This Is Us finally resolves Kevin’s love life

It’s an interesting thing to watch a TV show for an answer rather than an experience. For all its reputation for twists and turns, most of the time This Is Us is a nuanced family drama about deeply repressed people navigating the complexities of life. But every once and a while the show delivers an episode that really is just all about answering a single question: Will Randall and Beth get divorced? How did Jack die? Who will Kevin end up with?

To its credit, there were one or two moments in “The Night Before The Wedding” where I did start to doubt my steadfast confidence that it was always going to come back to Kevin and Sophie. Paralleling the wedding singer with Jack seeing Rebecca sing “Moonshadow” certainly had some full-circle resonance to it. And the way the first two-thirds of the episode totally downplay Cassidy definitely made her a candidate for a surprise third act reveal.

But once Nicky started talking about Dipsy Doodle pinball machines giving him an unexpected second shot, the deal was done. Sophie may have panicked during her wedding eve hook-up with Kevin, but that was just a bump in the rode to the happily ever after that’s been a long, long, long time coming. “You know, these things have a way of coming back around if they’re meant to be,” Randall told Malik back in “Every Version of You.” And that’s exactly what happens when Kevin and Sophie finally decide to rekindle their love all these years later.

On first viewing, the romantic suspense is enough to carry “The Night Before The Wedding”—especially once Sophie seems to officially remove herself as a romantic option two-thirds of the way through. But the thing about an episode designed to answer a question is that it can also feel a little hollow once it’s finally gotten around to its big reveal. So how does “The Night Before The Wedding” fare on that front? Well, it’s a bit of a mixed bag.

What works really well about this episode is the lovely chemistry that Justin Hartley generates with Alexandra Breckenridge and—in one brief scene at least—Jennifer Morrison. A lot of “The Night Before The Wedding” lives in the walking-and-talking romantic space of something like Richard Linklater’s Before trilogy. And the whole cast turn the charisma up to 11 to compensate for the relative simplicity of the episode’s storytelling.

On the platonic side of things, the scene of Kevin and Cassidy confessing their best friendship is so good it retroactively made me mad she hasn’t been a main cast member for the past two seasons. And the sequence of Kevin and Sophie silently making eyes across the rehearsal dinner bonfires is one of the sexiest things This Is Us has ever done. There’s a lived-in, slightly improvisational feel to a bunch of Kevin and Sophie’s interactions this week, which helps sell the idea of just how well they know each other. And the episode is smart to give their relationship the bulk of its screentime rather than shoehorning in equally long interludes for Cassidy and Arielle the wedding singer.

So what doesn’t work about “The Night Before The Wedding”? Well, most everything else. Though this episode seems to be screaming out for a structure that contrasts Kevin and Sophie’s messy divorce as 20-year-olds with their “we’re finally ready” love story at 45, “The Night Before The Wedding” chooses to keep things almost exclusively grounded in the present instead—using the subplots for Cassidy and Arielle in place of the show’s usual flashback structure. And that’s a bummer because what makes Kevin and Sophie so interesting as a couple is the lengthy, complicated history they’ve shared together. Though This Is Us is tailor-made to bring that history to life in the span of a single episode, for some reason it chooses not to here.

And there’s certainly no shortage of parallels to be drawn. Though the perfectly poetic depiction of Rebecca’s Alzheimer’s is starting to grate (you can pull that trick once, show!), her monologue to 20-year-old Sophie is intriguingly similar to the one Sophie’s mom gave 18-year-old Kevin back when he asked for her family’s engagement ring. “Kev, you’re gonna have huge success, and that’s gonna take you lots of places,” Claire (Jennifer Westfeldt) explained to her teenage son-in-law. “But I can’t give you that ring. Not yet. Your marriage is too new, and you’re too young. You got to earn it, baby doll.”

Indeed, “The Night Before The Wedding” offers a fascinating flipside to “A Hell Of A Week: Part Two,” the season four romantic walk-and-talk episode where Kevin came to comfort Sophie at her mom’s funeral. The fact that Kevin and Sophie didn’t wind up impulsively getting back together then is part of the reason they’re finally ready for each other now. Yet instead of drawing on any of that pre-established history, This Is Us invents an overly cutesy backstory about an elementary school valentine that Kevin has been carrying in his wallet for decades.

Again, it’s not bad exactly. There are enough charming interactions in this episode to keep it afloat, from Randall’s sweet pep talk, to Beth popping in to continue her hook-up investigation. And I get that at least part of the simplicity of this episode is meant to reflect the ease that Kevin and Sophie feel now that they’re finally (finally!) in sync with one another. But I’m worried that This Is Us is getting a little too soft as its heads towards its series finale. (Sophie getting divorced between the engagement party and the wedding feels awful tidy, for instance.)

Yes, it’s reassuring to know the Pearson family is going to be okay once we leave them behind in four weeks. But my biggest hope is that the show lives up to its artistic potential in each hour it has left. So let’s raise a toast to Kevin and Sophie. And then let’s raise a toast to This Is Us digging into thornier character stuff in its remaining episodes.

Stray observations

• People I briefly thought Kevin might end up with while watching tonight’s episode: Cassidy, Arielle the wedding singer, Madison, Zoe, a character we hadn’t met yet, no one, Phillip’s drunken cousin Oliver.
• I did think Sophie’s dress/boot combo was a little odd last week, so I like that there was a storytelling reason behind it.
• Overall, I’m enjoying this final season, but one of my big disappointments is how much the show has turned Nicky into a generic sitcom uncle. That’s another place where it feels like This Is Us is getting too soft in its storytelling.
• It’s weird how bland Kevin’s interactions with his kids are given how well the series usually writes Kevin and kids.
• On first viewing, I thought Kevin purposefully made Sophie spill her drink at Kate’s engagement party, but on rewatch I think it’s just supposed to be an example of how nervous and out-of-sorts he is. Regardless, it’s a strange little interlude to include.
• Whose go-to sound for fastfowarding is TiVo?