The Worst Episode Of How I Met Your Mother, According To IMDb

Television Comedy Shows

Craig Thomas and Carter Bays' CBS sitcom "How I Met Your Mother" ran for nine seasons from 2005 to 2014, and was so popular that it even launched a spin-off series. Despite its impressive longevity, however, it's safe to say that not every episode is a winner ... which makes sense since there are over 200 episodes in the series. There are actually a handful of seriously terrible episodes of the ensemble comedy — which stars Josh Radnor as Ted Mosby, the guy who takes forever telling his kids about how he met their mother (with adult Ted voice by the late Bob Saget) — so which one do fans think is the absolute worst, if we're using the IMDb ranking as their final word on the matter?

The answer is a little complicated, because the series finale, "Last Forever," is split into two parts ... and the second part, appropriately subtitled "Part Two," has the dubious distinction of earning the series' lowest episodic IMDb ranking with a bleak 5.5. ("Last Forever: Part One" doesn't fare much better with a 6.6, but I'll circle back to that nonsense shortly.) So what happens in "Last Forever: Part Two" that angered fans so badly? Do any other episodes, besides "Part One" of the series finale, flop as badly with fans as the very end of the entire show? 

The (second half of) the double episode of Last Forever is the worst episode of How I Met Your Mother, according to fans

The reason that "Last Forever: Part Two" has such an unbelievably low ranking on IMDb — a near-failing grade, in fact — is because not only does it absolutely stink, but it throws away the show's entire legacy just so Carter Bays and Craig Thomas could stick to a plan they devised a full decade earlier. Let me explain. At the end of the show's second season, Bays and Thomas filmed a scene with "adult" Ted's kids Penny (Lyndsy Fonseca) and Luke (David Henrie) revealing that the titular mother, who is ultimately played to perfection by Cristin Milioti in the show's ninth and final season, dies ... paving the way for Ted to get back together with his on-again, off-again girlfriend and the kids' "aunt" Robin Scherbatzky (series regular Cobie Smulders). 

The idea that Robin, a hardworking career woman who works her way up the broadcast journalism ladder to become an internationally renowned news anchor, would still settle for Ted, a pedantic coin collector who loves correcting people, is insulting enough. Add in the fact that the entire ninth season focuses on Robin's wedding to someone else — namely, one of Ted's best friends Barney Stinson (Neil Patrick Harris) — and the fact that "Last Forever: Part Two" skates through the final storyline for the show's constant couple Marshall Eriksen (Jason Segel) and Lily Aldrin (Alyson Hannigan), and you've got an absolute clunker of an episode. So which other episodes earned dismal scores on IMDb?

The lowest ranking How I Met Your Mother episodes on IMDb

Longtime fans of "How I Met Your Mother" probably won't be that shocked by the rest of the "worst" episodes according to IMDb; a lot of them are from season 9, which is widely believed to be the show's worst season, and they're only memorable because they're terrible. The second-place finisher, "Bedtime Stories," rocks a rating of 5.8 and features a pre-"Hamilton" Lin-Manuel Miranda but is also performed only in rhyme, which feels like a place-filler at best and is absolutely grating at its worst. The third-worst episode according to IMDb, "Slapsgiving 3: Slappointment in Slapmarra," features some seriously offensive caricatures of Asian cinema — performed by the show's white cast — that is legitimately embarrassing no matter when you watch it. (There's a reason its rating is a pathetic 6.0.)

Another season 9 stinker, "Mom and Dad," comes in fourth place with 6.6, probably because it features a really awkward subplot where Barney and his brother James (Wayne Brady) try to convince their mother Loretta Stinson (Frances Conroy) to get back together with one of their two dads, all while William Zabka (yes, from "The Karate Kid" and, eventually, "Cobra Kai") is running around messing with Ted. Then we get "Last Forever: Part One," where we're forced to sit there and watch as Robin and Barney call off their marriage after we just watched an entire season focused around their wedding. Again, not every episode of "How I Met Your Mother" can reach the height of, say, "Slap Bet" or "How I Met Everyone Else," just to name a few; they don't have to be this bad, though.

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