“A Father’s Advice,” the season two premiere of This Is Us, was mostly dedicated to walking back the events of the season one finale.
Kate Pearson (Chrissy Metz) wants to be a singer? Too bad. She stinks. Randall Pearson wants to adopt another child? Well, maybe he should have talked about it more with his wife. Kevin Pearson (Justin Hartley) is starring in a Ron Howard movie? Hey, look, there’s Ron Howard in a one-shot cameo!
The episode even walked back the separation between Jack (Milo Ventimiglia) and Rebecca (Mandy Moore) Pearson back in the ‘90s — with the two vowing to face down the problems creating rifts in their marriage because that’s what married people do. (At least it took a few months for them to find their way back to each other, though those months mostly unspooled offscreen.)
There’s a world where all of this is smart. There’s probably no way that, say, Kate would become a professional singer overnight, and I cringed a bit when we first saw Randall cradling a baby, thinking the show had simply skipped to the part where he had a new, adopted child. But no! The premiere made it clear that we’re going to follow these journeys in at least some approximation of painstaking detail. This Is Us, at least, isn’t going to suddenly speed up its storytelling unnaturally…
Download and Enjoy below…