While other TV shows have come up with traditionally frightening episodes for Halloween night, the This Is Us writers chose to present fear in a different way: by taking a trip back to the most frightening time in Kevin (Justin Hartley), Kate (Chrissy Metz), and Randall’s (Sterling K. Brown) lives, one that continues to haunt them to this day—their 20s. We’re often told that our 20s are the best time in our lives. Many of us are in college, finishing up school, or about to embark on a promising new phase in our lives—a culmination of everything we’ve been working toward. But for the Pearson triplets, this time was wrought with pain, depression, and disillusionment. And for matriarch Rebecca (Mandy Moore), who was still struggling to pick up the pieces after her husband Jack’s (Milo Ventimiglia) death, it was a devastating, near-catatonic period.
Though tonight’s episode is really about the moments that defined the triplets’ 20s, it opens with the Pearson kids at 10 years old on Halloween night in 1990. Kevin is yet again turning up his nose at Randall, who’s spent a lot of time coming up with a map to help each of them navigate their trick-or-treating escapades around the neighborhood. Why do you need a map for your own neighborhood? Kevin asks the same thing, which sends Randall into a tailspin. For him, everything needs to be perfect. He’s going as Michael Jackson. Kevin is going as a cigar-smoking homeless man. Rebecca and Jack are going as the illustrious Sonny and Cher. And Kate was supposed to go as a veterinarian—Rebecca had spent hours at the sewing machine making the perfect outfit, with a stethoscope as a prop—but at the last minute, she decides, to her mother’s dismay, to be Sandy from Grease instead. Right before Rebecca is about to put her foot down, in comes Jack—late from work—to rescue his beloved only daughter from a situation in which she doesn’t get her way, undermining Rebecca in the process.
While Jack’s Daddy Dearest act was first introduced as a major theme earlier this season, this episode was the first time he and Rebecca had a real talk about it—and he ended up turning the tables on her. She pulls him into their bedroom after the Halloween showdown in the kitchen, telling him it's not okay to take Kate’s side over hers—which, she says, he does all the time. In turn, Jack accuses her of handling Randall in the exact same way—like he's a "glass figurine." Neither take accountability for their actions, and ultimately, they decide to split the Pearson Halloween into two teams—Randall and Rebecca hitting up the houses with the best candy, while Kevin, Kate, and Jack head to the haunted house. Once again, Randall feels separated from his siblings, the people with whom he's supposed to identify most, in order to follow his own personal path. Of course, this time it’s just a map around the neighborhood. But once he's in his 20s, we learn it’s much more than that.
Before we get to that, though, we need to finish Halloween 1990. Randall goes house to house with his mother, but avoids the Larson home because “they talk too much,” or so he tells his mom. As it turns out, he wasn’t lying. They do talk too much, and have a lot to say about exactly how Randall became a Pearson. Rebecca, thinking that Jack might have been right—she does allow Randall’s rigid ways to dictate everyone else's—pulls him aside for a lesson about compromise. Then Randall explains that the Larsons told him he was a replacement child, someone Rebecca and Jack got instead of their real baby. It’s one of the moments we as viewers have been waiting for, when Randall’s parents have to explain to him how he became a part of the family. But it was a moment Rebecca was dreading—and one she hoped to have with Jack at her side. In true This Is Us fashion, this conversation nearly shatters your heart. Rebecca tries to soothe Randall’s confused and broken spirit with the well-intentioned “You aren’t ‘instead of’ anything. You are the way it was always supposed to be.” He asks about the name of the baby who died, and she says it was Kyle. That this third "K" name fits perfectly with Kevin and Kate isn’t lost on Randall, who quickly notes, “He probably looked like you and daddy. Nobody looks like me.” As much as Rebecca dotes on Randall, she never seems to find the right words to say when he mentions how he feels like an outsider. She relies on making him feel special and dousing him in love and care, hoping it’s enough to fill his void.
Meanwhile, Kate, Kevin, and Jack are having a different kind of evening. The ever-confident Kevin is king of the block and ruling all the other trick-or-treaters. And just when Jack is comforted by the idea that even Kate is having a great time—holding hands with her crush Billy while going through the haunted house—he learns that his popular son bribed Billy with candy. Usually, this would have been a much bigger moment between Jack and Kevin, with Jack explaining to Kevin why what he did was wrong. But surprisingly, after confronting Kevin about it, Jacks lets his son simply skip off to another house, dad looking on in silence as the image of his son grows smaller down the road.
