This Is Us - I Call Marriage / Jack Pearson’s Son - Double Review

I Call Marriage

This Is Us continues to amaze me. Just when I think I can’t love these characters and their relationships any more, my love for them grows each week. Things are moving very quickly now as we approach the season finale and every episode seems to be getting more and more emotional.

Toby visits Kate at “fat camp” to spend some quality time with her and instead of the warm welcome he was expecting, she says she doesn't have time for him with all of her activities. When Toby meets Duke as he’s leaving, he decides to stay for the day out of jealousy. This kind of backfires because when he joins Kate's exercise class he becomes a distraction and it leads to a fight between them. Each week I question more and more whether Kate and Toby are going to work out. It just seems like their timing is terrible and they both need to focus on themselves before they can truly devote themselves to their relationship. After their fight, while Kate is feeling vulnerable, Duke continues his relentless pursuit of her and I’m actually worried that she might take him up on his offer. I hate that Duke is making her question how great she is and interfering in her and Toby’s relationship. The episode leaves us in suspense about whether or not she’ll go to his cabin and sleep with him.

Meanwhile, Kevin is dealing with his own complicated relationship. After the shocking reveal that he was married and is now divorced, his plans to win back his ex-wife, Sophie, are in full swing. It seems like things are not going to end well when she walks out on their first meeting. As he follows her onto the subway we get a bit of information about why things didn’t work out between them. When he moved to LA to pursue acting, they thought they could make the long distance work but they couldn’t and it turns out that he cheated on her as well. We still don’t have all the information on that but I’m sure it will come up again soon. We also find out that Kevin made a fake Facebook profile to keep up with her, which in a weird way is kind of cute. He also knows basically everything about her, like what she wore on the first day of second grade. When he finds out she’s in a relationship, he says if she’s happy that’s fine but if not she should meet him back at the diner and sure enough, the next day she shows up! I’m actually really interested to see where things go between them and to learn more about their history. Although Kevin hasn't had the most compelling storyline so far, I find myself interested in what happened between them. I think there are a lot of different layers to this like why they got married so young, the dynamic of her and Kate while she was dating Kevin, what happened when they broke up, why she’s never been mentioned before, etc. I feel like she’ll be a big part of us learning more about Kevin over the coming weeks, which I’m looking forward to. I’ve already emotionally connected and gotten to know Kate and Randall, but Kevin seems more closed off. Hopefully, this storyline will give us a chance to get to know him better.

Randall is really beginning to struggle with the idea of losing William and I am right there with him. I feel like I’m in denial but I know it’s coming soon. Randall knows this too and is having dreams of finding William’s body and all the stresses of his life are piling on. His job is extremely stressful and now there’s competition from a coworker for some of his accounts. He’s having to make some difficult choices between his job and family and although he chooses his family every time, it’s obvious that the choice between the two is causing him a great deal of stress. Although he’s been trying to hide it, we’re starting to see that Randall does not cope with stress very well and it seems like there might be something physically wrong with him because we keep seeing his hand shaking. I can’t lose Randall too, so I’m hoping this is just a temporary symptom of his stress and not something more serious.

In the flashbacks to Rebecca and Jack this week, we see their wedding and the vows they made to each other. We also see them when the kids are teenagers and a lot has changed in their relationship since the wedding. Their spark seems to have faded a bit as they’re both so busy. When they go out to dinner with Miguel and his wife Shelley, they find out that their friends are getting a divorce. This is very upsetting to them but especially to Jack who starts to question if things are still good between him and Rebecca. This leads to him planning an elaborate date night back at their first apartment and it’s exactly what they need to put the spark back in their relationship. Earlier in the episode, Rebecca found out that her band was invited to go on tour. She really wants to go but when her bandmate, Ben, questions her marriage she puts him in his place with a passionate speech about what a great husband and father Jack is. All of these outside influences that could have pushed them further apart have actually pushed them out of their rut.

Overall, I thought this was a great episode that set things up for some interesting stories for the remainder of the season. I’m really looking forward to learning more about Kevin and Sophie and seeing what’s happening with Randall. I’m also starting to think that Miguel is not that bad and every week I get more and more curious about how he and Rebecca end up together. Hopefully, we’ll find out about all these things and more in the coming weeks.

