Review: "How I Met Your Mother" Season Finale [Spoilers]

Maya Zach ’17/ Emertainment Monthly Staff
The wait is over, the mother (of all secrets) has been revealed! In an interesting twist, the viewers have the chance to see the mother before Ted does. Creators Carter Bays and Craig Thomas decided not to cast a famous star for the title character; rather they chose an actress who is relatively a newcomer, Cristin Milioti. She is most famous for her role on 30 Rock, where she played Abby, a blonde comic who pretended to be ditzy and used baby talk to get ahead.
Barney and Robin celebrate the completion of planning their wedding, but dinner is spoiled when a snobby couple steals their table (To match their haughty attitudes, the woman has the most pretentious name, and treats it as such—Krirsten). As a nod to the show’s second season finale, Robin sends her engagement ring in a glass of champagne to the couple’s table to try to break them up. Barney and Robin are incredibly proud that they ruined a relationship, but are even more thrilled when they realize that instead of breaking them up, they brought them closer together, the couple of seven years is finally getting married.
Lily is terrified that Judy, Marshall’s mother, will ruin their plans to move to Rome by convincing Marshall to stay behind. Marshall ensures that his mother does not cause this, however something else stops him. He receives a call congratulating him on becoming a judge. After many hilarious attempts to defer the offer or work from Italy fail, he decides to take the job. However, he doesn’t tell Lily, because it is definitely “face-to-face news.”
Ted decides to sell his completely furnished house and plans on moving to Chicago (a mix of his two favorite cities, New York City and Cleveland) the day after the wedding to build himself a new life. Of course the reason he is leaving is because he is still in love with Robin and can’t bear to watch her live her life with someone else. Lily spills that (in the fourth season) Robin ran off to Japan when she was in the same situation, when Ted was marrying Stella. It turns out that Ted was not the only who discovered the importance of the Robin’s “something old” locket. She re-hid it once she thought she lost her opportunity to marry Ted. Lily helps Ted uncover the locket, but she gives him some advice to go with it, “Be careful.” This one gesture could ruin her wedding, after all.

To end the season, we see glimmers of the mother. At first we just see her boots, the ones that Lily raves about. Then we see the yellow umbrella. And then the camera pans up and we finally see the face of the mother. She is at the train station, purchasing a ticket to Farhampton, the location of Barney and Robin’s wedding, where we know that she is performing.
This episode did an excellent job with continuity; it brought back jokes and memories from many of the previous seasons, which is always a great way to end a season. But what is more important is to leave the viewers with questions, a way to rope them back in next year. I don’t know about you guys, but I’m eager to find out how Lily takes the news about Marshall’s judgeship, if Ted gives Robin the locket, and we still have not seen Ted meet his future wife!
Though there were a few too many open storylines for my taste, this was a solid episode of How I Met Your Mother. This season has had quite a few weak episodes, the show has started to become repetitive and a lot of the humor has been overused (Most shows don’t make it to eight seasons for a reason!), so this episode was a very nice change of pace. Everything felt original (or was a cute throwback) except for Ted’s undying love for Robin, of course. An excellent way to end the season!