This Is Us dives into that future wedding

Welcome to 2025! (Or maybe 2026?) After last week’s time-jump heavy Kate and Toby saga, This Is Us settles into a new era this week. That game-changing season five flashfoward to Kate and Philip’s wedding is now the present-day for the show. Kate and Toby have mended their post-divorce fence. Madison and Elijah are married with a nine-month-old baby. Randall is a U.S. Senator. Rebecca’s memory issues have become much more prominent. And Kevin is having a secret wedding weekend affair!

Whew. Like last week’s episode, “The Day Of The Wedding” is a lot to take in, especially on a first viewing. (I, for one, spent most of the episode panicked about whether this meant the series was going to casually sub out the actresses playing Randall and Beth’s daughters—although no news is probably good news on that front.) In fact, This Is Us seems to sense that its audience might find all these changes rather jarring, and tries to soften the blow with a low-stakes flashback storyline and some lighthearted comedy in the present, as Beth and Madison team up as super sleuths trying to suss out who Kevin hooked up with the night before.

Indeed, as Randall notes in his “equal parts sexy and depressing” wedding day speech, the rush of time can slow down a little bit on a special day. And This Is Us is smart to anchor all its big changes around two fairly low-key special days in the Pearson family’s life. Once you get past the jolt of the time jump, “The Day Of The Wedding” mostly manages to lock into that sweet specificity that This Is Us does so well. Plus we get an origin story for Jack’s moustache, and what could be more comfortingly familiar than that?

Though it’s Kate and Phillip’s big day, it’s really Rebecca who takes center stage this week, as Mandy Moore once again turns in one of those stellar dual timeline performances she makes look so effortless. Back in the 1980s, Rebecca tries to cope with losing her identity to the repetitive routine of being a stay-at-home-mom by making the classic mistake of an impulsive haircut. In the present, meanwhile, she’s grappling with increased memory issues, especially as the wedding shakes up her routine. (Routines are the theme of the week here.)

As with the season premiere, it’s nice that This Is Us finds ways to bring us into Rebecca’s experience of her own Alzheimer’s, rather than just looking at her condition from the outside in. There’s an effectively disorienting sequence where we see Milo Ventimiglia sub in for Justin Hartley as Rebecca mistakes her son for her long-dead husband, something Kevin has learned to just roll with. (Nicky whispering, “You okay kid?” made me cry.) As ever, This Is Us expertly navigates the line between brutal realism and cathartic uplift, culminating in Rebecca’s incredibly moving performance at the wedding reception, which I suspect jerked as many tears for the show’s audience as it did for Kate and Phillip’s wedding guests.

Indeed, on the surface, the wedding stuff seems to be where the main action is at this week, with the “Rebecca gets a bad haircut!” subplot as just a funny, low-stakes aside. But there’s actually quite a bit of fascinating character stuff built into that 1980s storyline too, which both emphasizes the sweet strength of Rebecca and Jack’s partnership and dances up against the central tension of their relationship too.

Because Jack had a deeply unstable childhood followed by an even more destabilizing experience in the Vietnam War, he finds comfort in the routine of a happy suburban family life. For Rebecca, however, that kind of conventional domesticity is exactly the thing she feared most growing up, which is why she spent so much of her youth rebelling against. As I discussed back in my review of the third season episode “Katie Girls,” Jack and Rebecca’s life together looks a lot more like his dream than hers. And I love when This Is Us highlights that bittersweet reality rather than pretending it doesn’t exist. Though this particular storyline resolves sweetly enough, this is the very same tension that eventually fuels Jack and Rebecca’s big blow-out fight from season one too.

But there’s an even more fascinating parallel at play this week between 1980s Rebecca and present-day Miguel, who are both struggling with losing their identities to caretaking roles. It’s the crucial yet largely invisible work that’s so often overlooked, even (and maybe especially) by those you’re closest to. Like Jack, the Big Three have a tendency to prioritize their own points of view to the detriment of everything else. And as Randall in particular hyperfocuses on his own stress over his mom’s health, he misses out on the fact that Miguel is the one actually dealing with this reality day-in-and-day-out.

In fact, there’s a double level of pain at play here: Not only does Miguel have to watch his wife’s decline, he also has to watch her constantly evoke the memory of Jack too—a reminder that there’s another formative relationship in her life to which he’ll never quite stack up. Jon Huertas is heartbreaking during Miguel’s explosive monologue about just wanting an hour of wine tasting to feel like a normal human being. And it’s nice to see this kind of story explored with a male caretaker in addition to a female one.

It’s good, nuanced character stuff to ground the time jumps and hook-up mysteries. And that’s reassuring as the show heads into the unknown for its final five (five!) episodes. To be honest, it still feels like we’ve got a ton of ground to cover in that short amount of time—not least of all Rebecca and Miguel’s courtship, which it feels absolutely bananas the show hasn’t covered yet. But first it’s time for This Is Us to play Mamma Mia! as the show jumps back to Kevin’s three potential paramours on “The Night Before The Wedding.”

Stray observations

• I could maybe buy Randall transitioning his alderman position into a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives, but a senator? That’s beyond just being a “rising star,” that’s basically an unprecedented political journey
• Love the idea of them sharing make-up, but Kevin and Madison absolutely do not have the same skin tone.
• Phillip makes a nice impression this week. And if you squint, you can kind of see what the show is getting at with the idea that he and Kate have a more open, frank communication style than the one she had with Toby.
• I’m very confused by the big Pearson family wedding photo: Kevin’s twins are in it, but not Randall’s kids or Kate’s own children?!?
• After Kate’s brothers walked her down the aisle at her first wedding, it’s very sweet to see Miguel given that honor at her second.
• As in “Sometimes,” This Is Us pulls the neat trick of taking one of the show’s main musical themes and turning it into a song for Rebecca—thus weaving the musical fabric of the series into its storytelling in a whole new way.
• I’m genuinely impressed that the wig department managed to find a hairstyle that Mandy Moore can’t pull off.
• If the floral wrap belongs to Cassidy, I’m guessing the song lyrics are from the wedding singer and the bra belongs to Sophie—who will end up being “the one.” Her being the only one to laugh at Kevin’s Princess Bride-themed wedding toast echoes the time she was the only one to laugh at his Mr. T impression at their middle school talent show.