How I Met Your Mother's Alternate Ending Explained

You would think the CBS sitcom "How I Met Your Mother" (as created by Craig Thomas and Carter Bays) would end with the show's lovelorn protagonist Ted Mosby (played on-screen by Josh Radnor and voiced in his old age by the late Bob Saget) meeting the eponymous mother, and that would be that. Unfortunately, that is not what happened. After nine seasons and the same number of years, "How I Met Your Mother" came to a close in March of 2014, and to say it fell completely flat on its face in its conclusion is a massive understatement — because even though Ted did meet said mother, played winningly by Cristin Milioti, the actual ending of the show went in a wildly different direction.

Here's the gist. Throughout "How I Met Your Mother," Ted hangs out with his best friends — Marshall Eriksen (Jason Segel), Lily Aldrin (Alyson Hannigan), Barney Stinson (Neil Patrick Harris), and Robin Scherbatsky (Cobie Smulders) — while he searches New York for the love of his life, growing more and more desperate as he keeps meeting increasingly cartoonish women. (Abby Elliott, who's great on "The Bear," appears in "How I Met Your Mother" as a character named Jeanette, who basically serves to reinforce every negative stereotype about "clingy" women that's ever existed, and it is infuriating.) Throughout his search, Ted returns to Robin, whom he dates during the show's second season, a handful of times, but the two ultimately conclude that they're better off as friends and aren't compatible romantically. Then, in the last moments of the series finale, there's a twist! It's revealed that Ted's wife and the mother of his children, Tracy, has died (she's last seen in a hospital bed in full makeup during a scene that's part of a silent montage, and then she passes away off screen), which means Ted can go after Robin again, as encouraged by his kids.

I know I am not alone when I say that I hate this finale and thinking about it still fills me with irrational rage. Thankfully, if you're in that same camp, there is an alternate ending for "How I Met Your Mother," in which Ted just ... meets "the mother."

Before I get into the weeds regarding the alternate ending of "How I Met Your Mother," one thing needs to be made clear: The entire ninth season of the show takes place across one weekend as Barney and Robin get married, which is a frankly insufferable structure that makes the season drag interminably. (Also, regarding the Ted and Robin of it all, Barney and Robin get divorced almost immediately in the "How I Met Your Mother" series finale, "Last Forever," making the entire preceding season pointless. Cool!) When the ninth season got a DVD release, fans got what they were likely hoping for: a different conclusion.

In this alternate ending, Ted leaves Robin and Barney's reception early to catch a train back to New York, as, by this point of the story, he plans to leave the Big Apple for an architect job in Chicago. (Why? Because Robin, the woman Ted recently decided is his soulmate for the millionth time, is marrying his best friend Barney, and he's sad about it because Ted is a selfish jerk.) While he's waiting in the rain for a train from the fictional beachside town of Farhampton, he sees a woman (Tracy, obviously) with a yellow umbrella ... and recognizes her as the bass player from the wedding. They argue over ownership of the yellow umbrella — we see in the standout season 9 episode "How Your Mother Met Me" that the umbrella passed between Tracy and Ted throughout their years in New York — and learn each other's names. (We see this scene in the actual finale, but it's followed by all the stuff that sucks and ruins everything.)

In voiceover, Ted also reveals that he's "lucky" to wake up next to Tracy every morning and even indicates that Barney and Robin's marriage may have been mended (with a line about how things get put back together even after they're broken). It is, honestly, perfect. It even ends with Ted saying, "and that, kids, is how I met your mother." It's the title of the show! Unfortunately, though ... this is not the ending we got.

Look, I get that not everybody is going to side with me on this; some of my colleagues here at /Film even think we may have been too harsh on the finale of "How I Met Your Mother" when it originally aired. I'm sorry, but I must respectfully disagree for one very specific reason: Robin Scherbatsky is way too good for Ted Mosby.

Josh Radnor is genuinely terrific as Ted Mosby throughout "How I Met Your Mother," but it's not the actor's fault that the character is a pedantic jamoke who only wants what he can't have, is constantly terrorizing women in his quest for "the one," is unbelievably self-centered, and thinks that he can turn a "no" into a "yes" in any romantic scenario. (I don't think that, in 2025, I need to outline why that last thing is so, so bad.) Ted is also an unrepentant nerd who makes a meal out of the name "Renaissance Faire" and feels the need to constantly correct his friends if they do something innocuous like say "Kleenex" instead of "tissue" ... and even if he's right about these things, he's incredibly annoying about it.

Robin, on the other hand, is a fiercely independent woman who moved from Canada to New York by herself to carve out a career in broadcast journalism, a feat she fully achieves by the end of "Last Forever." Ted, on the other hand, simply wants a wife who will bear his children and be willing to support him in all of his adventures, not a career woman who flies all over the world for her job. To see Ted show up at Robin's window with the ridiculous blue French horn he stole for her in the show's first season is just ... insulting to both the show's characters and its audience. And even though Carter Bays and Craig Thomas have famously said they filmed Ted's kids "reacting" to the Robin reveal years beforehand and ultimately elected to go with the conclusion they planned long before the series ended, it's deeply unsatisfying and, honestly, just bad.

Because Ted and Robin only get back together years after they both achieve their respective dreams of having children and becoming an internationally known news anchor, this could be twisted into a "happy" ending in that these two found each other after initially choosing wildly divergent life trajectories. But it's not really "happy." Robin, who rules, is stuck with Ted, who sucks. At least the alternate ending exists to remind everyone of what should have happened.

"How I Met Your Mother" is streaming on Hulu now.