Capping off a season that’s contained more than its fair share of heartbreak, including a painful divorce and two major deaths, the promo for “Us“ leaves the impression that the finale will provide a peaceful coda to the series, allowing viewers to simply rest and remember why we love this family so much, before we say goodbye. Here’s what we have to look forward to in the This Is Us series finale.
Is there a promo for the series finale of This Is Us?
The extended promo for “Us” plays its cards close to the vest, consisting mostly of callbacks to previous episodes of the series, although we do get a few glimpses of what to expect in the final episode. It opens with an idyllic scene of Jack (Milo Ventimiglia) and Rebecca (Mandy Moore) pushing the elementary-aged Big Three on a swing set, before cutting to the couple having a heart to heart while lying in bed. “Really wish that I had spent more time appreciating it when it was all happening instead of just worrying about when it would end,” Rebecca muses. The promo then cuts back to Rebecca’s “birthday suit” dance for Jack from the pilot episode, and the first shot of the Big Three in their knitted yellow onesies and Jack’s “Big Three” chant that his kids have carried with them all their lives. We then see a shot of the house fire and the Big Three sharing a park bench in Season 2, while Kevin was in rehab. “You have changed the way I think about love,” Jack tells Rebecca as we flash back to their wedding day. The promo then shifts focus to Randall (Sterling K. Brown), revisiting him on the day William (Ron Cephas Jones) died, and the day Kevin came to his office to help him through a panic attack. Then it’s Kate’s (Chrissy Metz) turn. “Hey, Dad, this is Jack. This is your grandson,” she says, with the promo cutting to the day her son was born. “I’m not worried about forgetting about the big stuff,” an older but still lucid Rebecca says, as the promo cuts to brief clips of her spending time with her children throughout the years. “It’s the little things. That’s the stuff I’m not ready to let go of yet.” “I can see where it’s all heading now,” Randall says over images of him and his siblings with their mother in her final minutes. “And it’s all headed there so fast.” “What are you supposed to do with that?” he asks Beth (Susan Kelechi Watson) at Kate’s second wedding. “Only thing you can do, baby,” she says. “You dance.” And sure enough, there are Cassidy (Jennifer Morrison) and Kevin, each dancing with the children, and then Jack kissing Rebecca as the promo promises us that “this will be one unforgettable goodbye.” “If you step back,” William says in his moving final speech to Rebecca from the penultimate episode, “you’ll see that the end is not sad. It’s just the start of the next incredibly beautiful thing.” As he speaks, we see short snippets of all sorts of moments from the Pearson family’s life, which appear to take place after Rebecca’s death: Beth and Randall in bed, Kate smiling at a photo of her and Rebecca at Kate’s second wedding, Kevin and Sophie (Alexandra Breckenridge) both dressed in black and picking out a tie, possibly for Rebecca’s funeral. But the trailer doesn’t linger in those sad moments, cutting to moments of smiles and laughter with the family over the years—teenage Déjà (Lyric Ross) and Tess (Eris Baker), the adult Big Three, a divorced Toby (Chris Sullivan), a young Jack and Miguel (Jon Huertas), a pregnant Madison (Caitlin Thompson)—before lingering on Jack and Rebecca with the preteen Big Three at the pool. “Try and appreciate the moments. I mean that’s what we’re doing, just collecting these little moments,” Jack says as he teaches his sons to shave in front of the bathroom mirror. The last bit of his voiceover accompanies Jack and Rebecca with the kids around the breakfast table, as Jack makes his family laugh by donning a pancake mask. “And we spend the rest of our lives looking back, trying to remember.”
What happened in Season 6 Episode 17 of This Is Us?
