NBCHave you stopped crying your tears of joy and pain brought on by the Tuesday, Jan. 24 episode of This Is Us? No? Neither have we, but sorry to do this to you, but here come some more tears.
In the episode, "Three Sentences," viewers learned that Kevin (Justin Hartley) was married to Sophie (Alexandra Breckenridge)…Kate's (Chrissy Metz) childhood best friend! And he still loves her! Meanwhile, Kate went to a weight-loss camp and met a man who is very into her and also began to work through the pain of her father, Jack's (Milo Ventimiglia) death. Viewers were shown Jack's funeral for the first time and now you're crying again. The funeral revealed Jack died while the Big Three were teenagers.
We'll give you a moment to get some tissues.
While at camp, Kate has a breakthrough about her pain connected to her weight and that's when viewers got a flashback to the funeral. "Of course we don't know at this point how Jack has passed away, but surely that has affected her into her adulthood and all of the kids," Metz said in the This Is Us after show.
Creator Dan Fogelman told EW that he's "always known when Jack died."
"The how is going to take much longer to reveal. To me, even when you're watching the pilot, long before you knew Jack may not be in the picture in the present day, this family always felt loving and good but broken. You've got kids battling severe issues, whether it be Randall and his anxiety, and Kate with many things of self-confidence and weight, and Kevin has gone off to Los Angeles, and clearly there's strained relationships with Rebecca," he said. " There feels like there was a break somewhere, and it always felt to me, as I thought about this family, that something formative happened to them in those prominent late teenage years, when you're really becoming an adult, and getting boyfriends and girlfriends, and forming as a human being in full."
You will find out more about Jack's death as the season comes to a close. And don't forget, This Is Us has been renewed for two additional seasons.
"By the end of the season, you're going to know a lot of the details of the how and the ramifications of it. In terms of the detail of how he died, was it illness? Was it something tragic? Was it something else? You're not going to know that for a little bit because we want to show that in the show. So that's going to take a minute," Fogelman said.
Prepare yourself for more tears, and "darkness" Fogelman said. "It's dark, and there's some darkness that creeps into the show because that's what happens in life. We're not trying to be edgy or cool, but perfect people act imperfectly. A wonderful marriage faces serious tests. People get sick and die. So we can't just do a show where every week is this kind of emotional but very safe release. We also have to dive into the heavy stuff. So [in] the back half of the season, people are going to have to put on their seat belts a little bit. I just wrote the finale today and… it's a doozy."
As for the Kevin going to Sophie and proclaiming his love for her, seemingly out of nowhere, Hartley said, "I think that moment of ‘Oh my gosh, this is what I need to,' is not necessarily something that he just discovered, but it was something that was right there in front of him the whole time. He just wasn't brave enough to sort of figure it out."
This Is Us airs Tuesdays, 9 p.m. on NBC.
(E! and NBC are both part of the NBCUniversal family.)