CBS’ long-running comedy series How I Met Your Mother is coming very close to its conclusion, but it was recently revealed that certain scenes for the series finale were actually filmed eight years ago.  When How I Met Your Mother first debuted, it offered viewers something quite different than your standard CBS sitcom.  It was still a sitcom, but it involved a highly serialized conceit that would play out through the series’ run, culminating in the titular reveal of how Ted (Josh Radnor) met his wife.  The show has certainly had its ups and downs along the way and the current final season has been frustratingly disappointing, but it will hopefully all have been worth it when the series finale airs later next month.

In a recent AMA on Reddit, series creators Carter Bays and Craig Thomas answered burning questions about the show, and during the course of the event they revealed that they actually filmed portions of the upcoming finale in 2006.  They also discussed the spinoff How I Met Your Dad.  Read on after the jump.

how-i-met-your-mother-season-1

One of the big logistical questions on everyone’s minds with regards to the HIMYM finale was how the show would deal with the aging of actors Lyndsy Fonseca and David Henrie, who play Ted’s children in the show’s frame story device.  The portion of the show in which Ted is telling his children this never-ending story of how he met their mother takes place in the year 2030 and is, presumably, all told in one sitting.  When the series began in 2006, Fonseca and Henrie were 19 and 17, respectively, but they are now 27 and 24.  Apparently Thomas and Bays were thinking ahead, as Thomas revealed in the Reddit AMA that they shot the conclusion of this framing device in 2006:

CT: We have not changed the very end of series at all. In fact, we shot part of it back in 2006, before Ted's kids got much older! We just looked at that footage, which will factor into the end of the series—it totally worked and was kind of haunting to watch! Shot 8 years ago and it will now help end our series on March 31st, 2014!

CB: We've been slowly crafting the last 10 minutes of the show probably since it started, but the actual writing of it hasn't happened until just recently.

how-i-met-your-mother-finale

As proof, Bays recently tweeted a picture of a document on his computer of a draft of the finale dated 2/21/06, saying, “Writing finale. Found this doc on my computer. Look @ the date. No memory of writing it. Wish I could show the rest!”

During the AMA, the duo also revealed that if the show had only lasted one season, the mother would have been Victoria, and Thomas talked briefly about the upcoming spinoff series How I Met Your Dad:

“We decided that if we could think of an exciting, new way to tell a story using only the same framework -- a parent telling their kids about their life before they were born -- and if we could find a female writer we loved who could co-create it with us (since How I Met Your Dad is from a female perspective), that we would do the spin-off. And then all of those things happened. So we are doing a spin-off. It will be its own, totally new show.”

How I Met Your Mother will come to an end with the series finale on March 31st on CBS.

how-i-met-your-mother-the-locket