (I'm partial to the idea of them meeting by her slapping him in the face.)

"And that's how I met your mother!" It cuts back to the couch, with the "kids" now adults because this story has taken so ridiculously long. (The boy now has a long beard.) For the first time in the series the two of them are on the edge of their seat waiting to hear what happens next. They beg to be told how their parents fell in love from that bizarre beginning. "Well, that's a long story. It all began with a [insert crazy non sequitur here]..."

..and credits.