This Is Us gives Jack a stunning showcase

When people talk about This Is Us being a sad show, they’re usually talking about the big moments. The dramatic deaths, heartwrenching fights, and tear-jerking reunions. But where This Is Us tends to hit me hardest is when it’s sad in small ways. After all, there’s something neat and tidy about melodrama, which tends to put a cathartic button on its big emotions. In real life, however, we seldom get that kind of closure. What we have instead are an accumulation of tiny, unresolved little hurts: Rushed conversations, unsaid feelings, unused figure skates.

“Don’t Let Me Keep You” is filled with those kinds of details, as 1986 Jack journeys to Ohio for his mother’s funeral and starts to reckon with just how complicated his relationship with her truly was. Though they spoke on the phone every Sunday at 6pm, theirs was a surface level connection. Marilyn was worried about being a bother. Jack was worried about opening up old wounds. Neither of them could quite bridge the gap over their traumatic years spent living in terror of Jack’s abusive dad Stanley.

This Is Us has always been a show about Jack’s deep sense of repression and how it trickled down to his family. And maybe more so than any other episode in the series, “Don’t Let Me Keep You” explicitly frames that repression as a response to Jack’s abusive childhood home. Learning to forget the past was his coping mechanism; the only way he could build a happier future with Rebecca and their kids. Yet in burying the past, Jack and Marilyn wound up inadvertently limiting their present too, living all but separate lives in the 13 years since Jack helped his mom leave his dad in December of 1972 and then moved her to Ohio to live with her cousin Debby (the wonderful Camryn Manheim) a few weeks later.

Given that This Is Us is usually strictly an East Coast/West Coast show, I have to commend the team behind “Don’t Let Me Keep You” for delivering some of the most accurate Midwestern representation I’ve ever seen. Planning funerals around mealtimes? That dark cat joke? The condiment caddy? Literally everything about Marilyn’s WWF-loving boyfriend Mike? It was all absolutely spot on—no one more so than Manheim, who gives Debby a no-nonsense frankness balanced out by an inherent warmth. She’s clearly a little pissed that Jack didn’t make more of an effort when Marilyn was alive; but she can also see how hard this all is for him too.

In fact, “Don’t Let Me Keep You” made me realize that in addition to his sense of repression, Jack’s other big defining trait is social awkwardness. It’s easy to forget because he’s so comfortable and confident around Rebecca and the kids, and because he has a natural talent for leadership that can mask his anxiety in the right setting. But watching him struggle to make small talk with his mom’s warm Midwestern friends confirms he’s a man who’s only really at ease in the comfort of his nuclear family. The triumph of Jack’s life is that he was able to find that comfort zone at all. The tragedy is just how limited it is.

Which brings me to the big qualm I had with this episode, which is its refusal to engage with Nicky as a part of Jack’s traumatic past too. I’ve always assumed that while Jack lied to Rebecca about his brother dying in Vietnam, he didn’t actively con his parents into thinking their son had died—if only because that’s a level of deception the show would’ve needed to explore way more in depth if it was the case. And, furthermore, I’ve always assumed that one of the reasons Jack’s mom wasn’t an active part of his life after he met Rebecca is because he needed to keep his two worlds strictly separate in order to keep up the Nicky lie. Yet instead of clarifying any of that, “Don’t Let Me Keep You” just elides the Nicky situation entirely in a way I found pretty unsatisfying.

For instance, though we get a compelling scene where a drunken Jack angrily calls his dad to tell him about Marilyn’s death, we don’t ever see Jack grapple with whether or not to tell Nicky about what happened. Nor do Debby or Mike bring up the idea of inviting Nicky to the funeral, which definitely raises questions about what Marilyn knew about her younger son post-war or at least what she told others about him. Instead of using Nicky as another fulcrum point in this episode’s exploration of the Pearson family’s repressive streak, “Don’t Let Me Keep You” just ignores him entirely.

It’s frustrating because this episode otherwise gets so much right about how repression works. The various scenes of Jack’s well-intentioned but stilted conversations with his mom are painful to watch because they feel so true to life. It’s easy to fall into patterns of the things you do and don’t talk about with your loved ones. And in the day-to-day reality of a busy life, it’s easy to take for granted the things you’ll miss the most when they’re gone. There’s joy in the fact that Jack and his mom were able to build happy, fulfilling lives for themselves after getting out from under Stanley’s influence. But there’s also irreparable sadness to the fact that they weren’t able to fully share those lives with each other.

This Is Us lets that bittersweet reality exist without trying to resolve it. In fact, just when I was starting to wonder if that heartwarming Big Three ice skating scene was too neat of a bow for this complicated story, “Don’t Let Me Keep You” swerves to deliver an absolute gutpunch of an ending. While serving his kids his favorite childhood meal of hot dogs and tomato soup, Jack suddenly remembers one of the happy childhood memories he’d buried along with the bad ones.

It’s only then that the full weight of what he’s lost truly hits him. “I don’t have a mom anymore,” Jack sobs to Rebecca in one of Milo Ventimiglia’s strongest acting moments to date. Then Jack does what so many parents have done over the years; he pulls himself together and goes back to being a happy dad for his kids. There’s an extra layer of poignancy at play here: Jack doesn’t know that he only has a limited number of years to make happy memories with his family before he’ll be taken from them too soon. But it’s a testament to his ability to break the cycle of abuse that the Big Three’s memories of their parents won’t have to be buried.

Stray observations

• Rebecca showing up just in time to save Jack’s eulogy is such a direct echo of Kevin doing the same thing for Sophie back in “A Hell Of A Week: Part Two,” that I’m now convinced Kevin and Sophie are endgame.
• The This Is Us writers have such a knack for writing kid dialogue. “Are these hot dogs?” / “Where’s the bun?” was a perfect depiction of how kids react to being served familiar foods in a new way.
• I loved that rotating shot at the bar, where Marilyn replaces Jack and then back again. Very elegantly done.
• Is this the furthest we’ve ever gotten into a season without seeing the teenage or middle school Big Three yet? Those 6-year-olds are really stealing the spotlight this year!
• “Okay, ma, don’t let me keep you.”