This Is Us introduced another mystery, but this cliffhanger was slightly more alarming than last year’s “her.”
At the end of “Storybook Love,” the first This Is Us episode directed by series star Milo Ventimiglia, Rebecca (Mandy Moore) and adult Kate (Chrissy Metz) received Randall’s (Sterling K. Brown) baby gift and start sifting through family photographs that were included. A photo that caught their attention: young Kate (Hannah Zeile) with her then-boyfriend Marc (Austin Abrams).
“I was trying so hard to hold it together that year after your father died,” Rebecca said. “And I wanted to believe so badly that you kids were happy, I didn’t see what was happening.”
“I didn’t see it either,” Kate said.
See what, exactly? That’s the question.
“Oh my God, Kate in the very ending,” Ventimiglia told TVLine about the cliffhanger. “We need the audience to ask the question: ‘What the f–k happened?!'”
So, yeah, it’s big.
“It’s 100 percent a thing,” Ventimiglia said about the reaction and what’s to come.
In an interview with EW, executive producers Isaac Aptaker and Elizabeth Berger shed more light on the plot point to come.
“Fans should have a healthy amount of concern. I mean, there’s something ominous looming there, the way that Rebecca and Kate are speaking about that relationship in present day. And although he seems like a sweet guy now, it certainly seems like that did not end well for Kate,” Aptaker said.
Aptaker noted young adult Kate is at a vulnerable stage of her life right now after the death of her father. She was aimless. “And she meets this guy at a time when she’s incredibly impressionable, and we’ll just have to see what happens there,” he said.
In the flashback, Marc arrived at the family dinner unannounced, which should be telling.
“He’s obviously somebody that goes for what he wants and feels entitled to show up to a place even when he’s not invited. And we do feel like that is a little bit of a tell for where we’re going and what this guy is all about,” Berger said.
This Is Us airs Tuesdays, 9 p.m. on NBC.
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