‘This Is Us’ Season Finale Recap: Bumps in the Road
Warning: This recap of the “Moonshadow” episode of This Is Us contains spoilers.
The creator and the stars were everywhere, telling people that the first season of This Is Us would end as it began — in tears. We all prepared for the worst. We gathered tissues, blankets, loved ones, anything that would make the pain and the shock easier to absorb.
And then, it didn’t happen. We didn’t learn how Jack died. Not sure whether writers and producers were whistling “Dixie” during interviews to drum up anticipation or we simply misunderstood what they were all getting at. Either way, the finale played out very differently than we expected it would. It required far fewer hankies than the previous two chapters and failed to answer the biggest unknown.
And that isn’t a nice way of saying it was a letdown or that it was a poorly written episode. In fact, Jack and Rebecca’s big fight was one of the more realistic TV marital spats we’ve seen, and we enjoyed seeing how they met while Rebecca was singing. Also relieved that superdad did not die in some fiery DUI incident or by picking a dumb brawl with a shape shifter. (Those things were going to be unacceptable in that they would make us like him a little less because, well, you know, totally avoidable.) It was not bad, just different. And now we wait.
’70s Jack and Rebecca
Turns out Jack is a Vietnam vet, a very well-adjusted one — even adorable ol’ Mrs. Peabody thinks so — who can find only odd jobs and is forced to live with his raging alcoholic dad and doormat mom. He dreams of opening an auto-body shop with his buddy Daryl if he can ever save enough. Mrs. Peabody can pay him only $5 for fixing her deceased husband’s ’67 Chevelle, which you might remember was the same car Jack sold when the babies were on the way. Instead, she offers to set him up with her best friend’s “knockout” granddaughter as another form of payment.
His dad busts his balls for being an “unemployed 28-year-old who will probably live in [his] attic till the end of time.” Jack mumbles a protest: “Drink up because God forbid you go a night without finishing an entire bottle.” But ultimately he backs down and slinks off to his room to add his meager earnings to his Army tin. Later he complains to Daryl that they are never going to have enough unless they take a risk. He wants Daryl’s cousin to get him into a shady backroom poker game, although his pal begs him to let it go because the men who run it are bad news. “Enough of this crap. We’re good guys. We deserve to make it,” Jack says.
Across town, Rebecca is lunching with her pregnant and engaged friends, whose biggest dilemma is deciding between lobster and beef Wellington for the wedding reception. The conversation turns to whether Rebecca’s bringing a plus-one to the wedding. “Probably not. Put me at the table with the spinster aunts and reject cousins,” she says.
They too want to set her up and think she should have a plan B in case becoming a successful singer falls through. Her harpy friend Kathryn chirps, “The odds are like one in a million. Maybe you’re the next Carole King, maybe not. Don’t you think you should diversify just in case?”
Rebecca is good with holding out, playing open mics, and focusing on her career, until she gets home and finds a rejection letter from Elektra Records. Then she rings her friend and asks about that blind date.
Despite Daryl’s protests, he and Jack go to the card game. Lo and behold, Jack gets four queens on his first hand and beats the full house of the guy in charge. Jack starts to excuse himself, taking the $1,500 pot, and Rick encourages him to stay beyond one hand. But Jack says it’s time for them to leave because the game is “too rich for my blood.”
And as fast as he can say “good guys don’t always finish last” to Daryl, two thugs jump them, take the money, and threaten to kill them if they ever return. It’s Daryl’s turn to be optimistic, but Jack loses something bigger than money in that fight. “Whenever that man had a choice between doing the right thing and doing the wrong thing, he always broke the wrong way, like clockwork. Every single time,” he sulks. “I tried to go the other way — be respectful to women, do my part in ‘Nam, be a good man. Look where it’s gotten me. When am I gonna get my break? They make this too hard, man.”
He announces his next plan, even worse than playing in that card game. He’s going to go back to the bar next week and reclaim his winnings by stealing them out of the register while Daryl keeps the ancient bartender on the phone. “I’m going to take the life I was supposed to have,” fumes Jack, “instead of waiting for it to come find me.”
While he’s waiting for the bartender to ready the drop, he finds the note about the blind date in his pocket and realizes he missed it. Rebecca arrives first for the blind date, and you think Jack is busy robbing a joint, but eventually a boring finance guy named Ethan shows up, explaining that he’s late because he locked his keys in his office like a dope. Somewhere after he concludes his speech on the difference between mergers and acquisitions, she calls an end to the date because she needs to get back to that song in her heart. Turns out that open mic is at Ray’s, and just as Jack is about to make his move, he hears a few bars of “Moonshadow” and catches Rebecca’s eye — and the rest is Pearson family history. (And now we know why he bought a necklace for her with a lunar charm.)
