This Is Us celebrates young love and mature romance
Deja and Nicky take parallel road trips and reach major turning points
“Are you going to be a problem, sir?”
“Absolutely.”
The Pearsons are a lot. It’s one of the reasons This Is Us is a polarizing show. If you’re not able to get onboard with the over-the-top way they show love, the series can be off-putting in its melodramatic grand gestures. It’s hard to sympathize with characters who do objectively insane things like Google stalk old flings from the 1960s and then show up at their house completely unannounced. But, to its credit, “One Giant Leap” uses its two central romantic road trips to undercut the show’s usual storytelling mode.
Save for a quick opening line from Randall, the Big Three are almost entirely absent from this episode—both in the past and the present. Instead, it’s Nicky, Rebecca, and Miguel who take center stage in one storyline and Deja and Malik in the other. That gives “One Giant Leap” a different feeling than your average This Is Us episode. Deja’s secret trip to visit Malik primes us for melodrama only to serve up something wonderfully understated instead. And Nicky’s impulsive road trip to see Sally promises rom-com fantasy only to deliver a much more realistic take on romance and romanticism.
On paper, there’s a lot to like about “One Giant Leap” and the way it contrasts young love and mature romance in order to celebrate the beauty of both. In practice, however, it’s an episode that never fully gelled for me. That could just be because I spent most of its runtime reeling at the absolute insanity of Nicky, Rebecca, and Miguel showing up on Sally’s doorstep after finding her address online. (That’s some impressive internet stalking from Nicky considering how common her name is and how limited his tech skills are.) But I also think “One Giant Leap” struggles to find the right balance between showing and telling when it comes to exploring its central themes of age and romance.
Let’s start with the Deja storyline, which is the simpler of the two. Though Deja pulls the classic teen move of telling her parents she’s staying with a friend when she’s actually heading off to visit her boyfriend, this is otherwise an episode that emphasizes Deja’s maturity. She doesn’t lose her cool when Malik’s ex-girlfriend Jennifer greets her with a passive aggressive cold shoulder. And she’s gracious and understanding when it comes to the fact that Malik needs to spend some of her visit finishing his Harvard classwork.
Across the board, the Deja throughline is a wonderfully mature story about a teenage girl tentatively but purposefully taking a step towards adulthood—including deciding to have sex for the first time. For a show with so many different coming-of-age stories, I’ve always found it curious that This Is Us has never really focused on this particular milestone before. Here the show does Deja’s experience justice by underplaying it rather than overplaying it. I was reminded of the gentle ease of Jack and Rebecca’s road trip back in “Sometimes,” although the simplicity of Deja’s story also makes it somewhat of an odd contrast with the more heightened Nicky stuff.
While teenage Deja is growing up, 70-something Nicky is in full-on lovesick teenager mode. Though “One Giant Leap” is a spiritual sequel to the Nicky-centric episode “One Small Step,” it rivals “The Dinner And The Date” in terms of This Is Us cringe comedy. After their surprise arrival, Nicky, Rebecca, and Miguel quickly learn that Sally’s memories of Nicky are hazy at best and she’s married to a man named Eric. Nevertheless, the Pearson cohort are invited to stay for “the most awkward meal of all time,” where a conversation about the mental load of “sweating the small stuff” builds into a painfully raw sharing of long repressed feelings and frustrations.
I did enjoy how Nicky’s adventure is sort of hijacked by Rebecca, who winds up bonding with Sally about the difficulties of aging. They were both glamorous women of the 1960s and ’70s who have struggled to maintain the same sense of self-confidence as they’ve aged into older, more reserved versions of themselves. With the bond of a shared experience but the frankness of strangers, Rebecca and Sally are able to inspire each other to push past their insecurities and start doing things like taking self portraits and salsa dancing again. Yet while it’s lovely to see this kind of empathetic portrait of aging depicted onscreen, I struggled to fully invest in the emotions of a storyline with such a strange set-up.
At least “One Giant Leap” doesn’t give Sally and Nicky an idealized decade-spanning star-crossed love story, which might have been just a touch too saccharine even for this show. Instead, the trip grants Nicky a different sense of peace and closure. He realizes that the years he spent pining for Sally gave him a sliver of hope in his darkest moments. And the fact that he made her wall of old photographs is meaningful enough. Finally freed from the burden of unrequited love, Nicky finds himself open to a spark with a flight attendant named Edie, who does wind up being the person he’s married to in the future—another solid endpoint that feels slightly marred by the clunky path it took to get us there.
Where this episode really soars, however, is in its low-key celebration of Miguel—just about the only man in the Pearson family’s orbit who isn’t a lot to deal with. Miguel truly puts Rebecca first in a way that even Jack, with his showily performative love, never quite did. It’s why Miguel can barely even process Rebecca’s concern that instead of getting the “showroom model” of her, he got the “used classic with a lot of miles.” Rebecca is worried she’ll become a burden as she starts to lose her memories. But to Miguel, this is just another part of the life and love they’ve carved out together—one where he’s still happy to be the steady support system he’s always been. Creator Dan Fogelman has promised that we’ll finally see Rebecca and Miguel’s full love story in this final season. Now that’s a road trip I can’t wait to take.
Stray observations
- This episode made me realize that I’ve totally lost track of how old Deja is supposed to be at this point. I’m also a little confused about Rebecca’s age too. She talks about being “in her 60s” like it was a long time ago, but if she was supposed to be about 30 when she and Jack had the triplets in 1980, wouldn’t she only be 71 or 72 today?
- “How was breakfast at Tiffany’s? haha” is an absolutely perfect Randall dad text.
- A poster in Deja’s room suggests she’s a fan of the Freeform TV series Good Trouble, and I just want to commend her on her excellent taste. It’s one of my favorites too.
- I love that you can tell Tess knows Deja’s true road trip plan by the way she hugs her and wishes her good luck.
- It’s weird to have Sally get into that big fight with her husband in the same episode that also confirms Nicky is married to Edie in the future. Are we supposed to be wondering whether Sally is still going to reenter Nicky’s life in some way?