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control of your internet experience. “He's fallen in love
so many times now." “Not like this.
This is different.” Did the Mother kind of ruin
How I Met Your Mother, by being too wonderful? "Are you okay?" "No. But there's
nothing you can do." “Want a cookie?” “Yes.” For nine seasons
and over 200 episodes, How I Met Your Mother
teased its title character, a woman so incredible that she would
not only be Ted Mosby’s soulmate, she would justify how long it took
to tell the story of how they met. And somehow, the show succeeded
in rising to this challenge: Tracy, played by Cristin Milioti,
is a perfect match for Ted, and kind of perfect just in general. “Who is this person?” “The bass player from the wedding band.” “Oh, yeah, she's great.”
“Love her!” But, as we learn in the finale, the
show’s framing is a red herring, because this series isn’t
actually about Tracy, the Mother of Ted’s kids who we
learn passed away six years before Ted sat down to tell his kids
this long-and-winding story. It’s about Ted’s decades-long crush
on Robin; basically his whole narration turns out to be a long justification
of his desire to try again with her. “This is a story about how you’re
totally in love with Aunt Robin.” This pivot turns Tracy into a
“stepping stone” love interest, just a plot device along
the way to the main event. Usually, the character relegated
to the “Stepping stone” or “Runner-Up” Love Interest role
is not deeply beloved by fans. But Tracy is almost an angel–
incredibly charming, loving, and sweet right up to her
tragic and untimely death. And How I Met Your Mother’s final
season inconveniently made Tracy —a red herring character who gives
birth to Ted’s kids and then dies— a much better match for
him than Robin ever was. “But I can't believe you let
Ted hang his jousting lance from the Renaissance Faire
on your bedroom wall.” “Yeah. That's Ted's.” So if the show wanted us to forget
this gem of a person so quickly, they made her too lovable. Moreover, by relegating Tracy
to the margins after all the reasons it telegraphed she was the soulmate-love
Ted had been resolutely holding out for, How I Met Your Mother undercut
the romantic ideals at its core. Here’s our Take on why How I Met
Your Mother betrayed itself and underestimated its audience
by treating the Mother as disposable. “You made us sit down and listen to
this story about how you met Mom. Yet Mom's hardly in the story.” If you’re new here, be sure to
subscribe and click the bell to get notified about all our new videos. Though How I Met Your Mother
included several other stories, like Barney’s slow maturation,
Marshall and Lily’s evolving marriage, and Robin’s commitment to her career,
Ted’s romantic life was always the center of the show and
the narrative’s driving force. “Nothing hotter than a guy planning
out his own imaginary wedding, huh?” Ted is like the extreme
Goldilocks of dating, and the show takes great pains to show
why each of his major love interests isn’t quite the match for him. His first serious partner
during the show, Victoria, is more of the idea of a girlfriend
than a real person, a solid partner who just isn’t the one—something
that her German fiance Klaus articulates about her, too, in the episode
when he and Victoria both run out on their planned wedding to each other. “There is a word in German,
lebenslangerschicksalsschatz. And the closest translation would
be ‘lifelong treasure of destiny.’ she is not my
lebenslangerschicksalsschatz.” Stella doesn’t want to move
to New York, and ultimately turns out to be already emotionally
committed to her ex-boyfriend Tony, “And that kids, was the perfect
ending to a perfect love story. It just wasn’t mine.” while Zoey’s commitment to
preserving old architecture clashes with Ted’s professional dreams,
in a mirror of how Robin won’t ignore her career aspirations for
the domestic life Ted wants. With both women, the issue
isn’t simply incompatibility; it’s that there are certain things
he’s unwilling to compromise on in his search for love. “New York is never finished,
Theodore. Do not miss your turn.” “The Arcadian has to go, doesn't it?” And as much as Ted thinks
he’s willing to go to any length, we see this in shorter love plots,
too—Ted’s not only quite specific and picky about what
he wants from a partner, but also pretty unwilling to sacrifice
or change much about himself or his life. While Ted never fully accepts it over
the course of the series, Robin, too, doesn’t fit his criteria he’s unwilling to
compromise on for the love-of-his life, in the most major way of all:
she doesn’t want to have kids or the kind of traditional
family life that Ted does. “I don’t know where I’m
going to be in five years, and I don’t want to know. I
want my life to be an adventure.” By contrast, Tracy really
is the perfect fit for Ted. She’s deeply like him in her
personality, outlook and life vision. All of her tics and strange habits
are things Ted finds adorable, as we learn when he briefly
dates her roommate Cindy. “she does these bizarre paintings
