Alyson Hannigan defends much-attacked season finale of ‘How I Met Your Mother’
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Alyson Hannigan, who plays Lily on the CBS sitcom ‘How I Met Your Mother,’ says she doesn’t quite understand the widespread negative reaction to last week’s Season 6 finale.
Among the many revelations: After many tries with husband Marshall (Jason Segal), Lily announced she’s finally pregnant, although she initially misinterpreted her nausea as stemming from food poisoning. Fans also learned, courtesy of a flash-forward, that longtime hound dog Barney Stinson (Neil Patrick Harris) has a wedding in his future. But even as the episode began to set up some intriguing plot developments, many critics and Twitterati slammed the finale, with one saying the handling of the various intertwined plot strands made him ‘incredibly dubious’ about the show’s future.
‘I think people never like a cliffhanger,’ Hannigan said in a phone interview Monday. ‘But they do, they just say they don’t.’ Most of the reaction from her fans on her own Twitter feed, she added, has been positive.
Hannigan says that producers Carter Bays and Craig Thomas sat with the cast and mapped out the entire season in advance last year, leaving a few important parts unexplained. ‘We were like, well, who’s getting married and they had told us it was Barney,’ Hannigan said. ‘But they didn’t tell us who the bride was, and we were like, ‘Whaaat?’’
But there’s still plenty of wiggle room for characters the future. ‘You never know with Barney, right?,’ she said.
During her hiatus, Hannigan is taking time off to help out a favorite charity, the Mom’s Night Out campaign from online marketplace StubHub, which encourages mothers to attend 17 different summer events, with proceeds going to the Adopt-a-Classrom education program. But she’s headed back to work in midsummer, as last week CBS picked up another season of ‘Mother.’
Maybe then the producers can explain why Lily makes odd velociraptor noises when she’s sick -- one of the other revelations from the season finale.
‘I make some sort of crazy noises when I chew, which I think might also be dinosaur noises,’ Hannigan said. ‘I guess Lilly is just prehistoric.’
Trackers, what do you think of ‘Mother’ and its season finale?
For the record, 6:10 p.m. May 23: An earlier version of this post identified StubHub as a ticket brokerage. The company describes itself as an online marketplace similar to eBay, its parent company.
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-- Scott Collins (twitter.com/scottcollinsLAT)