Jack Pearson’s Son

This episode picks up right where we left off with Kate heading over to Duke’s cabin. I was really hoping she wasn’t going to sleep with him and thankfully she didn’t. Instead, she confronts him about what he said to her and tells him they’re nothing alike. My favorite part of all this was when she said, “Deep down, I’m awesome.” I feel like this is a big step for her and shows a lot of growth. However, after she’s finished confronting him, he lets her know that his parents own the camp and now she’s going to be kicked out. This is frustrating because she was definitely not out of line, he was basically harassing her daily. I guess one of the positives of this is that hopefully we never have to see Duke again. Anyways, after she’s kicked out she goes to Toby’s hotel room to apologize and once he forgives her they decide to spend the day really getting to know each other. They each ask each other a variety of questions but the two big ones are centered on Toby’s past depression and thoughts of suicide and Jack’s death. We still don’t really know anything about how Jack died and we didn’t get to find out now because Kate is still not ready to open up and talk about it. Toby suggests that they hold off on the wedding planning and just take their time being engaged and getting to know each other until Kate is ready to open up about everything, including Jack. We know Jack dies when they were teenagers so it’s been a while and Kate’s inability to even talk about it has me worried that something really terrible happened to him.

It seems like everyone is going through an extremely stressful time these days and this week Kevin is experiencing a lot of this stress over the opening of his play. Throughout the episode, he turns to many people for help and support. First, he calls his ex-wife, Sophie, who he’s officially “cautiously dating” and while she seems to cheer him up, she also tells him she can’t make it to the performance because of work. He reaches out to Kate but gets no answer and when he goes to visit Randall at work, he realizes that Randall has too much going on in his life to help him out. With nowhere else to go, he decides to visit his mom, only to find out she’s not home and only Miguel is there. I have not been a big fan of Miguel. I didn’t really trust him but also I didn’t really know him. We’ve seen him in flashbacks but we haven’t seen that much of him and what he’s like present day. Not to mention what we have seen has been filtered through the perspective of the kids, mainly Kevin, who does not like Miguel at all. In the last episode, I found myself warming up to Miguel from the past and surprisingly, this week I also found myself starting to like present-day Miguel. This is kind of the most we’ve seen of Miguel now and it really made me realize that I might have judged him too harshly. The scene between him and Kevin was actually one of my favorites of the entire episode. One of my favorite moments of their talk was when Miguel said it breaks his heart that Kevin doesn’t like him because when he talks to Kevin he feels like he has a piece of Jack, his best friend, back. The whole conversation felt very sincere and it was exactly what Kevin needed.

Randall is still going through a very difficult time and it only gets worse this week. In addition to William’s declining health and the demands of his job, Beth has to go away last minute when her mom breaks her hip. This leaves Randall to have to deal with everything on his own and he’s really at his breaking point. He takes on so much and throughout the episode, I got increasingly worried about him. Throughout the flashbacks, we see him as a teenager struggling to cope with extreme anxiety related to his school work, so now we know this is a problem he’s had for a while. I really hate to see him struggle and when he cried during the middle of his meeting, it broke my heart. However, the standout scene of this episode was between Kevin and Randall. After visiting Randall earlier in the day and receiving a call from him that he couldn’t make it to the play, Kevin knows that something just isn't right. After his conversation with Miguel about his similarities to his father, Kevin knows what he has to do and at the very last second he ditches the play and runs to Randall’s office. All this is shown simultaneously with a flashback of Kevin seeing Randall sobbing in his room as a teen and ignoring him. This time, he does what Jack would do and prioritizes his brother and making sure he’s okay. When he gets to Randall’s office he finds him crying alone on the floor where he joins him and just holds him as he cries. It was one of the most touching and emotional scenes of this show so far. The growth of Kevin and Randall’s relationship has been one of my favorite parts of This Is Us and this scene will stick with me for a while. I am curious to see what happens with the play though because his leaving will definitely have big consequences.

Meanwhile, in the flashbacks, it’s Valentine's day and Rebecca is preparing to head off on tour. She’s getting everything prepared for Jack and he’s being extremely supportive. Later, in a conversation with Miguel, we find out that he’s actually not quite as supportive as he lets on. However, when Rebecca thinks about backing out to stay with the kids who seem to really need her, Jack has the chance to agree but instead pushes her to go. Later that night, at one of her gigs, he notices she’s looking at her bandmate, Ben, when she sings a love song. This immediately makes him suspicious and when he finds out that they used to date, he cancels their Valentine’s Day plans and they get in a huge fight. This whole episode had me feeling very uneasy. I’m not ready for anyone to die and I think something is going to happen to Jack very imminently. All throughout the episode, I felt like something was building up quickly and I just have a bad feeling. Although we still have a few more episode until the finale, where I suspect the deaths will be happening, I feel like there’s something about this night with Jack and that this is the night that he dies. I feel very unsettled and worried. It’s entirely feasible, due to the nature of these flashbacks, that this could be true. Because the flashbacks are dependent on the parallels to the current timeline and aren’t chronological, we may not pick up with this night until a few episodes from now. I just feel very uneasy about this fight and how he's drinking again. This night feels very significant and I just want to know what happens.

Overall, I loved this episode, even though at times it emotionally destroyed me. I guess that’s just part of what makes this show so great and engaging though.

What did you think of these episodes? Let me know in the comments and thanks for reading!