of robots playing sports.” “That sounded awesome. Your mother’s
robot volleyball watercolor is hanging up in the den as we speak.” More centrally, Tracy is
the right partner for Ted because she has a similarly quaint
and idealistic view of romantic love “I guess I’m old-fashioned. I believe
that each of us only gets one.” —which is really Ted’s defining trait. In the one episode that actually
shows us Tracy’s backstory, we learn that her journey has
been a mirror image of Ted’s: Tracy’s boyfriend Max dies unexpectedly
on her 21st birthday, and in a reversal of Ted’s incessant dating and poor
choices, Tracy refuses to open herself up to the possibility of
another romance for several years. “I have been holding myself
back from falling in love again” “But you’re not here anymore.” Okay, so How I Met Your
Mother didn’t necessarily make the right choice in trying
to make us get over Tracy, but when it comes to
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plus one additional month for free. It’s risk free with Nord’s 30-day
money-back guarantee. The technique of talking
so much about the mother throughout the series worked to
pique our interest in this character who’d by the end become
a near-mythical figure. It’s a technique we’ve seen in
iconic stories like Apocalypse Now or Saving Private Ryan, where
a character who’s offscreen for the early action is used
as a Macguffin for the plot, but all the focus on
the idea of this person can get us really hyped
up to finally meet them. Often this character ends up
having only a brief role to play, or they might turn out
to be fairly mundane. But even though How I Met Your Mother
creates incredibly high expectations for The Mother, against
all odds, she meets them. After teasing the idea of her so long, the final season gradually lets us get
to know her in small, tantalizing doses. Scenes of her meeting
all the other characters concisely flesh out
a special person who’s quirky, funny,
kind and sweetly silly. “You just met me. I
could be a serial killer.” “I like to believe in people. Plus, what are the chances
that we're both serial killers?” Most of what we do learn about
and see of Tracy suggests that we really would have enjoyed
getting to know her better, for longer. She knows about all of the
obscure, obnoxious trivia Ted does “I still can’t believe he dragged
me to the childhood home of some stupid bucklesmith
no one’s ever even heard of.” “Yeah, who cares about
Florian Van Otterloop.” “I never told you his name.” She seems to put up with Ted
no matter how annoying he gets. She's even inadvertently responsible
for Barney and Robin getting together for real after a lovelorn
Barney tries to hit on her. “It’s going to be okay.
You’re a good guy. You will get through this.” Most importantly, Ted’s
and Tracy’s connection is the conclusion that makes sense
for his story and his romantic ideals. In the Season eight premiere when Klaus
describes the idea of destined soulmates and why Victoria isn’t that
magic person (for him or Ted): “She is my Beinahelei-
denschaftsgegenstand "the thing that is almost the thing
that you want... but it's not quite." Klaus’ speech about how
you feel that soulmate love coursing through your body is
accompanied by significant visuals: of Lily and Marshall’s
love for their baby, and Robin getting emotional over pictures of
her with Barney (who’s then with Quinn but staring out the car window,
perhaps thinking of Robin). When Klaus asks if Ted’s felt this
yet, the answer is evidently no “Have you ever felt this
way about someone?” “Yeah, I think so.” “If you have to think about
it, you have not felt it.” —which we have to
take to mean that neither Victoria nor
Robin is really this for Ted. The sequence then gives
way to a foreshadowing of Ted meeting the Mother
at this train station, “Unfortunately, the ‘when’ of it
was still a little ways down the road.” clearly making the point that The Mother
is Ted’s “Lebenslangerschicksalsschat.” And in the scene
when they at last meet, we see them feeling
this immediate connection “Funny how sometimes
you just find things.” Significantly, in the
conversation with Klaus, Ted raises the question of whether
people can become or grow into soulmates, “maybe as the years go by, she'll get
Lebenslangerschicksalsschatz-ier.” but Klaus emphatically rejects this, declaring that the feeling
is immediate and innate. “Lebenslangerschicksalsschatz is
not something that develops over time. It is something that
happens instantaneously.” And this is very much in keeping with
How I Met Your Mother’s mystical, classically romantic view of love. Whereas numerous characters
on other sitcoms—like Friends’ Monica and Chandler—support the
argument for creating one’s soulmate “I don’t think that you & I were
destined to end up together. What I do believe is
that we fell in love and that we work
hard for our relationship." How I Met Your
Mother and especially Ted are all about the supernatural
magic of love and having the stamina
to keep believing in romantic
fate no matter how long it takes. The challenge, in this world
