5 Reasons How I Met Your Mother Finale Is As Bad As You Remember (And 3 Reasons It Isn't)

For nine years, as many seasons and 208 episodes, audiences watched eagerly as Ted Mosby slowly revealed to his kids how he met their mother. Theories were abound throughout the show's run, and with every twist of the narrative came more anticipation for the final reveal.

It was a shame to many, then, when the two-part season finale "Last Forever" finally hit their screens, promising an epic and hopefully satisfying ending but hitting many of the wrong notes.

How I Met Your Mother's finale has since gone down in TV history as one of the worst show endings of all time. Any hope fans had for a happy conclusion that tied-up loose ends and made the last two hundred episodes worth it were sorely disappointed, and of course a lot of the finale's harshest critics have some good points about why it failed.

But is all as bad as we've been led to believe? It has been over six years since Last Forever aired, and there is still much Internet discussion about whether or the not it was a true failure as many critics and fans believed at the time.

For the following list, let's take a look at all the things the finale did wrong, and all the things that it did right. And of course, major spoilers follow. Let's dig in.

One of the best aspects of How I Met Your Mother was its narrative structure. Unlike the vast majority of sitcoms at the time, this was a show that proved right out the gate to have no issues playing with time and mixing up the usual, linear sitcom formula.

Unfortunately, there were moments when this narrative approach hit come snags, and never was that more obvious than in the finale.

Over the course of two episodes (40 minutes in total), Future Ted skips over eleven years worth of his and the Mother's story. To put it in context, everything leading up to the finale covered around nine years of Ted and the gang's lives.

Because of this rushed, forced-together approach, character development and major twists are revealed without build-up, and the whole thing ends up watching like showrunners Carter Bays and Craig Thomas just wanted to get things over with.

Amongst the confusion, Marshall and the Mother come out the worst, with the Mother hardly being a part of the story and Marshall's sudden career progression lacking the emotional gravitas that his story had in earlier seasons.

For a show concerned with meticulous detail and slow-burn storytelling, Last Forever just feels uncharacteristically lazy.