‘How I Met Your Mother’ series finale spoilers: A general feel of what to expect

Now that the incredible 200th episode of “How I Met Your Mother” has come and gone, we turn now to what is another pressing order of business: Talking about the series finale. March 31 may be a ways away still, but with new episodes coming up the vast majority of weeks ahead leading up to it, you are really not going to have too much time at all to sit back and wonder what is coming up.

This one-hour event, entitled “Last Forever,” has the rather hard challenge of tying together every loose end that the producers want to see happen, and that could even include giving us more of a sense as to what makes Ted in the year 2030 want to sit down Luke and Penny Mosby to tell them this long, elaborate story.

Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter, co-creator Craig Thomas teases that at least half of the episode will be spent pushing ahead and showing some of Ted and The Mother’s future after that first meeting, and also show just where Barney, Robin, Marshall, and Lily all turn up:

“We’re stalling writing it out of sheer nostalgia and fear that we’ll be sobbing the whole time. In one episode, we’re going to see 17 years in the lives of all our characters. We’re going to catch the audience back up to the year 2030, when the story is being told by future Ted to his kids. It’s a very big, ambitious hour. The big important things that will happen, a lot of those have remained true to our idea of how to finish the series that we’ve had basically since the pilot.”

The one general impression that we have here is that if the 200th episode (read our full review of it here) caused you to occasionally pull out a Kleenex or two, this one could be such that you need a full box to get through it. Don’t feel weird about it, since we will be right there with you going through the same exact thing.

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Photo: CBS