’90s Rebecca and Jack
The episode picked up where it left off last week — with Jack driving to Rebecca’s first show while pounding beers. Luckily, he makes it in one piece, but he immediately starts putting in orders for more beer-and-bourbons at the bar. He’s so intent on getting hammered that he doesn’t see Rebecca walk past on her way to call home on the pay phone after Sam, er, Ben made a pass at her in her dressing room. She put the kibosh on that immediately, BTW. But it turns out Jack was right all along about Ben having ulterior motives, and she leaves a message on the Pearson answering machine telling him how much she misses him and wishes they were together. Rebecca was nervous about the big crowd (“More than I have sung in front of in 15 years!”) and about looking like a mom playing dress-up and about missing ER. (Weren’t we all back then?)
Once he is good and stumbling, Jack finally decides to hunt down his wife. As he wanders around behind the scenes, he finds Ben instead. Ben mistakenly thinks Rebecca has said something about the attempted kiss and tries to tell Jack that he should not punish her because he crossed the line. Punches are thrown, faces bloodied, and when she returns to the room, Rebecca is not happy about having to break up a fight or drive Jack’s wasted butt home. Ben pleads with Rebecca to stay, saying they are on in 20 minutes, and she shuts it down: “It’s all over, Ben.”
Rebecca and Jack drive home in silence, but once they get back to Pittsburgh and she hands him frozen peas for his aching hand, the gloves come off. He promises to apologize and fix it with Ben in the morning, but she wants to know how long the drinking has been happening and if he’s driven the kids while intoxicated. “That would be some way to leave us…”
He argues that it is just a relapse and he’ll get help. She argues that he isn’t a real drunk. She charges: “You drank too much for one year seven years ago and you stopped cold turkey. But I do find it convenient that this alcoholism of yours has suddenly rematerialized at the exact same moment that I finally have something happening for myself.”
He tries to change the subject to what Ben did and whether she reciprocated, and when that sends her fleeing the table, he tries to persuade her to just let it all out. “Go ahead and say out loud that we don’t fulfill you.” OK, fair enough. Rebecca feels like a ghost because she has no life: “I am a housewife to three teenagers who don’t need me anymore, and I have a husband who waltzes in at 8, if I’m lucky, goes to the kitchen, recaps his day, and passes out at 10. You wanted a house. You wanted kids. I followed. You hated the fact that I was singing again. You didn’t want me to have a career.”
“You are a 40-year-old woman singing covers in pubs. That is not a career!” he bellows. His rage reminds her of his father. Jack has gripes of his own about everything he has sacrificed and how, despite “supporting this family financially and emotionally” and giving her everything she ever wanted, he’s “still being attacked for not being supportive.”
“This is insane. We love each other,” he says, as he seems to suddenly grasp how ugly the fight has become. But Rebecca has a question: “What do you love about me as I am right now, not the me that you’ve conjured up in your mind over the years? The next time you tell me you love me, make sure you’re not doing it out of habit.”
She excuses herself to go to bed, and he doesn’t follow. She finds him awake on the couch, and he starts to apologize. “I know you feel bad,” says Rebecca. “I feel terrible. We may have hated what we said, but we meant it and can’t pull it back in the light of day. Go stay with Miguel for a while. Give us some air.”
He doesn’t have a lot of fight left in him, and he agrees to go to her future husband’s house but first wants to answer the question she posed the night before. He starts by explaining that he stood some poor girl up the night they met and has never wondered who she was.
Then Jack says, “I love the mother you are. I love that you are still the most beautiful woman in any room, and you laugh with your entire face. I love that you dance funny, not sexy. I love that you are still the same woman who ran out of a blind date because she simply had to sing. You are not just my great love story. You were my big break. I can’t go back to who I was before I met you. And our love story … is just getting started.”
He throws in a trademark Jack wink and walks out the door as she fondles her necklace.
Us
Although the big three were absent for almost the entire finale, the writers wove them in at the very end, as Jack was giving his big speech. It gave viewers a mixed bag of closure and cliffhanger, since it will be a while before we see the present-day Pearsons again.
As Jack is headed over to Miguel’s, Rebecca worries about what they will tell the kids. He offers, “The truth. That we had a fight and we both need a minute to catch our breath.” Then she worries that they’d screw them up, and Jack launches into a monologue that coincides with what is happening with the 2017 versions of his children. “The kids are going to be fine. We’ve shown them a healthy marriage. This is going to be a blip on their radar years from now. We’re their parents. We do the best we can, but at the end of the day what happens to them, how they turn out, that’s bigger than us.”
“Sometimes they’ll make good decisions,” says Jack, as we see Kate looking at a photo of her mom singing back in the day and telling Toby that she wants to sing for a living now that they’re back in L.A. “Sometimes bad decisions,” continues Jack, as we see Kevin saying goodbye to Sophie as he leaves for his meeting with Opie. Kevin shrugs off the meeting, saying he probably won’t get the job, but Sophie says she wants him to get it — even though she’s clearly worried he’ll break her heart again.
“And every once in a while, they’re going to do something that is going to knock us off our feet, something that exceeds even our wildest dreams.” That nugget coincides a scene of Randall placing a photo of William in the photo album alongside old ones of the Pearsons. After looking nostalgically at them, he shuffles into the bedroom and announces to his wife that he wants to adopt a baby.
This Is Us will return to NBC next fall for Season 2. Watch clips and full episodes of This is Us at Yahoo View.
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