"“If they’re shooting at you, they’re bad,” Rogers replies, the exchange underlining how black-and-white the film’s politics end up looking."

Yeah, we really have to fill in a lot of blanks ourselves, and I understand hat people will go different ways than I will. That's fine. But I will caution into reading too much into the apartment and dogs- that's exactly her situation in the first two seasons, and it didn't mean she was settling down then.

Right? And making them deal with that right after- or, in some ways- DURING- the wedding? Gah, Ted is the worst.

"A "douche move" would've been withdrawing from the group"

But after Nora and Quinn, he went right back to birddogging, too. And I'm not sure that he was really different post-Robin than he was post-Quinn; we didn't see enough of him (before the baby) to really tell.

I'm fucking with you; I totally saw the entire scene, its just that elipses-did-you-actually-watch-the-scene thing is such a silly rhetorical device I like to hang lanterns on it.

And I mean- that contradicts three or four episodes where they directly say that Ted is over Robin…

"At this point though the kids are in their mid-to-late teens and ready to move on to college and their adult life."

Of course it's not what he said, I specifically said it's what I think he meant. But going solely off of your post (Again, didn't see it, Made in Jersey), what I think he meant is pretty consistent with what he said. He's saying that he tried being the guy who could settle down and be married- and I tried it with the…

Nope, my CBS feed flipped over to an episode of Made in Jersey at that point.

Maybe, but that's not really ever established.

Would that the series agreed with you, but given the relative amount of screen time each relationship got, it treated the mother like an afterthought, and Robin like the thesis statement.

I think it's more "If she MUST die to make way for Robin, can we at least have another minute or so with her?"

"They told the ending they want to tell, not necessarily what the fans wanted them to tell"

Was that the ONLY OTHER choice apart from what we got?

Did it really fuck him up? I see the line of thinking- it lead him to go on a slut-rampage that lead to the perfect month, etc.- but there's some fanwanking in there. In his next scene after the divorce, he's not saying birddogging because he's hurt from the divorce, he says he's birddogging because that's just who he…

It does and it doesn't; certainly, as the kids are portrayed, Ted's no where near done raising them yet, and being a well-loved aunt is quite a bit different than being even a surrogate mother figure. But yes, once kids reach their teenage years, you do have more of an opportunity for a life apart from them. It's just…

It depends quite a bit on the story. I wouldn't get mad at The Wire for showing me something tragic, but real; that show was committed to a sort of warts-and-all realism. But I'd probably have a problem with Futurama doing that, because generally, the last thing Futurama tried to do was be "realistic".

In which case, there was a pretty obvious way to avoid having to depict her death AT ALL…

Okay, but Barney and Robin's wasn't. Not only did it not lead to a grand marriage, but the wedding and the reception were pretty pedestrian. The reception, to the extent it was depicted, looked to be about half-empty…