How I Met Your Mother: 10 Simple Fixes That Would Have Saved The Ending

10. Spread It Out Over The Season

"One episode takes place during one slap! The entire season takes place over the wedding weekend! How cool would that be?"

Surely some viewers echoed the creators' excitement over these ideas. And yes, Slapsgiving 3: Slappointment In Slapmarra was deliriously entertaining, as was the all-rhyming episode Bedtime Stories. However, when you have a finale that encapsulates over fifteen years, why don't you give the emotional beats time to breathe a bit? The finale is really a highlights reel of sorts for these characters viewers have come to love and care deeply about. Perhaps the worst offence remains Ted's apparent lack of grief over his dead wife, the love of his life, as the show quickly moves into the awful final minutes. Meanwhile, rumours of a funeral scene for the Mother have been floated around the Internet, but the creators say it was cut for time. Had the season been more evenly spaced out, this scene could have easily stayed, and the ending's emotional beats would have landed significantly better. How I Met Your Mother always played fast and loose with time, switching between past and present for callbacks and inside jokes quite frequently, but the show wasted this valuable resource in the ninth season. Kill the time-fillers and gimmick episodes; broadcast an ending that is worthy of the show that preceded it. The major events (the divorce, Tracy's death, Ted moving on, Marshall's career, etc.) should have been spread over the last five episodes instead of just the last hour, allowing both the viewers and the characters to fully digest the huge changes.