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this-is-us-season-4.jpg

Twitter Ugly Cries Its Way Through Last Night's Touching 'This Is Us'

By Dustin Rowles | TV | February 19, 2020 |

By Dustin Rowles | TV | February 19, 2020 |

this-is-us-season-4.jpg

This week’s episode of This Is Us was a real humdinger. It is the culmination of an arc of episodes that focused each week on one Pearson sibling — Randall dealing with his anxiety following a home burglary; Kevin dealing with his messy love life; and Kate dealing with her troubled marriage — until the three decided to come together and sort through their problems at the family cabin.

There were three timelines this week. In the ’90s timeline, the family cabin is relatively new to them, and Jack decides to put together a time capsule, which is definitely something that only happens on television shows. The contents of that time capsule come into play in the present timeline.

Meanwhile, in the intermediate timeline, college-aged Kevin and Randall race to the cabin with Rebecca out of fear that Kate’s boyfriend, Marc, is mistreating her. They’re right. It’s interesting because this show so very infrequently deals with legitimately bad people, but Marc is a villain. He’s bad f**king news. On the drive up, he loses his temper and kicks Kate out of the car and makes her walk. Once they get to the cabin, Marc somehow manages to be an even bigger asshole by “accidentally” dropping Jack’s favorite mug after Kate asked him to put it away.

When Kate gets reasonably upset with Marc, Marc locks her out of her own cabin when she goes to get firewood. In the snow. Without a coat.

Marc is trash.

Cut to the next morning, when Kevin, Randall, and Becca finally show up. When they walk in, smug-trash Marc offers them pancakes like they have just intruded on his cabin. Randall and Kevin, however, quickly notice that there is a broken window and that Kate is wearing gloves inside, and they quickly deduce that something is amiss. Marc confesses. “We got into a stupid fight. Kate went out to get firewood and I locked her out because I was pissed.” Kate broke a window to get back in, and cut open her hand.

Kevin and Randall are ready to beat his ass:

But Becca’s got this:

There is no violence (sadly), but Becca kicks Marc the hell out of the cabin. Kate’s a mess, but she 100 percent backs her mom’s decision. “I thought he loved me.”

In the present timeline, Randall is still anxious as hell about the burglary of his home; Kevin is upset with Randall and Kate for not telling him about their mother’s memory loss; Kate is peeved with Kevin for sleeping with her best friend. But none of this is unfixable. They’re at the cabin together with no electricity, and eventually, they decide to dig up the time capsule. Last week, I joked that they were all in the backyard digging up Marc’s remains, which was a popular joke!

In the time capsule, Randall finds the last piece of a literal puzzle that he’d been working on all day; Kevin finds a pic of him and Sophie (because it’s always gonna be Sophie); there’s also a tape recording from Becca in the capsule, only it’s not of Becca. It’s from Jack. “Hey guys, it’s me. Your Dad. It’s 1993.”

On the tape, Jack also confesses that he had this “crazy idea” to build a house next to the cabin for him and Becca to grow old together. He thought it was a silly pipe dream and he threw the sketch in the trash, but Rebecca pulled it out and put it in the time capsule “because she believes in my dreams.”

Cut to that future timeline where Becca is in bed, near death, and the Pearson siblings are much, much older. The bed that Becca is in? It’s in a cabin that Kevin built based on Jack’s drawing from the time capsule.

It’s cool. It’s OK. Let it all out.

But don’t let all the crying obscure what a fine-ass looking older gentlemen Kevin gracefully ages into (with Sophie? Probably with Sophie).