A tantalizing glimpse of the future
The Show: This Is Us, Season 2, Episode 1 The Moment: The dramatic reveal
Spoiler alert: This story contains spoilers for This Is Us.
Jack (Milo Ventimiglia) and Rebecca (Mandy Moore) have hit a rocky patch. She knocks on his door. He confesses that he’s a drinker, has been lying to her and needs to fix it on his own. He shuts the door.
She knocks again. “Get in the car,” she says. “If you have a problem we will fix it together.” He gets in the car. Cut to the (unspecified) future. Rebecca drives. We see a plastic bag of personal effects on the passenger seat. We see two of her teenage children crying on a sofa. We see her third teenager, Kevin, kissing a girl.
She pulls up to her house, steels herself to look out the car window, wails in anguish. The camera pulls back. We see her family home, burned to a crisp.
In the last moments of its pilot, this series pulled off a nifty trick: it revealed that the three kids we’d been watching were also the three adults we’d been watching, in alternating time frames.
Instantly, we were hooked; we had to see them get from A to B.
Mid-season, another bomb: we learn that Jack dies. We must stick around to see how.
With this episode, they’ve done it again. We now hunker down to see those clues explained.
In addition to mastering structure, this series also mastered tone, in its very title: This is us. We are you — the best version of you. Don’t you want to see what happens to us?
It’s noble. It’s sappy. It’s irresistible. This Is Us airs Tuesdays at 9 p.m. on CTV and NBC. Johanna Schneller is a media connoisseur who zeroes in on pop-culture moments. She usually appears Monday through Thursday.