Warning: Spoilers ahead from the season finale of “This Is Us”
Well, Jack (Milo Ventimiglia) didn’t die. But his marriage to Rebecca (Mandy Moore) nearly did in the first-season finale of NBC’s “This Is Us.”
In a poignant hour that captured how this super-couple met — by what Bob Dylan would call a simple twist of fate — and many years later came to a crossroads that drove them apart, creator Dan Fogelman helmed his most narratively ambitious episode yet, managing more timelines than an H.G. Wells time machine but telling his story with a grace that made everything seamless and proving again that you don’t have to blow the budget or hire CGI wizards to make a great TV drama.
Just as the “Memphis” episode showcased two actors (Sterling K. Brown and Ron Cephas Jones), the finale focused on Ventimiglia and Moore. The wonderful journey this series has had with fans began with them and it is fitting that the season should end with them, centering on a believable conflict that derives from Jack and Rebecca’s differences as two adults from widely different backgrounds.
Their journey culminated in Rebecca’s gig singing with a bar band on a five-state tour. Seeing his wife spend time away from the family with Ben (Sam Trammell, playing sincere and sleazy at the same time), an old flame of brief duration, was the one bridge Jack would not cross and his instinct is proved correct. Ben puts the moves on Rebecca backstage and she is amusingly put out. Did she really think he liked her singing that much? When Ben inadvertently tells Jack, who has arrived drunk at the club looking for his wife, that he “crossed the line,” Jack hits him and the wheels are set in motion for the breach in the Pearson marriage.
While their argument, conducted at home after Rebecca walks out on the gig to drive her inebriated husband out of harm’s way, is not in the scorched-earth realm of Tony and Carmela on “The Sopranos,” it cuts pretty deep for network TV. Recriminations are flung about how Jack and Rebecca have disappointed each other, but she really strikes a chord when she tells him “I’m a freaking ghost” now that her teenage children no longer need her. After all the shouting is over, Jack sleeps on the couch and in the morning, Rebecca calmly asks him to bunk with his friend Miguel for a while. It’s a devastating moment that’s all the more powerful because Moore never raises her voice.
Moore makes the most of her many fine scenes. She registers Rebecca’s innocence, hopefulness, disgust and resignation with equal, forceful measure. You love her when she has a moment of stage fright in her dressing room and confesses to Ben that she should not be singing but “watching ‘ER,’” and you feel her anger when she silently tosses a bag of frozen peas to Jack so he can keep his hand from swelling after punching Ben. Ventimiglia has been a pleasure to watch all season long, creating a believable family man, but here, in flashbacks with his friend Daryl (Jeremy Luke), we learn how lousy he feels being at home after the Vietnam War, unable to find a steady job. “They make this too damn hard,” he says.
The flashbacks work wonderfully well in showing how Jack and Rebecca turned it around for each other, meeting at the right time on the right night and going on to have the family that America fell in love with hook, line and sinker. There are sadder days to come next season, for sure, but with this moving season finale, “This Is Us” has prepared us for the inevitable: All good TV love stories come to an end.