A Statement About the Finale Fever (Mildly Spoilery. Beware, or something)

It's that time of year kids!
Upfront time, "will our show be renewed?" time, "who is going to die on my favorite show?" time, "will I still care when this show comes back on the air in the fall of 2012?" time.

Maybe that's an exaggeration, but in the case of shows like Lost, January 2010 seems like an awfully long time away. It might not be, considering it might take that long to find all of the pieces of the Island after it was blown up by, you know, a hydrogen bomb. Poor Juliet. Poor Sawyer. Poor us, who have to wait 7 interminable months to find out what the frak just happened.

I think the couple of months worth of brain regeneration (and charts!) will help us understand that the finale actually told us more than we think on initial impact. I have a feeling a review of the Jacob-y moments in each of our characters' pasts will yield a great deal of info (that will be helpful in the next season, without a doubt). I have not yet read the good Doctor's final analysis, but his points last week were both illuminating and so mind-bending I might actually be glad to have all this time off to rest my brain. It hurts, but in a good way.

Another finale I watched the other night was How I Met Your Mother, which makes for the twelve-thousandth time I've watched Alyson Hannigan this week (future posts will discuss how awesome she is, but for now that is neither here nor there). A couple of things struck me about the finale: First of all, I had read previously that they shot the scenes for the last show back in January so that Hannigan would not have to come back from maternity leave. A lot of bloggers have talked about how distracting the pregnancies of the two female leads have been, but I have to say it was more disconcerting for me to see them less pregnant last night than the week before. Cobie Smulders had no discernable bump in January, and even Hannigan looked less pregnant than she had when she stormed out of the bar after Barney's offensive joke a couple of weeks ago (this was the reason she was absent for several weeks-- she was mad at Barney).

The other thing that really got me about this finale was how much I was waiting for progress-- a great ending to the goat story, some kind of Robin/Barney closure (or opening) and for Ted to meet at least another potential "One." When his ex-fiancée Stella appeared a couple of weeks ago, fans went nuts thinking that she, indeed, comes back into Ted's life and is the mother of his long-suffering children. Let us be clear: she is so not the mother. But the ending to that episode, as misleading as it was, would have been a better place to end the season. A big "Huh?" would have sat better than me than the benign acceptance that Ted has a new job as a Professor, and that the Mother is one of his students. Eh.

I suppose that's all for now (I mean, isn't that enough for you people??), but look! It wasn't all shiny, "this rocks" pontificating. Glorious.