How I Met Your Mother ended on a disappointing note for a large chunk of its fans, and after a vocal set of them put together a petition demanding a different ending it appears they’ve gotten their way.
Producers have announced a HIMYM alternate ending will be released, but just what the new ending entails — or could possibly entail — is still in question.
[WARNING: Stop reading if you haven’t watched the HIMYM finale yet, spoilers lie ahead.]
After nine seasons of moving Ted Mosby toward a meeting with the mother of his two kids, and an entire season of introducing viewers to the lovely Tracy McConnell (Cristin Milioti), they saw it fall apart so quickly in the finale. Viewers found out that the titular mother has been dead for the entire telling of the story, and the story itself was really just a ruse so Ted could get the kids’ approval to go after Robin yet again.
Viewers who grew an affinity for Milioti’s character felt cheated, noting that the show spent the better part of five seasons explaining why Ted and Robin would never work out.
That displeasure with the How I Met Your Mother finale turned to organized protest. An online petition on Change.org demanding that CBS “rewrite and reshoot” the finale gained more than 17,000 signatures.
“You completely betrayed us,” one petitioner wrote.
It now appears that all the protests have worked . Carter Bays, the show’s creator and executive producer, announced that a happy How I Met Your Mother alternate ending was on the way in the show’s DVD, which will be released later this year.
But there are some restrictions to what the How I Met Your Mother alternate ending could actually include. Bays noted that the new HIMYM ending was created on the fly.
“We only shot one script, but through edit room magic we had two possible outcomes for the series,” Bays tweeted. “We chose the ending we chose and we stand by it. But we loved the other version too.”
The admission implies that the How I Met Your Mother alternate ending would use only voiceover and now new footage, so it’s not likely that fans will see any wild changes. While there is a chance the mother will get to live, odd are she will still die (after all, there are still shots of her in a hospital bed and other ones of his kids addressing her death). But there is a chance it could just end and roll the credits after he first meets the mother.
