First of all, anyone who hasn’t seen This Is Us is seriously missing out. It is one of my favorite shows and tugs at your heartstrings like no other show I’ve ever seen.
Spoilers ahead…
Finally! The moment we’ve all been waiting for…we finally find out how Jack Pearson dies. The series had revealed early on that Jack died when the “Big Three” were teenagers, but we were left guessing how. This heart-wrenching episode premiered on Super Bowl sunday to represent the 20th anniversary of when Jack died and I was hands down more pumped for this episode than the Super Bowl itself.
The episode begins with Jack waking up to the house on fire. The previous episode showed Jack flipping the off switch of his crockpot, but it acted up and ultimately caused the fire. Many predictions were made about whether or not Jack would die in the fire, but he managed to save everyone in his family (including Kate’s dog, which is why she blames herself for his death). The true hero. So if he doesn’t die in the fire…how does he die?! The anticipation killed me.
The episode flashed back and forth in time, as it does in most episodes, which made the anticipation even worse. About midway through the episode, we finally see Jack in the hospital getting examined. Rebecca is at the hospital with him while the kids are at Miguel’s. The doctors reassure Jack that he is doing fine and just took in a lot of smoke. Rebecca, thinking everything is okay, decides to get a snack and call to check on the kids…at that point I knew something was going to go wrong and I was not ready for it!
As Rebecca is getting a candy bar out of the vending machine, a bunch of commotion is occurring in the background, but she doesn’t notice. At this point, I’m screaming at her on my TV to turn around! The doctor eventually comes to tell her that her husband went into cardiac arrest from complications and didn’t make it.
So there you have it. All the guessing and waiting. Jack died from a heart attack. The whole situation is so sad and I got so attached to these characters that I felt like I lost someone too (pathetic I know).
As the episode continued, Rebecca had to somehow pull herself together to tell her children that their father just died. With all the tears, the episode did have a happy ending and a twist. Randall and his wife fostered a girl named Deja previously, but she decided to go back to live with her mother. Well, she comes back at the end of the episode and they also flashforward to when Randall is older, when his daughter Tess is an adult. Her job is to help find families for foster children, similar to how her father fostered Deja. It made me wonder if the show will begin to show the future rather than just the past and present…we shall see. It was by far the most emotional episode thus far, but far worth all the tears.
Another episode premiered on Tuesday, Jack’s funeral. This episode was as much, if not more emotional than the previous episode. Now the show won’t be back for a couple of weeks, so I guess I’ll have to just be patient and wait for the excitement to continue! As the show hinted, Jack’s story is not over just yet!