This post contains spoilers This Is Us.
The penultimate episode This Is UsRebecca Pearson was always going to be the one to thank. If the NBC drama’s first several seasons left viewers preoccupied with how Jack Pearson died (may the Crock-Pot live in minor infamy), then the last few have been—sometimes tediously—devoted to Rebecca’s eventual demise. The show’s second to last episode, titled “The Train” and written by series creator Dan Fogelman does get there—but not before one last misdirect.
Things start with an unfamiliar group in an uncertain time period. The West Wing’s Dulé HillA family of three includes the patriarch, who in turn becomes the father to Marcus Brooks, a severely injured leg. Back at the Pearsons’ palatial residence, the family prepares to give their goodbyes to Rebecca, whose dementia has deteriorated to its final stage.
Each family member bids goodbye one at a time Mandy Moore’s matriarch. Beth (an ever-standout Susan Kelechi WatsonRebecca ( ) says that she tried to emulate her mothering style. “Thank you for helping me with that complicated, incredible, beautiful boy that you raised,” she says of Randall (Sterling K. Brown). “But I got him now.” Toby (Chris SullivanSophie (Alexandra Breckenridge(Thank you to Rebecca for welcoming them as Kate’s respective partners in the family.Chrissy MetzKevin (Justin Hartley). Kate is on a flight back from a London work trip, desperate to make it to her mother’s deathbed in time.
An unconscious Rebecca experiences these farewells through the metaphor of a train—a callback to the season 6 premiere—each car representing a person’s last message. Randall’s biological father, William (Ron Cephas Jones) acts as her guide, moving her throughout the train despite Rebecca’s insistence that she’s “waiting for someone.” Serving vespers in the bar car is Dr. K (Gerald McRaney), who tells Rebecca that he initially thought she wouldn’t withstand the birth of her triplets. “You survived just to lose a child and then a husband, and still, what a thing you made of it all,” he says. “What a big, messy, gigantic, spectacular thing.” While delivering the poignant speech, he’s surrounded by relics of the show—Jack’s Terrible Towel from the pilot, the growth chart from the Pearson kitchen, VHS tapes watched on Thanksgiving.
Between the tear-filled speeches to Rebecca, past and present, there is a secondary storyline. Déjà (La Trice Harper) tells Randall that she’s pregnant, news she’s apprehensive about given her new medical residency particularly since she’s not married to the baby’s father. The show cuts to Marcus, who is working in a medical laboratory on a cancer cure. When his boss asks if he has anyone to go home to, we’re promptly shown Déjà. But all of this proximity turns out to be a red herring: it’s Déjà’s first love Malik who is her child’s father. “I’ve loved you since I was 16,” he tells her after making an impromptu appearance at the Pearson residence. “I wanna marry you. I wanna have this baby with you.” It’s yet another happy ending checked off the list.
You might be wondering how Marcus is connected to the Pearsons.
All roads lead to Jack, the slow cooker with the faulty slow burner. Hill is seen speaking to Hill at one point. Milo Ventimiglia’s Jack at the hospital. As it’s revealed, the Pearson house fire and Brooks car accident happened on the same night. Jack consoles Marcus’s restless father, offering Dr. K’s pilot episode advice on how to take “the sourest lemon that life has to offer and turn it into something resembling lemonade.” He heads back to his room, expecting a routine examination, while Marcus’s father awaits his son’s fate in an OR. Marcus survives the operation. Jack succumbs to smoke inhalation in just a few minutes. Their doctor is stunned at the abrupt turn of events. Meanwhile, in the present day, Marcus helps develop drugs that help Alzehimer’s patients like Rebecca. At one point, Randall notes the dichotomy of death and new life—a trademark theme that This Is Us can’t resist one last swing at.
The Pearson multiverse ends with Kate saying her farewell at the eleventh hour. When Rebecca tells William how sad “the end” is, he suggests that it’s only sorrowful because “it must have been pretty wonderful when it was happening.” She receives one final visit from her departed second husband Miguel (Jon HuertasJack gets second billing. When Rebecca finally reaches the train’s “caboose,” a word she struggled to remember in the season’s premiere, it is Jack who awaits her. “Hey,” she tells him, offering viewers a cathartic reunion six seasons in the making. “Hey,” he replies. Even the most seasoned person can be skeptical This Is Us viewer reduced to a train’s worth of tears.
As for next week’s tissue-tested finale, fittingly titled “Us,” the episode will fuse recently-filmed scenes with footage shot early in the show’s run set against the backdrop of Rebecca’s funeral, Fogelman told Deadline. “While it will make you cry, it will make you sad, the end of the finale moves me in a way that is different,” he said. “I think the cast and crew captured something about the human condition and the condition of being a person in the family that I am really proud of.”
Source: Glamour