view, isn’t putting in boring, tough relationship work like it might
be for a Monica-and-Chandler, but spiritually persevering—waiting
for the real thing to finally show up, without letting your
doubts get the better of you, and without settling for a
lesser love that’s not-quite-right. “And you're absolutely sure
you'll find that someday?” “Of course. Everyone
does eventually.” “You just never know when or where.” Robin (in contrast to Ted’s sparks-
flying-right-away meeting scene with Tracy) may inspire
instant feelings in Ted, but she herself is put off when he
comes on too strong in the pilot. She’s the person who’s
around Ted for many years and whom you could argue
“grows into” his soulmate by being there long enough—but
this is not the philosophy of the show. The philosophy is that love shows
up and fully overwhelms you— and that, after a very long wait,
is the magic that Tracy represents. Oddly, after telling us all
this repeatedly, though, How I Met Your Mother
has other plans— because it had already
made up its mind to make Ted’s relationship
with Robin the destination. When How I Met Your
Mother suddenly reveals its last-minute endgame, that
Ted really winds up with Robin, just like that The Mother is
transformed into an intermission or abstraction, even a distraction. Though Ted meeting
Tracy does feel special, the series begins
with the dramatic, romantic meetcute
between Ted and Robin, “It was like something
from an old movie.” and it evidently always planned
to end with the couple as well. The showrunners secretly
filmed the concluding scene with Ted’s future children in 2006,
during production on the show’s second season (in order to avoid
the child actors aging too much before the series’ conclusion). Though it may have
made sense at the time, especially given how compelling
Ted and Robin were as a couple in the show’s
second season, the series ended almost
a decade later in 2014. The nature of television means
that How I Met Your Mother had to draw out Ted and Robin’s
relationship for that entire period, and therefore
make repeated, convincing arguments that
they weren’t right for each other, “We have an expiration date, don’t we?” only to ignore all of that evidence
at the end of the series. And by setting the ending
in stone so early, the show denied itself the freedom
to have its characters change in unexpected and exciting
ways along the journey (like for example, falling in love and
committing to a brand new person and not staying hung up
on another lead character in a way that’s not really
satisfying or believable). The beginning of the series
teases a bigger “picture,” which initially seems like it should
be about Ted’s future marriage, “I was just too close to the puzzle
to see the picture that was forming” but in reality Ted commits
to Robin in the pilot, and everything that follows
was (despite many diversions) just about Robin and the obstacles
to them finally being together. While initially, the main
thing separating them is Robin’s prioritizing
her career and not really desiring the family life Ted wants,
over time the biggest obstacle becomes Robin’s
relationship with Barney. “We both think the marriage
commitment thing’s a drag. We both want
something casual and fun. And we clearly get
along really well.” “Wow, that actually
did make a lot of sense.” Though Barney and
Robin weren’t pre-written into the script the same way
Ted and Robin seemed to be, their chemistry emerged organically
from near the beginning of the series— so as a result, it felt much
more satisfying and real. And though their relationship
doesn’t work out the first time, How I Met Your Mother spends
much of its final two seasons arguing for Barney and Robin,
with Barney’s elaborate, classic Stinson proposal, “prove your loyalty to Patrice
by burning The Playbook. And actually burn it. You
don’t need it anymore.” and moving through
all of the obstacles they encounter (both
external and internal) over a long, winding
wedding weekend that’s the focus of the
show’s entire last season. “I am always gonna be
honest with you cuz I love you.” Their partnership evolved
naturally from their interactions and has entailed a lot
of both characters working through their emotional
issues in a realistic way. In fact, the last major beats
of Ted and Robin’s relationship involve Ted telling
Robin to marry Barney. First, he tells her that
Barney is planning to marry Robin’s co-worker Patrice,
which is part of Barney’s plan to confirm that it’s okay
for him to marry Robin. “It means your
best bro in the world has let go of Robin and
has given you his blessing.” Then Ted talks Robin out
of ditching the wedding, which ironically is used to
“prove” that Ted is the one who actually “deserves”
to end up with her (even though his argument against
himself feels quite convincing) “I don’t love you like that anymore,
and you don’t love me. You love barney.” And after several
seasons of work to demonstrate Barney’s
determination to change and grow, the series concludes
by repudiating his arc and suddenly sending him
right back to square one. “That woman is half your age.
