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Jan 8, 2024 · Stream It Or Skip It: ‘This Is Us’ On Netflix, The Emmy-Winning NBC Series Comes To The Biggest Streamer For The First Time. By Joel Keller @ joelkeller. Published Jan. 8, 2024, 4:30 p.m. ET ...
May 25, 2022 · In the penultimate episode, the kindly doctor that delivered the Big Three, played by Gerald McRaney, employed baseball terminology in reassuring Rebecca, “No perfect games in parenting. Not ...
- Saying goodbye to one of TV’s greatest melodramas.
- Best Reviewed TV Shows of 2022
- What's your favorite season of This Is Us?
- The Biggest New TV Shows and Seasons Coming in 2022
- Verdict
By Siddhant Adlakha
Updated: May 25, 2022 7:06 pm
Posted: May 25, 2022 6:58 pm
The following contains full spoilers for This Is Us Season 6, which wrapped up on May 24 on NBC.
Tasked with wrapping up some of the show’s most emotionally charged stories, the final season of This Is Us — the non-linear NBC family melodrama — takes a winding and unconventional approach, but one that feels perfectly in tune with the series. The plot, essentially, concludes about two-thirds of the way through the final block of 18 episodes, paving the way for a fantastic run of focused, cathartic chapters that proved, week after week, why the show is so beloved. When things finally come to a close (in the quietly devastating series finale, simply titled “Us”), the result is as moving and satisfying as it is mysterious and poetic.
The season kicks off with flashbacks to the Challenger Disaster, the televised 1986 explosion of a NASA space shuttle. Pearson parents Jack (Milo Ventimiglia) and Rebecca (Mandy Moore) have to navigate the wildly different reactions of their elementary school-aged children, Kevin, Kate, and Randall (played, in this timeline, by young actors Kaz Womack, Rose Landau, and Caron Coleman), in a self-contained, life-lessons style story typical of This Is Us, but it’s also a subtle roadmap to the rest of the season.
As shots of the pre-launch Challenger play on a classroom television, the siblings watch on with excitement, but we, the audience, know what’s about to happen. There’s little we can do — no character we can reach out to, hope as we might — as things hurtle towards disaster. Season 6 functions much the same way. Flash-forwards in prior seasons have shown us that, in the present, the already fraught long-distance marriage of Kate (Chrissy Metz) and Toby (Chris Sullivan) — who got together in the pilot after meeting at a weight loss support group — won’t last much longer, and that Rebecca’s Alzheimer’s will get much, much worse in future episodes. The cards have been on the table for some time; these outcomes are inevitable, and there’s little we can do but prepare, as the show’s most vital facets are threatened. This Is Us has always been about love and memory, and the horrible idea that these things might be lost looms over the proceedings. The Pearson kids have already lost their father by the time the series starts, and the thought of losing another parent is almost too much to bear.
Of course, this doesn’t prevent This Is Us from remaining one of the funniest shows on television. All it means is that it needs to strike a more careful balance — which it does. Randall (Sterling K. Brown), the Pearson adoptee, has a particularly tough time coming to terms with his own adopted daughter Deja (Lyric Ross) trying to carve her own path and move in with her boyfriend Malik (Asante Blackk), a plot that unravels delicately for the teenage couple, and hilariously for the most high-strung of the “Big Three” siblings, as Randall wrestles between his discomfort — with the help of some vintage banter from his quick-witted wife Beth (Susan Kelechi Watson) — and his desire to ensure Deja has a bright future. All the while, Randall is also forced to accept his helplessness to change his mother’s condition as it worsens.
In some ways, they’ve already lost Rebeca. Moore has spent years playing a dignified older version of the character, but her glassy-eyed expression through much of Season 6 proves difficult for the kids to accept. Since she’s also their living connection to the little family rituals of the past (Jack was always one for tradition), it feels like what little part they still have of their father is being lost as well. However, as they go on to learn, these little moments are things they’ll inevitably carry forward too, with their own kids, as they finally try and fill their parents’ enormous shoes.
In the penultimate episode — which plays particularly like the series finale of a more bombastic show, but This Is Us knows better than to end on some romanticized crescendo — two key elements from earlier in the series make a comeback. The first is the long-dead William (Ron Cephas Jones), Randall’s biological father. The show’s events kicked off when Randall first tracked William down, and he became a surprisingly large part of the Pearsons’ lives. This episode, “The Train,” is about the Pearsons gathering to say their goodbyes to Rebecca as she slips away; in her mind, she sees this process as walking through a train and revisiting people from her past. William’s return, in this imagined construct, is a warm and welcoming presence, as well as a testament to the way This Is Us has balanced Randall’s story as a man caught between his adopted and biological lineage. Perhaps this is some imagined version of the peace Randall hopes his mother will feel at the very end.
The idea of the big picture bookends the entire season.
“
The second element the show brings back is a subtle one: an abstract, Jackson Pollock-esque painting which William points out to Rebecca aboard the train. First appearing in Season 1, it was painted by Kevin, and composed of many overlapping streaks of color; Kevin once compared the individual layers of this painting to people and experiences, which one could step back and observe as an overlapping collage of life itself. The “big picture,” so to speak.
This idea of the big picture bookends the entire season. When it begins, we know where things will end up to some degree (both for the Pearsons in the present, on their way to divorce and disease, and for the kids in the flashback as they eagerly await the Challenger launch). In the final episode, the trio is left to deal with their mother’s passing, and Randall in particular has trouble seeing beyond his mourning. The episode’s flashbacks (featuring the welcome return of Parker Bates, Mackenzie Hancsicsak, and Lonnie Chavis as tween Kevin, Kate, and Randall for the first time this season) don’t follow some grandiose event en route to one of Jack’s life lessons. Rather, they follow a simple, rainy day — an unremarkable day, and a pretty bad one for young Kevin and Randall — during which Jack, Rebecca, and Kate just want to play, and watch old home videos, which the boys readily reject.
The sixth and final season of This Is Us has the impossible task of wrapping up some emotionally enormous storylines, but does it so successfully and unconventionally. The Pearson family deals with inevitable divorce and death, but the show’s final episodes bring the big picture of their lives fully into view, with some truly meaningful long-form s...
- Siddhant Adlakha
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This Is Us. Watch This Is Us with a subscription on Hulu, Netflix, or buy it on Fandango at Home, Prime Video. The Pearson family's generational story unfolds in this emotional drama. In moments ...
- Milo Ventimiglia
- TV-14
- 6
This Is Us: Created by Dan Fogelman. With Milo Ventimiglia, Mandy Moore, Sterling K. Brown, Chrissy Metz. A heartwarming and emotional story about a unique set of triplets, their struggles, and their wonderful parents.
- (153K)
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May 24, 2022 · In the series finale, titled “Us” and written by Fogelman, the episode plays out in two timelines. In the present/future timeline, the Big Three are laying mother Rebecca Pearson to rest ...
May 25, 2022 · Following the tried-and-true “This Is Us” formula, the last episode weaves together the present and the past. In the future, it’s Rebecca’s funeral and the Big Three — Randall, Kate and ...
