An all around odd, slightly awkward episode, but I still enjoyed it I guess. Whatever.

Liked the beginning and ending of the finale, the middle was a little too clunky. But I thought it was a great ending.

Just awful, the mother didn't even fucking matter.

I bet Joey liked it.

Stolen from Twitter:

How I used your mother to get the children aunt robin couldn't have.

It's like there's one ending, above all other endings, that would turn your show into the most egregious act of self-parody in the last decade. It's so obvious. And they do it anyway. Shark, jump, etc. It's really sort of astounding.

That was impressively bad.

I'm with you.

How, exactly, did Ted "use" the mother? (phrasing, I know). He loved her from the moment they met, through her debilitating illness, even years past the day she died. He loved the mother so much that he felt the need to recount his whole history with Robin, bad parts and all, to his children to help himself rationalize his desire to move on six years after her death. The entire show was Ted telling himself it's OK to try and love someone else. It's a misconception that he was in love with Robin the whole time. Nothing in the story implies that. We are just so programmed to believe that in TV-comedy world it's once in love, forever in love, but that's not life and not what they were going for here. They wanted to show the good, bad, and beautiful moments that build our lives don't last forever but there is always hope, which was the underlying mindset of the Ted character from day one. The mother's previous fiance had died and she moved on and found happiness, why can't Ted? Perhaps the show should have been called "Ted Mosby's Eternal Optimism About Love".

Good:
1.) The mother remembering him from the Econ class, really the whole "first conversation" scene.
2.) They didn't dwell on her death
3.) Barney holding his daughter for the first time (for all you non-dad's, that was exactly what it's like)
4.) "Fudge supreme"
5.) The breakdown of the friendships, again very real

Bad:
1.) The blue french horn thing was beat to death already. I get it, it had to be a grand gesture on par with finding the locket to show they can start again, but if that's what they had in mind they should have let us forget about it for the last few seasons.

you called it.

Aw, I liked it.

I'll never understand why this is the sitcom RM choose to embrace.

All of this, 100% - particularly 3 and 5.

The very end was kind of stilted but, for a scene partly filmed years ago, it was probably as good as it could've been.

All in all, I enjoyed that way more than I expected. Good, solid end-off to a frequently inconsistent but sweet little show.

I wish they had spent half this season on future stuff like much of the last episode had and not on the wedding.

Ted didn't use the mother, the writers used the mother. She wasn't a character, she was a plot device to get to Robin.

I actually agree with b_i's "good" column. Given the decision they made for the direction, I think they did an OK job with it. I just think it was a truly awful decision to make in the first place.

The show would've been more poignant if it just ended with the train stop scene. There was already enough evidence to support the theory that the mother dies. Let the viewers continue to speculate on the death and that maybe somewhere down the road Robin and Ted meet up again.