Two important notes before I start. One, yes, I realize that I am discussing a random show I watched for the first time eleven years after it ended. Two, many spoilers ahead.
Even if you have never seen How I Met Your Mother, which I will henceforth be abbreviating as HIMYM for simplicity, you can probably guess that a show which lasted nine seasons isn’t really the story of two people meeting. HIMYM is the story of a man living his mid-twenties to mid-thirties in New York City. It’s about his friends and his girlfriends, and while Ted Mosby claims that all of the more episodic tales are all part of the bigger picture, the story could’ve been resolved with a decent amount of detail in, like, one episode.
I knew many of the basic details of HIMYM’s final episode before I started to watch the show, so I do have some unfair advantages. I knew Barney and Robin, around whose wedding the ninth season is centered, would get divorced. I knew Ted’s eventual wife, by the time the story was being told, was deceased. But to be fair, some of the most critical information of the series is learned on the very first episode. We know that Ted eventually has a daughter and a son. We know that Robin, the woman with whom Ted was immediately smitten in the first episode, would eventually become “Aunt Robin”, not the mother of the children. We know that Barney, Lily, Marshall, and Robin remain at least enough in Ted’s life that he can reference them as aunts and uncles and his children would understand it.
There is no mystery to the fact that eventually Ted would find a woman with whom to have children, but the reveal of who she is and what she would be like remains intact essentially until the waning moments of Season 8, when we see The Mother, revealed in the series finale to be named Tracy McConnell, purchasing a train ticket. Tracy is portrayed by Cristin Milioti, a relatively unknown actress who was probably best known for her Broadway work and a three-episode stint on The Sopranos but has since gone on to one of the more notable post-HIMYM careers among the cast (she portrayed Jordan Belfort’s first wife in The Wolf of Wall Street, a $400 million Martin Scorsese movie, during the final season; perhaps this was inevitable).
Tracy became an instantly beloved character; she was funny, charming, beautiful, and compassionate. Although Ted had a few seasons worth of questionable behavior, the audience still ultimately wanted him to be happy, and suddenly the absolute perfect woman for him was seemingly dropped from the sky.
The meet-cute between Ted and Tracy—the close call of Ted accidentally beginning his first class as a professor in an economics lecture hall in which Tracy was sitting, Ted briefly dating Tracy’s roommate and nearly meeting her, Ted’s closest friends being helped in a moment of existential crisis by Tracy before the two ever conversed—is objectively corny and improbable. But the defining episode, I would argue of the series but certainly of HIMYM’s final season, grounds Tracy. It turns her from Ted’s manic pixie dream girl into a three-dimensional character.
Season nine is, to be clear, not a perfect season of television—the episode Slapsgiving 3: Slappointment in Slapmarra is an astonishingly bad taste and not even particularly funny beyond its use of white actors to deploy Asian stereotypes, most notably. But it does have How Your Mother Met Me.
This episode is the one in the series in which Tracy is the main character. It essentially catches us up from the beginning of HIMYM to the weekend of the wedding, and we learn that on the night that Ted met Robin, Tracy experienced a life-altering tragedy—the death of her boyfriend Max. Without question, this is the defining moment of her life from 2005 through 2013, and she takes a subsequent hiatus from dating for several years. But even when she starts dating Louis, a decent guy but one who isn’t seemingly an amazing fit for her, it is clear that Tracy is still haunted by Max. When Louis proposes to her, she needs a moment to step outside and ask to the Heavens if she had permission to move on with her life.
Much of HIMYM is framed around Ted’s insistence on finding The One, a hypothetical perfect match. But as Tracy mentions in the series, she believes that she found and lost her The One by the end of her twenty-first birthday. That she was even willing to entertain the possibility of dating Ted required several strokes of luck, as she still had her doubts about dating even after her long-term relationship with Louis.
This sounds painfully obvious but it’s worth a reminder—Tracy McConnell is a fictional character portrayed by a real person, Cristin Milioti, who is still alive. While Tracy was “killed off” in the series finale at an age of no older than forty, this didn’t really happen.
I would not wish for a seemingly good person like Tracy to die young, but that is a thing that happens sometimes. HIMYM handled the subject of death better than most when it came to the passing of Marshall’s father Marvin—it hit like a lightning bolt (he died of a heart attack, whereas Tracy died of a long-term illness) and his healing process was slow. It took several episodes for Marshall to be anywhere near emotionally recovered, and in a medium—a CBS sitcom with a laugh track—where character emotions tend to reset at the beginning of every episode. Even though we never see Tracy’s college-age boyfriend Max, he still exists in the show’s universe. As with Marshall, who mourns the loss of his father and then is able to pay tribute to him by naming his first-born son after him, Tracy pays her own form of tribute to Max by remaining indebted to her memory of him but ultimately doing what is best for herself by living her best life. It is never spoken, but Tracy is not the first person to have lost a significant other who went on to date or marry somebody else, and as is essentially always the case, Tracy surely still loved Max in a way that was not lessened by, and did not diminish her love for, Ted.
A common fan complaint about Season 9 is the sense that the audience didn’t get to spend enough time with Tracy. But this was the story of how Ted met the mother of his children—not how he courted her, not how he started a family with her, and not of how he lost her.
Ted surely loved Tracy just as Tracy had loved Max. But just as Tracy’s life was improved by finding love with Ted, Ted’s would be improved by rekindling his love with Robin. Robin, in some ways the actual main character of HIMYM since her arrival into the friend group is the jumping off point, loved Ted so much that she was questioning her marriage to Barney on the day of their wedding. Ted infamously professed his love for Robin on their first date. And as idyllic as Tracy was, Robin was clearly a great match for Ted. And I have no doubt it would be Tracy approved, as she knew from firsthand experience that finding new love after the death of a partner can help to soothe a broken heart.
I knew Tracy was going to die. Contemporary audiences did not. Contemporary audiences saw a man asking another woman out five minutes after the death of his wife and the mother of his children. But for his children, who surely knew Tracy much better than they knew “Aunt Robin”, it was six years later. And they immediately encourage Ted to date Robin. It wasn’t the conclusion of Ted’s healing process, one that would surely exist on some level for the rest of his life, but rather a major step along the way.
Circumstances are a major part of romantic love. The early romance of Ted and Robin fell apart because Robin didn’t want a commitment nor children, and by the early 2010s, she is brokenhearted by news that she cannot have children and marries a man with more of an aversion to marriage than she ever had. Ted nearly met Tracy at a St. Patrick’s Day party years earlier than he did meet her, and by his own account, he was a drunken idiot and Tracy was still too emotionally vulnerable for a new relationship. Robin could never replace Tracy, for Ted but especially for Tracy’s children, but how the children speak of Robin suggests that she has the maternal instincts to be a great stepmother. In an earlier episode, Ted openly weeps at the notion from Tracy that a mother will always be available for her daughter’s wedding, presumably because he already knows that Tracy will not survive to see her daughter’s wedding. Robin is probably the next-best person to fill that role.
Lily and Marshall, the perfect couple throughout the run of the series, are the only ones with a truly happy ending by the end of the show. But the other three do receive some level of closure. Barney, who had resumed his often sociopathic womanizing ways after he and Robin divorced, was settled down by the immediate love he felt for a daughter he openly never wanted. Robin, whose primary reason for not wanting to settle down is a desire to travel the world for her career (which ultimately causes her marriage to Barney to unravel), gets the opportunity to live out her dream. And Ted has the son and daughter he always wanted; and though Ted may not have gotten the perfect girl for him for as long as he might have wanted, he did get to find love that was twenty-five years in the making from the moment he first told Robin that he loved her.
