HitFix

‘How I Met Your Mother’ DVD will include an alternate ending

by: Uproxx authors

Did you hate the ending for “How I Met Your Mother”?

Are you willing to pay a large sum of money to get an ending you might like more?

If so… You're in luck!

Late Friday (April 4) afternoon, just days after a series finale which was, let's just say “contentious,” Deadline.com broke the news that an alternate “How I Met Your Mother” ending might appear on complete series DVD, series co-creator Carter Bays took to Twitter to explain and confirm.

“How was everybody's week?” Bays started, ending a post-finale bout of Twitter-silence.

[I've always wanted to write a story that included embedded tweets, so let's try this out! And obviously stop reading if you haven't watched the darned “How I Met Your Mother” finale.]

Bays continued:

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So what, pray tell, would this mean?

Well… Who knows? Last week, there was briefly a viral video that edited the ending so that rather than all that downer stuff with the Mother dying never happened, we saw the umbrella covered Mother-Meeting, Old Man Ted told his kids that's how he met their mother and we went back to Ted & Mom happily avoiding rain for all eternity. Naturally, that video got pulled because of pesky copyright laws. 

Do we assume that the ending Bays refers to is something vaguely comparable to that? 

If you weren't a fan of the ending, is that something that would make you happy? Or at least make you happier? Let's say that that ending, which had people claiming the Internet had “fixed” the finale, is almost exactly what appears on the DVD, would you consider the finale a success? 

Would you be able and willing to just ignore the cryptic hints about The Mother's demise that had a big chunk of the show's audience just taking her death as a foregone conclusion? I mean, then that whole conversations about mothers not going to their daughters' weddings would be meaningless, but… whatever!

Would you be OK with the fact that, with that happier ending, Robin actually doesn't get an ending at all? Does the finale become progressive because Robin just chooses career over romance and family and that's OK? Or does it become sad and miserable because Robin's success scared Barney away, he found love with an infant and she's just sitting at home waiting for somebody with a blue horn, somebody who will never come?

Would that ending mean that this whole nine-season run really *was* just a boring long story that Ted told his Future Children while The Mother was off in the kitchen making nachos or something?

Is there a different version of an alternate ending that you think you'd want to see? Keep in mind that as Bays tweets, there's no additional scripted material. It's just a different edit of the show as you saw it. 

My own opinion here is totally irrelevant. Y'all know my feelings on both the finale and on the last few seasons. Whatever my negative feelings might be, my major positive takeaway has always been that Bays & Thomas got to give the series the ending they wanted to give it. This was their thing and I'm free to dislike it, but on an “artistic integrity” level, I can always respect somebody laying down an unpopular ending and standing by it and not standing by it in a “but we love the other version too.” Come on, guys. If that's your ending, THAT'S YOUR ENDING. I don't want to know there were alternate endings, because the one thing the “HIMYM” ending wasn't was wishy-washy. It was “Yo. The Mother died. Because love ends. But Aunt Robin is hot, too. So love begins again. Love is a flat circle. Like a horn.” After nine seasons of a destination-driven show, the creator's destination is the destination and that's especially true if it turns out that this is an ending that's only seeing the light of day because of online uproar about the finale. This wasn't Choose Your Own Adventure or “Clue,” darnit. 

Of course, while Deadline calls the alternate ending “happy,” Bays does not. So it's possible that it's the exact same ending that viewers saw, only set to “Yakety Sax.” That wouldn't necessarily be happy. Just happier.

And because I loved embedding tweets in a story, I'm giving myself the last word:

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What do y'all think?

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