How I Would Have Ended How I Met Your Mother: A work of depressed fan fiction

It's not every day I write fan fiction. Then again, I never considered myself that sort of fan, especially of a CBS sitcom.

Like twenty-some million other Americans, I spent an hour Monday night completing the nearly 100 hours invested into How I Met Your Mother, the high-concept sitcom in which a father, in the future, narrates the story, in the present, of how he met the mother of his two children.

Of course, as we now know, that premise was a trick, and the show was — surprise — about the father's infatuation with his best friend, Robin, the woman he'd met in the first episode, but explicitly said was not the titular mother, and implicitly said was not the light at the end of the tunnel.

For years, the creators of the show also went the out of their way to verify Ted's statements in interviews and panels in the real world. In the words of a talking baby dinosaur, Robin was not the momma.

Me? I did not like the ending. I saw it coming, mostly because it made plenty of sense on a blunt, technical level. Though this isn't a review. If that's what you'd like, read this powerful takedown by NPR's Linda Holmes. There are many others critiques like this one. I think many people discovered how much they'd loved How I Met Your Mother in how much they hated How I Met Your Mother's finale.

No, this is shallow fan fiction. This is How I Would Have Concluded How I Met Your Mother. It's a not a slam piece. It's not a pout fest. It's most certainly not instructions for the show's creators, who are smart and thoughtful writers. A sour episode — or even season — doesn't undercut the great work that went into the show, especially those early seasons.

It's fan fiction. Shallow, silly fan fiction written by someone who can't even imagine the pressures and complexities of writing and finishing one of the most successful sitcoms of the generation.

So, concluding HIMYM, for me, is like a thought exercise. And the previous nine seasons of incomplete conflicts, in-jokes and character arcs are like a puzzle, a set of rules that need to be obeyed. Or, you could say it's like a game, because you're on a gaming website, and someone's bound to ask what this has to do with games because someone always asks.

Here's what we know about the puzzle: at it's core, the show was about Ted and Robin's relationship, or absence of. The finale needed to neatly and quickly put a nail in that coffin, cast that coffin in cement and sink that coffin into the deepest, darkest rift in the bottom of the ocean.

Ironically, the show was not about Ted and the mother, barring the title. A final episode entirely dedicated to the mother and Ted's relationship would raise an obvious question for Ted's children: why'd you spend nearly 100 hours telling us about Aunt Robin?

Okay, let's try to fix those two major issues.

I liked that the show tried to conclude Robin and Ted's relationship in the penultimate episode. The hills and valleys of their relationship requires it's own wiki, but in short, Robin had lost a piece of jewelry, while Ted had spent a great deal of time and money finding it. Robin wanted to receive the jewelry on her wedding day from Barney, her fiancee. Ted knew this, gave the jewelry to Barney who gave it to Robin. But later, Robin later called Ted, privately, as the person who'd actually found the lost charm. Robin wonders, out loud, if she was meant for Ted all along.

That's twisted, but it's fine. Here's where my story takes a left into fan fiction.

Ted, hearing Robin say this, realizes he's a monster. For nine years, he's obsessed over this same woman, a couple of those years while she was dating his best friend. He's nearly ruined his life, her life and Barney's life multiple times with his obsessive envy and inexplicable infatuation, despite concluding many times that he and Robin would in no uncertain terms be terrible for each other. And so, he finally admits as much to Robin.

Ted then leaves the hotel before Robin and Barney's wedding, because he's overwhelmingly aware of his colossal, long-term creep factor.

But, at the train station he runs into a patient stranger, and being Ted, regales her with presumably the entire 100-hour story. This part isn't so unlike the finale. But as Ted finishes the story, he vows that after nine-years he done with love, romance and most of all supernatural signs.

And that's when the girl with the yellow umbrella gets off the train.

The stranger notices Ted is gobsmacked, and recommends he behave like a young man, and waste no time pursuing such a beautiful woman. Ted says he can't, that he gave up on signs, that they'd failed him for nearly a decade. The stranger laughs. For a decade, Ted ignored signs. He'd been so obsessed with Robin that he'd never truly opened himself to looking for the right woman. He'd actually been missing every sign that had come before him.

We see a flashback of all the times Ted should have met the mother, every scene with the yellow umbrella, the mother's roommates apartment, the economics classroom. He could have met her, we learn, but he wasn't ready for her. Now, with his mind finally free of Robin, he's given one last opportunity, one last sign.

And Ted takes it. He introduces himself to the mother, they have a meet-cute, and she invites him to a wedding; she's playing bass in the band. They arrive at Barney and Robin's wedding together, everyone's confused but happy how Ted nearly missed the wedding, only to arrive with the bassist they'd all separately met. They call it fate.

The mother catches the bouquet, we get a nice finale in which Ted and the mother grow old together — all thanks to Aunt Robin and Uncle Barney. I'd never met your mother if I'd never let Robin go, Ted tells the kids. And so How I Met Your Mother is a story about what so many of us experience in our twenties. We overcome that first, crippling lost love. But we also fine something better, truer. With experience on our side, we know what we're looking for when it's standing right in front of us.

As for the Robin and Barney stuff, personally, I think they break up, and they live fulfilling lives being who they are. There's nothing wrong with a woman who dedicates her life to a fulfilling career or a man who remains a bachelor. We don't need Robin feeling lonely or Barney finding peace in the eyes of a newborn, fulfilling stereotypical ideas of adulthood.

And most of all, we don't need the mother inexplicably dying. It's a comedy, not the Sopranos. And if it were the Sopranos, it'd spend more than a quarter of the episode grieving the death of the titular character.

Anyway, that's my fan fiction. It's silly and frivolous, but I thought I'd share it because I can't stop thinking about this show and the finale and what it means to have lived in New York for a decade, going through my twenties in the city alongside a show about people going through their twenties in the city.

Now I'll get back to doing what I do best: talking about Goat Simulators.