Haven’t you changed even a little?” “No. I haven’t.” Instead, the thing
that finally “actually” changes Barney is
the birth of his daughter with a woman who
goes entirely unnamed, buying into the absurd
“father of daughters” trope that suggests that the only
way for men to treat women as people is to be
involved in creating one. Though the finale attempts to have
it both ways by treating Barney and Robin’s marriage
as an “adult” failure, “This isn’t a failed marriage,
it’s a very successful marriage that happened to
only last three years.” this doesn’t fit into
the storybook terms of the rest of the show
(which may sometimes claim not to believe in fairytale
endings, but still returns to them again and again and again). A big part of the problem
here is structural. A mere one episode after
Robin and Barney tie the knot, the show flashes
forward to their divorce (thus skipping most
of their actual marriage). And even worse, it flashes
forwards at warp speed from Ted’s and Tracy’s happy
ending to Tracy’s death— the episode runtime between
their wedding and the scene of Tracy in her hospital
bed is a mere 17 seconds. Then, it’s not even five
minutes of screentime later that he’s declaring his love to
Robin with the blue french horn. Maybe six years have
passed for the characters when Ted’s kids give him
their weirdly-enthusiastic blessing to go for it with Robin, “Mom's been gone for
six years now. It's time.” but viewers barely got
time to catch their breath, let alone adjust to these
huge emotional shifts. And having these narrative-altering
beats happen in such limited screentime implicitly gives Ted’s and
Tracy’s romance less value and respect, belittling their
importance to the story— which is what leads to the
viewers feeling, on some level, that the Mother was done wrong. How I Met Your Mother
did such a good job of establishing Tracy
as a character that, even though she had only
recently been introduced, fans and critics felt “betrayed”
by how she was treated. Since the series ended,
fans have gravitated toward the show’s “official”
alternate ending, which scraps the Ted-and-Robin
story in favor of letting Tracy and Ted simply be married and happy. And there’s something about
that re-edit that does work better even purely from an
artistic standpoint— as the speed and screen-time
issues in the actual finale make the final blue-french-horn scene
feel almost artificially tacked on. Throughout the show’s run,
fans correctly theorized that The Mother had
actually been dead throughout Ted’s entire story. The How I Met Your Mother creators
described Tracy’s death to Milioti as being “lifelike,” and in
keeping with a history of loss, disappointment and lowered
expectations throughout the series— as seen in events like
Marshall losing his father, Robin’s discovering having biological
children isn’t an option for her, “it’s one thing not to want something
it’s another to be told you can’t have it.” Lily’s coming to terms with having
put her personal life priorities over her artistic dreams,
and the characters all making sacrifices and having
to give up on some of their dreams. “That’s life… you never end
up where you want to be. I’m not helping the environment.
Ted’s not a philosopher, Lily’s not a world-famous artist.” Yet in this case, the tragedy
of losing a spouse is suspiciously convenient to the fantasy
of letting Ted date Robin. Tracy’s primary character function
ends up being to serve as a bridge between Ted and Robin, even a
third wheel in their relationship. She’s someone who
can give Ted the children and domestic life he craves (which
wouldn’t be in Robin’s character for multiple reasons) but
then get out of the way and also give him the opportunity to
pursue his real love interest later on. The practice of “fridging”
a female character (having her hurt or killed to
motivate a male character’s story) usually happens in action,
thrillers or superhero stories, but Tracy is more or less the
romantic sitcom version of this, “What mother is gonna miss
her daughter’s wedding?” Her existence and her death
are used solely to motivate Ted, and to give him the having-it-all
happy ending of being with Robin and still having kids. The fact that she expires
tragically due to an unnamed illness is a deus ex machina, removing
any potential sense of wrongdoing or messy guilt that might
have resulted from Ted wanting to pursue Robin
if Tracy were still alive. He’s even spared the obstacle
of his children’s disapproval: In the finale, those kids
get the most dialogue they’ve had over the entire series,
in order to aggressively push him to go after Robin, “I just... just call her up on the
phone and ask her out on a date?” “Yes. Yes.” “And that... that's something
you guys would want?” “Yes! Yes!” What’s sad about this is
that Tracy’s whole love story (which culminated in Ted
becoming her husband and father to her kids) and even
her life are somewhat devalued, treated as a short
interlude in the real story. How I Met Your Mother sometimes
makes us aware of how each of us crafts narratives around ourselves—
notably, when Ted is so unsettled because, in Stella’s
and Tony’s love story, he’s not the romantic hero,
but the obstacle and villain, “This is a terrible movie! And
it got everything wrong!” Like any two people
who belong together, Tracy’s and Ted’s love narratives
seemed to be in sync, mirrors leading to each other. Ted claimed as much through his story’s
very framing (and the show’s title). But it was a false sell that
ultimately cheapened the meaning of the commitment
he made to her and their family. “In exactly 45 days from now,
you and I are gonna meet, and we're gonna fall in love
we're gonna have two kids.” How I Met Your Mother was
nostalgic even in its time, and its creators evidently
expected its viewers to want that gooey
final reunion of its Ross-and-Rachel-type
on-again-off-again central couple. But this assumption didn't
give viewers enough credit. The show’s fans understood
that people change, and the first person you set
your sights on isn’t necessarily the best person for
you to be with forever. Viewers went along with where
the story actually took them, and that was (in a real sense, or at
least it should have been) toward Tracy “Right from the moment
I met your mom I knew, I have to love this woman as much
as I can, for as long as I can, and I can never stop loving
her even for a second.” The series ends with images
of the cast from the first episode, showing how young they were
and giving us a concrete sense of the length and
weight of the narrative. Tracy is included as the
final member of the cast, but it’s a choice that rings hollow
given how quickly she was cast aside. Tracy—and the show—
deserved better. “You picked a real winner, Mosby.” “I did.” This is The Take on your favorite
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