Cristin Milioti was shocked what happened after she finally met your mother.

The Penguin star, 39, explained on Monday’s episode of the Armchair Expert podcast that she had “never seen” the popular CBS sitcom How I Met Your Mother before landing the plum role of – spoiler alert! – the titular mother in seasons 8 and 9. “I’m glad that I hadn’t. I don’t think I understood,” Milioti told hosts Dax Shepard and Monica Padman, before Padman cut in – “the weight of the mother!”

“The weight of it,” Milioti affirmed. “I’m in it for like six episodes.”

Something of a comedy-mystery hybrid, How I Met Your Mother plays out like a campfire story in which Josh Radnor’s Ted Mosby explains to his kids via extended flashback how he met their mother. Viewers were left in the dark about the mother’s identity until the ninth and final season revealed her as Milioti’s Tracy – angering a great number of fans who assumed it was series regular Robin, played by Cobie Smulders since the series’ pilot episode.

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“I’m glad you didn’t know, because that is stressful. Because I bet, I mean, you’ll tell us – people had strong reactions to that,” Padman continued, referring to the surprising series finale.

“They surely did,” Milioti said. “You know, I am pretty good about staying very far away from the internet. It’s not a good place for a human brain to be. I also was pretty good at sheltering myself from that. But I definitely didn’t understand the weight… It’s a very famously contested finale.”

The How I Met Your Mother is often ranked among the most divisive TV finales in recent history – particularly for a sitcom, a form from which viewers expect both stronger adherence to convention and greater payoff for romantic pairings (Ted and Robin) in which they’ve emotionally invested. Even if the series does end with Ted racing off to revive his romance with Robin.

But as controversial as the HIMYM finale remains, it’s also garnered its fair share of acolytes and admirers, especially as fans have gone back and rewatched the series, picking up on clues that it was meant to be Tracy all along. On the 10th anniversary of the sitcom’s premiere, Entertainment Weekly argued that cutting the series pilot and finale together makes a “romcom worthy of the big screen.”

11 years out from that finale, Milioti is able to laugh about fans’ perception that she suddenly appeared on the series only to seize such a critical role, joking, “I burst through the wall like the Kool-Aid man and I go, ‘Oh yeah!’ And then the show ends.”

You can listen to the rest of Cristin Milioti’s interview on the ‘Armchair Expert’ podcast with Dax Shepard above.