Life can be pretty complicated with its unexpected twists, turns, trials, and tribulations that reshape our grand plans. At the same time though, some aspects of life are really seemingly driven by fate. To borrow a popular quote, many folks out there sometimes have a "rendezvous with destiny." The series finale of How I Met Your Mother, easily one of the best TV comedies of the last decade, reflected these elements of our lives. In this way, the conclusion was both realistic and sentimental. On the one hand, the complications of life were aptly displayed in events such as Barney and Robin's ultimate divorce (a kind of experience millions of Americans are familiar with), Barney eventually becoming the father of a child - perhaps inevitable, though appropriate, after being a proactive womanizer, and the mother, whose name is revealed to have the same initials as Ted's, dying of a terminal illness, a kind of pain all too many people have experienced in their families. On the other hand, the sentimentality of the show was at its best in the finale. The scene in which Barney holds his new child in his hands and tells her he will love her forever is incredibly heartwarming and satisfactorily humanizes Neil Patrick Harris' self-aggrandizing yet ultimately affable character. The finish, though disappointing to some critics and viewers who thought Ted and the mother (Tracy McConnell) were perfect together, was emotionally charged as well as Ted finally really did end up with Robin after all. This scene demonstrated brilliantly how the oft used axiom "everything happens for a reason" holds some truth to it as some things were just meant to be.
For these reasons, though Seinfeld was obviously a superior series, the series finale of How I Met Your Mother was actually better than the 1998 series finale of another popular, nine-year network sitcom, Seinfeld -- an opinion that will likely not sit well with some of my readers. The finale of HIMYM was an appropriate and fitting finish to a colorful story that, as the kids pointed out in the end, was really all about how Ted loves Robin. It brought it all "full circle," as my friend George Dobbins noted on Facebook, all the way down to the blue horn being presented by Ted. Further, as aforementioned, the finale was both totally realistic, in the depiction of unanticipated events that reshuffle people's lives like unexpected pregnancies and divorce and serious sickness, while still asking us to believe in some predetermined fate, as demonstrated in Ted finally ending up with Robin, for instance. However, the Seinfeld finale was, on the flip side, quite unrealistic which is important since that show was ostensibly all about the quirks that befall people in their daily lives so if any shows ought to have a realistic finale, it was Seinfeld. Ending up in a jail cell was just a bizarre way to close, as many critics and viewers pointed out at the time, as it was not realistic and somewhat abrupt.
Nevertheless, there will be those who will criticize the HIMYM series finale as maddening because the mother died and Ted ended up going after Robin years later anyway thus making the mother even more of a minor character in this whole series than we initially thought. Further, many of us viewers probably didn't want to think it was possible for Ted to fall in love with anyone else as Tracy was seemingly the genuine love of his life and nobody could ever match that. The show proved us wrong though in testing a hypothesis that Vice President Joe Biden raised in a spring 2012 address to the families of fallen U.S. soldiers. In recounting the devastating loss of his own wife, the mother of his first three children, one of whom died with her in the car accident that killed them in 1972, Biden noted that he thought he been "to the top of the mountain" and would never come back because Neilia Hunter was seemingly the only woman he could ever love with all his heart. After five years though, he met Jill Jacobs, now known to most Americans as Dr. Biden, and was able to find love again because as he put it in the hypothesis he laid out to families of the deceased, "there will come a day when the thought of your husband or wife brings a smile to your lips before it brings a tear to your eye." In his memoir, Promises to Keep, Biden expands on this notion to demonstrate that your heart can find true love again while that smile can come to your lips when you think of the past -- almost the exact experience Ted had as he connected with Robin but still was able to happily recount to his kids how he met their mother.
No comments:
Post a Comment