‘This is Us’ Super Bowl episode will obliterate your soul
Warning: This review contains spoilers
If the New England Patriots losing to the Philadelphia Eagles didn’t have much of an effect on you, —side-eyeing all of you Philly fans—the special “This is Us” episode that premiered right after Sunday’s game surely had to have ripped your heart out, spit on it and stomped all over it with shoes made out of glass.
The episode, respectively titled “Super Bowl Sunday,” finally revealed beloved TV dad Jack Pearson’s (Milo Ventimiglia) fate, which is the elephant in the room that fans have been waiting to be acknowledged for almost two whole seasons. I know, take a minute to breathe. Or two. Maybe bring your inhaler? Never mind, just take the day off work.
For those of you who are unfamiliar with the show, football is a huge deal in the Pearson household. The episode started off with a flashback from that fateful night of the Super Bowl that happened thirty-something years ago, switching back to scenes of the present, and how Rebecca (Mandy Moore) Kate (Chrissy Metz) Kevin (Justin Hartley) and Randall (Sterling K. Brown) all spend their Super Bowl Sunday in real time. The way Rebecca spends hers, of course, making Jack’s favorite dish, lasagna, and watching the game was the most heart-wrenching of them all to watch. Let’s not even get started on the two laughs thing.
In true “This is Us” fashion, the story of how Jack’s death happened was not exactly what fans were expecting. In the episode prior, we learned it definitely had to do with their Crock-Pot that had a finicky switch, gifted to them from the family who used to live in their house, and a battery-less smoke detector.
Naturally, fans thought they knew what lied ahead in the next episode but boy, were they wrong. When Jack realized that the house was on fire in this episode, he managed to safely get himself, Rebecca, Kate, Randall and their dog Louie (surprise!) along with a bag of family memories out of the house, which is not we all saw coming.
It is a sense of relief that we finally know how Jack’s death happened after spending countless amounts of hours putting together pieces of the puzzle every week. But at the same time, it is vastly unsettling. It feels like there’s nothing to live for anymore. What happens now? I imagine this this is how the characters in the show feel, especially Rebecca, whose performance during the hospital scene shook me to my rotting core. The pain she exuded was unforgettable.
I don’t know about you, I will never look at a Crock-Pot the same way again.