‘How I Met Your Mother’ season 8 finale review: Did Ted meet (or see) the Mother?

Was there a wedding on Monday night’s “How I Met Your Mother” season 8 finale? Not exactly, and we’re sure that there will be some out there inevitably disappointed by that. Luckily, we think that executive producers Carter Bays and Craig Thomas found themselves a plethora of other interesting ways to make this up to you.

We’re going to start this review off by going character-by-character, mostly because everyone had their own moments in the sun that contributed to the story as a whole.

Ted – All his life, Ted has been waiting to meet the perfect person. Unfortunately (and rather frustratingly), he believes that this person for him happens to be someone who is completely unavailable in Robin. Instead of fighting it out to find her, he instead came up with an alternate plan: Just running away.

As it turned out, Lily revealed to him that years ago, Robin had the same sort of feelings towards him. She considered running because he was about to marry Stella, and Robin actually dug up the locket back when she was drunk one night. Then, Ted realized that he had it.

Barney and Robin – Basically, we watched these two prepare for their wedding by trying to break up an awful, snotty couple, only to end up getting them together in the end. It was sweet, but hardly the sort of thing we were hoping for back when the season first started.

Marshall and Lily – Just when it looked like these two were going to be able to move to Rome, a major shocker came in for Marshall: An offer to be a judge in New York. The man took it, and then decided to not even tell her about it. This, dear friends, is going to be a huge problem next season.

While we are super-worried at the moment about what Ted is going to try to do with Robin, that’s not what people are going to be talking about. Instead, it is the answer to “who is the mother?”! At the very end of this episode, we saw her for the first time buying a ticket to Farhampton in preparation for performing at the wedding. It was a shocking ending that made up for any complaint that we could have about there being no wedding yet. Bays and Thomas found a way to make her into a character, and still give the series somewhere to go moving forward.

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What did you think about this finale: Did it satisfy you? Also, did you think that this is what the Mother would look like? In case you haven’t read some early plans on season 9, be sure to head on over to the link here.

Photo: CBS