How I Met Your Mother has been one of my favorite shows for years. This final season, though... it's been a mixed bag. It's had some great moments, but on the whole it's just not what I expected and hoped for. A lot of long-running sitcoms get criticized for not quitting while they were ahead, but HIMYM has taken that to a new extreme, dragging out one weekend to last an entire season.
One bit of good news is that we're less than two months from the long-awaited series finale.
Another is that last week's episode, the 200th, was a great one. That episode, combined with some great moments that stand out from the filler of this wedding weekend that won't end, give me confidence that the end of the series will be everything we're hoping for... even if the road to get there hasn't been.
*** Mild Spoilers Ahead ***
The best parts of this season have been those featuring Cristin Milioti as the mother. I absolutely LOVED her introduction at the end of last season. It made me so excited for this final run, especially as I heard the creators discussing how we were going to get to know her this season. We already want Ted to meet her... but we have to want her to meet Ted too.
Unfortunately, we haven't gotten as much of that as I was expecting. I've liked the glimpses that we have seen of her, either over this weekend or in flashback. (The flash-forwards to her and Ted are cute, I guess, but I'm just not as interested in THEM as I am in HER.) I like seeing how she meets each member of the group, and "Bass Player Wanted," the last episode before the holiday break, was probably my favorite of the season.
Until now.
Last week's episode was perfect. It's absolutely the best episode this season, and will probably go down as one of my favorites of the whole series. There are so many callbacks to little things we've learned about the mother up until now, but it's all given context. I feel like we finally got to know her and where she's coming from.
Even if we still don't know her name.
