'How I Met Your Mother' Is Becoming The Zeno's Paradox Of Sitcoms

This week has put the How I Met Your Mother viewer on a real emotional roller coaster. Boo, Ted (Josh Radnor) is going to waste more of our time in Season 9 by trying to get back together with Robin (Cobie Smulders) the weekend of her wedding. But yay, there's the promise that this will end in failure for him, because we've finally seen the Mother (Cristin Milioti), and she's on her way to the wedding too! But fuck, does that mean the show's producers are going to take the series title literally and end its ninth and final season with Mother meeting Ted? Turns out, yes: at the upfront today, CBS president Nina Tassler confirms that the entire ninth season will take place over the Robin/Barney (Neil Patrick Harris) wedding weekend. A sitcom that rolls out, episode by episode, almost in real time? Maybe not even in chronological order? Without any flash forwards of Ted and Mother as a couple to make us care about their getting together? Fuuuuuuuck.

Having already protracted the title-promised meeting for an absurdly long period of time -- complete with Ted making or at least pondering a reunion with explicitly-not-Mother Robin on multiple occasions, presumably to extend the timeline on his meeting his children's mother even longer -- series creators Carter Bays and Craig Thomas must feel that the show's last season must really deliver on fulfilling the mission set out by its title. But now that they've given away one of the last secrets of Mother's identity by showing her face in Monday's Season 8 finale, they could have moved the story forward in ways that would have made the wait satisfying, in retrospect, for the viewer. What if that last season progressed at a clip of a few weeks or months at a time, winding up with "Mother" giving birth to her first child (hence "Mother," as opposed to how Ted met his wife)?

Furthermore, Thomas and Bays have fucked up by releasing the plan for Season 9 early enough for internet wags (hi) to start complaining about it when the corpse of Season 8 is barely cold. Why am I second-guessing these professional TV writers on their intentions for a show that, by and large, I mostly like? Because they put me here. They came up with a convoluted premise for their show, and then they dragged it out past all logic and reason. We've been waiting so long for the meeting that it can't possibly satisfy anyone anymore.