'This Is Us' Delivers Another Big Surprise
by EG
NBC's hit drama This Is Us has kept fans guessing all through its first season and beyond, mostly about Jack's mysterious past and future. In this week's episode a few more crucial pieces of Jack's family jigsaw puzzle fell into place, and they were surprising pieces. In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, the show's producers talked about how and why the story is unfolding the way it is. Read on to find out more, but beware of spoilers.
From the get-go, the sibling rivalry between Kevin (Justin Hartley) and Randall (Sterling K. Brown) has always been a large theme on This Is Us. However, audiences got a deeper glimpse of that history on Tuesday's latest installment of the NBC series.
The episode, titled "Brothers," unrolled three separate timelines over the course of its hour, focusing on Kevin's ongoing pain killer addiction and Randall's struggles to bond with his foster daughter Deja (Lyric Ross) in the current storyline, while in the past Jack (Milo Ventimiglia) took the boys camping in an attempt to unify them.
Meanwhile, Rebecca (Mandy Moore) received a call that Jack's father Stanley (Peter Onorati) was about to pass in his nursing home, leading her to visit and meet the man for the very first time as Jack purposely stayed away.
Finally, the story also veered several decades back to a young Jack, who was on a road trip with his dad to go fishing. With fresh bait in the car, his father veered from the trip to refresh himself at a local tavern with several drinks instead, leaving Jack alone with the worms wondering when his father would return. Except, as the final scenes of the episode showed, Jack wasn't alone; his never-before-seen brother Nicky was asleep in the backseat. Later, the episode also revealed that Nicky accompanied Jack to Vietnam, although his current fate is unknown.
To delve a little deeper into this latest revelation and find out why now, THR spoke with episode directors and executive producers John Requa and Glenn Ficarra.
Find out what the producers had to say at The Hollywood Reporter.
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