‘This Is Us’ resists spiking Jack’s death
Well, it finally happened. After a season and a half of teases, red herrings and emotional flashbacks, This Is Us finally revealed to fans exactly how Jack Pearson (Milo Ventimiglia) died. On Super Bowl Sunday (and in an episode airing that night), the Pearson house caught fire because of a faulty slow cooker and a smoke alarm missing batteries. And after the family made it out OK, Jack went back inside for their dog, Louis, and family mementos. He died later at the hospital from a heart attack related to smoke inhalation.
For a show that relies on twists and turns, it wasn’t exactly a huge surprise, if only because so many details had already been revealed. Earlier this sea- son, fans learned about the fire, the batteries, and last week, the Crock-Pot (a plot twist that caused such a tizzy the company issued a defensive state- ment). In Season 1, Kate (Chrissy Metz) revealed that she blamed herself for his death, so fans speculated that Jack died rescuing the dog, which primarily belonged to her.
Although This Is Us is known for its big twists and fake-outs, at its core the show (like most) is about its characters. “Super Bowl Sunday” succeeded by focusing on Kevin (Justin Hartley), Kate, Randall (Sterling K. Brown) and Rebecca (Mandy Moore) in the present and past. By not drawing out Jack’s death even further, the episode managed to be
more about the different ways Jack’s family members experienced their grief, and not about tricking the audience.
It was the right way for the oftenfrustrating mystery to end.
As much hype as the series generated by dropping breadcrumbs on the trail to Sunday’s episode, it also occasionally turned what should have been an emotional story line into a puzzle that some fans were more eager to solve. It often felt that the clues and misdirections weren’t there to serve the story, but rather to pull off a big trick. The Season 1 finale suggested Jack would die in a drunk-driving accident, and the Season 2 premiere flashed back to the night of the fire but left Jack’s role in it opaque.
Mysteries are fun, but the best of This Is Us are the quieter, emotional episodes, not the tricky ones. Imagine if the staggeringly beautiful firstseason episode in which Randall’s biological father, William (Ron Cephas Jones), dies had tried to pull a baitand-switch?
Jack’s death is formative for the characters, as Kate, Kevin and Randall noted on the 20th anniversary of his death. It would have been cheap if the episode had, say, made his death unrelated to the fire or truly made it Kate’s fault. She didn’t force her father to go back into the house; he went back because that’s the kind of character the series has built, and viewers believed he would.
It wasn’t a twist; it was an emotional conclusion. And wherever the show goes from here, the ghost of Jack’s death won’t be haunting it anymore.
But if you love the twists, don’t worry. The writers couldn’t resist adding a little fake-out at the end with Randall’s daughter, Tess, revealing her future as a social worker. It’s still This Is Us, after all.