Seasons 7/8
So I’m on my 8th rewatch of How I Met Your Mother, and I genuinely can’t believe how badly Seasons 7 and 8 hold up.
Season 7 in particular feels like it’s almost entirely flashbacks and callbacks. There are obviously some great episodes in there, but so much of the season feels like the show is stalling rather than actually moving the story forward. Then Season 8 starts pretty strongly, especially around the middle, but after that it becomes a real drag again.
What’s interesting to me this time around, though, is the overarching story across both seasons. It’s very clear that Ted is still in love with Robin. Even when the show is pretending that Ted has moved on, Robin keeps being this constant presence in his story.
And that’s made me view the finale differently.
But on this rewatch, it feels like they were shoving the Ted and Robin ending in our faces for years. The problem is that the show also spent so much time convincing us that Robin and Barney were the endgame, and that Ted had finally accepted that Robin wasn’t the person he was supposed to be with. Knowing how the series ends made me view a lot of these scenes very differently.
Not sure if this was obvious to everyone else, but I think I’m usually too invested in Barney and Robin that I didn’t really take in everything else happening (aka Ted)