In a lot of ways, the penultimate episode of This Is Us felt like it served as a sort of series finale, with Pearson matriarch Rebecca taking her last breaths at the end of a full and meaningful life. Since the first episode, Rebecca, more than any other character, has been the glue that has held this series together as the only character to have appeared in nearly every timeline always played by the same actor. With her passing, it truly feels as though this chapter of the Pearson family’s saga has come to a close, although as we hear in the episode, an ending of one thing is always the beginning of something else. Episode 17, titled “The Train,” was split between three main stories: the Pearson family gathering by Rebecca’s bedside on her final night, Rebecca‘s perception of her final hours as she moved through a train populated by the meaning for people in her life; and a new character named Marcus (Luke Forbes) who was in a terrible car accident in the ’90s and grew up to perform cancer research. In the first, we listened to the Pearsons share their memories of Rebecca, and got to see a few of their goodbyes, including Beth confiding in her mother-in-law that she has always been her parenting role model. We also finally learned the identity of the father of Déjà‘s baby, who turned out to be Malik! Upon learning that Déjà was pregnant, he told her that he loved her and wanted to marry her (making us wonder if we might be treated to their wedding in the series finale). We also learned where Kate has been all this time: in London presenting the music curriculum she developed in preparation for it being adopted internationally. When Rebecca‘s nurse tells Randall and Kevin that Rebecca may not make it through the night, the Big Three worry that Kate may not make it home in time to say goodbye, but Rebecca holds on long enough to say goodbye to her “Bug.” Once Kate rushes in the next morning and tells Rebecca that she loves her, Rebecca is finally able to let go, and passes away peacefully with her children by her side. Then, in Rebecca‘s perspective, she is young and in full control of her faculties once again, dressed glamorously in red as she waits for someone aboard a luxurious train car. She hasn’t waited long before William appears before her, and persuades her to join him as he guides her further into the train. As Rebecca moves through the cars, she sees they are populated with her memories of the past, including her memory of her father when she was young, and her sons at several different points in their lives. This is also how she experiences her family‘s goodbyes to her as they sit by her bedside, seeing some of them sitting in train cars while others appear as voices over the loudspeaker. In the bar car, Rebecca has a particularly emotional discussion with Dr. K (Gerald McRaney), the man who delivered her babies. As she looks back over her life and her parenting, she voices her concerns about whether she’s done enough. Dr. K assures her that although no parent is perfect, she lived a marvelous life, and has earned her rest. But as Rebecca prepared to enter the caboose, she hesitated, realizing that Kate still had not arrived and refusing to follow William any further until her daughter was present. But when Kate’s voice finally came over the loudspeaker, Rebecca was finally ready for the end, although she observed to William that it was quite sad. However, William encouraged her to shift her perspective, seeing it not as something sad, but as confirmation that what she was leaving behind was truly worthwhile. And he suggested that if she were to consider the bigger picture, she might realize that all endings were also beginnings, and sometimes those beginnings could lead to something beautiful. Which brings us to the Marcus storyline, which took most of the episode to fully understand. It turns out that on the night his family got into their car accident, the Pearson family home burned down, and both families headed to the same hospital for treatment. While Marcus’s father (Dulé Hill) waited on news of his son, he happened to have a conversation with Jack, who was waiting to have his hands examined, unaware that he was minutes away from a fatal heart attack. When Marcus’ father expressed his deep worry for his son to Jack, Jack gave him a piece of advice that he once heard on the most painful day of his own life, when his son Kyle (the original third member of the Big Three) died: that even the sourest of lemons can be used to make something resembling lemonade. Shortly after that, we see that at the same time that Jack was dying in an examination room, Marcus was coding on the operating table, and the doctor that wasn’t there for Jack wound up saving Marcus’ life in those crucial moments. Later, as an adult, Marcus finds himself discouraged after his clinical trial is shut down, and heads to a restaurant to vent to his siblings. But his brother and sister urge him not to despair, laughing about their silly family motto, which their father loves to repeat to them: something about using sour lemons to make something resembling lemonade. Years later, much further into his professional career, we see Marcus being honored for his work advancing a promising new Alzheimer’s treatment, providing hope to countless other families like the Pearsons.
