How I Met Your Mother: “End of the Aisle”

Regardless of your feelings towards how How I Met Your Mother has treated the relationship between Ted and Robin over the course of the series run, particularly in more recent seasons and with Ted’s lingering feelings towards Robin, “End of the Aisle”’s treatment of where the writers had taken that relationship felt right. It felt true to the developments and character arcs of both of these characters and it put a necessary and touching button on the relationship. So much of the show’s run had sapped the vitality out of this relationship and Ted’s undying feelings only served to make it all the more unbearable, but this is what we got and it was tremendously satisfying. 

Of course Robin would see through Ted’s gambit, and, in that moment, sticking with this direction for these two characters over the show’s run paid off. The scene between them played off the show's history with the kind of emotional honesty I cherished from this show at its peak. This episode is filled with plenty of call-backs and a few too many feel like call-backs for their own sakes, but that worked here, in this instance, and it worked because it wasn’t mere fan service but where this story needed to go. 

As Older Ted tells us that he’s heard what he has long died to hear, that Robin loves him, and that hearing it for real snaps him to attention, it was the culmination of the story this show has been telling about Ted and Robin. You may not have liked the turns it took, and I certainly got fed up with it, but in this moment I could almost forgive the series for its shortcomings. 

This was far from a perfect episode. The answer of the strangely orchestrated mystery of why Robin asked for Ted to come and see her on her wedding day was built up far too much prior to this episode for the payoff here to really work. And too much time here is spent marking time until the finale when the real answers were looking for, regarding Ted and the mother, are dealt with (including the potential that the mother is dead in the future – which I dislike as an narrative possibility, especially if Robin is the kid’s step-mother, as it feels like slight cheat) and the episode feels a bit flabby, with jokes and moments stretching out longer than they ought to, particularly with Marshall and Lily and the wedding vow gags. 

But as a penultimate episode of a series that has been on for nine years, this worked very well. It released tensions between Ted and Robin, and Robin and Barney that were necessary, and it did it in very acute, relieving and pleasing ways. 

HIMYM may have had it rough for a while, not least of which during this final season, but when it has its sights on its characters and what they need going forward versus what we as an audience supposedly want (which Carter and Bays seem to have lost a grip on at some point, and that was coupled with typical sitcom aging), well, it can still hit a sweet spot.