Finally, we see how all these events impacted the triplets once they reach their 20s. Kevin is a struggling actor, so strapped for work he’s doing hair at a salon. Kate is a waitress with a not-so-secret admirer who frequents the diner where she works. She sleeps with him, knowing the whole time that he's married. Sadly, even once she’s in her 20s, she hasn’t given herself enough credit to feel like she deserves more. In fact, right after the two have sex in her bed, and he’s looking around for his clothes to make a quick exit, she says, “I’m tired of waiting for things to feel right. Nothing has felt right in a long time. I thought I’d just do it and it’d feel right after. It doesn’t, at all." Kate willfully and achingly engages in situations she knows are not good for her. While Kate’s 20s are light years away from who she is as an expectant mom and fiancée to Toby today, she's retained some longtime residual effects of inadequacy. The only difference is, she's taking steps to heal now.
But speaking of demons, her brothers also have quite a time facing theirs in their 20s. Kevin, as we know in the present day, is still wallowing in his own sense of inadequacy, covering up his insecurities with painkillers and overconfidence. But back in his 20s, he was even more insecure about rejection. As his roommate gets his big break on a hit movie, Kevin hasn’t worked in nearly a year. He was so desperate, he tried to steal the part his roommate just got, claiming to the director that he would be a “better fit” because his looks were more identical to the character in the script. Leave it to Kevin put himself before any relationship—friendship, family, or otherwise. We see him do it now with Sophie, and we’ve seen it numerous times with Randall and even Kate. We’ve now seen Kevin in four different ages (10, as a teenager, in his 20s, and at age 37), and he hasn’t changed one bit. His issues have only evolved and not dissipated, as a result of not dealing with his father’s death and not being able to communicate about anything he’s feeling with anyone he knows.
There is a moment between him and his sister in which he shares what is really happening with his plateaued acting career (minus the whole stealing his friend’s part, the director saying he’ll never work with him ever, and his friend calling him a loser and moving out of his apartment). To this, Kate confesses that she knowingly slept with a married guy. But instead of having a heartfelt bonding moment, Kevin comes down on Kate—telling her that she’s at a new low. It’s no secret that Kevin is manipulative, particularly when it comes to the women in his life. But with Kate, she just seems like his punching bag. She's always there whenever he needs her, but he's never the shoulder she can cry on, Regardless, we do see that she ends up uprooting to Hollywood, becoming his new roommate, and leaving her old life—or at least her old zip code—behind.
Meanwhile, Randall is just one day away from the birth of his first child—a month after his first nervous breakdown. To his siblings, Randall always seemed to have it together, which has exacerbated Kevin’s feelings toward him. But we learn more about Randall’s mental state at the single most important—and most fragile—moment of his life. Beth has invited Rebecca for a little extra support, which Randall sees as a slight against him. But he accepts it. He’s found himself a project to take his mind off his anxiety, installing a ceiling fan in the nursery, but when it doesn’t work he goes into panic mode. He’s so on edge that he finds himself in the hardware store, sharing all his deepest fears about fatherhood to the bewildered store clerk. Meanwhile, Beth and Rebecca have a rare moment alone in Beth’s house when she, for the first time, shows genuine vulnerability about her relationship with Randall given his mental state and their baby. More often than not, she's the one calming Randall down, telling him that everything will be okay. But whether it was hormones from the baby or real fear, Beth was troubled by what she saw when Randall was experiencing his breakdown. She tells Rebecca this, but Randall's mother says it he will be okay—she's seen Randall in similar situations over the years. But for Beth, it rocked her to her core.
Despite his deepest fears, Randall ends up delivering his own baby at home, with his mother’s help, even encouraging Beth the whole way through. And while Rebecca appears to have come out stronger on the other side, she admits to Randall how deeply she misses his father and wishes he was there. In a wrenching dual monologue to both baby Randall and baby Tess (hilariously named after the ceiling fan in her nursery) shown in juxtaposed scenes, Rebecca reveals both her fears and her hopes for the little ones—promising to never let them spend one moment in unhappiness.
Just before the episode concludes, we see Rebecca click through photos of baby Tess on Facebook and exchange her first message with Miguel since her husband’s death—presumably setting up the next phase in her life with him. It will be interesting to see their untraditional trajectory, and how it coincides with what will surely be more revelations about Jack—and how all these things shape the family we see today.