Are there any spoilers for the series finale of This Is Us?
Plot-wise, we still have very little idea what to expect from “Us,” although we imagine that it will cover the time immediately following Rebecca’s death as well as the years far into the future, perhaps revisiting Jack Damon (Blake Stadnik) as an adult, and hopefully some of the other Pearson children and grandchildren as well (Justin Hartley told The Hollywood Reporter that the final episode will go “10 or 12 years in the future” beyond Rebecca’s passing). We also can see in the promo that we’ll be treated to a few new flashbacks of the Big Three as children with Jack and Rebecca (and we’ve already known for a while now that some pieces of the finale were filmed years in advance). But while we may not know much about the story that will be told in the finale, the cast and creator have been more than happy to weigh in on how we might feel when it’s all over. Speaking to People, creator Dan Fogelman said, “I feel we’ve answered [the big] questions now, and we can live in the simple experience of being a family with this family. That was the goal here, and I think we set out to make an ending that felt like when you close a big giant, sprawling family novel. You feel sad because you realize the end of the book is getting thinner and thinner, and you’re running out of pages to read, because you’ve been so absorbed in the book. But hopefully when you close it, you also feel you’ve had a complete meal.” “I think this show hopefully will leave people with the feeling that, of course, has a little bit of melancholy in it, because it’s about loss and time, but it’s also something beautiful that I think is captured and said at the end of it all,” Fogelman went on. “I hope it speaks to people who have stuck with the show for six years. I’m excited and sad at the same time for the end, but I think it’s going to be really good.” Mandy Moore definitely thinks the finale will accomplish its goals, telling EW that after reading the script, she told Fogelman, “You stuck the landing, Dan. You really did. No one’s going to be disappointed.” Moore also cautioned fans not to expect a big event in the finale, saying that she felt the episode truly captured the themes of the series. “I think the simplicity of what’s in store for people in parts of this episode are what the whole series is really about,” Moore told EW. “People waiting for things to be tied up perfectly in a bow with every single character and every single story need to abandon that idea because that’s not the reality of life anyway. You finish telling one person’s story and it’s like, ‘Yeah, but they have children or they will continue having a life. And their children will have children will have children. This story could just go on forever and ever and ever.’ But having said that, the simplicity and the beauty of the quiet, simple seemingly mundane moments of this family’s life are going to feel like a warm hug for people.” Moore also thought that in the larger context of the series, “Us” will feel more like an epilogue, with “The Train” serving as a more traditional finale. When asked by The Hollywood Reporter if that was a good way to view the final two episodes, Moore said, “That’s a great way of viewing it. We’ve been through a lot, but we’re not going to end on that particular note. We’re going to inject a little bit more joy in your life to say goodbye.” Justin Hartley expanded on that idea of nothing ever really ending, telling The Hollywood Reporter that the finale is “not about what’s happening now, necessarily, but what’s in store for the future. Where these three are going and the tools that they have to help them navigate throughout all for the trials and tribulations that might come their way.” Chrissy Metz also hinted that “Us” will largely focus on the ongoing legacy of the Pearson family rather than trying to wrap up any one individual’s story. Speaking to Showbiz Cheat Sheet, Metz said, “I think that there will be a contentment in that there’s this ripple effect that our parents have on us and that we impart on our children. And it continues. I think that’s all we could ever hope for is that our kids are happier than we were. Their kids are happier than they are. At the core of who the Big Three are … these children are products of their environment. They are happy, and they have come through the pain to find the joy.” As to how we’ll feel once we’ve spent our last hour with the Pearson family? “I just wept like a baby,” Sterling K. Brown told Today. “I feel like our show’s already prone to inducing tears. I think (these) will be tears of satisfaction with how our story comes to an end.” Before sobbing your way through the finale, go back and revisit some of the best moments of the season with the This Is Us cast.
