SPOILER ALERT: Do not read if you have not yet watched “Nine Bucks,” the third season premiere of “This Is Us.”
The third season premiere of “This Is Us” offered another glimpse at the future lives of Randall (Sterling K. Brown) and Tess (Iantha Richardson) and revealed what future Toby (Chris Sullivan) looks like — notably in a Kate-less bed — but it did not answer the question of who the “her” they were visiting was.
“I think the plan is it will come in the course of the season you’ll get a lot of answers. We’re not going to live there a lot,” creator Dan Fogelman explained at a premiere panel for the show Tuesday. “It plays in time, so how did we get from the past to the present and how did we get from the present to the future?”
Fogelman shared that what is important in the show is “how you get there,” not the destination itself, but he did promise they wouldn’t “string [the answer] out over seven seasons or anything like that.”
“Time creates the twist in your life,” he said, noting that Kate not being in the scene could mean they’d broken up, that something had befallen her or that she simply was in another room.
Related
Instead, the premiere dove much deeper into the origin of Jack (Milo Ventimiglia) and Rebecca’s (Mandy Moore) love story. And surprisingly, they did not start off on the best foot: he took her to a carnival with only the titular “nine bucks” in his pocket where the pair got caught in the rain and learned they have fundamental differences when it comes to dogs versus cats and go-to pizza toppings. But even bigger than that, it turned out Rebecca had another man in her life — and he showed up on her doorstep the morning after her ill-fated first date with Jack, just as he was returning with flowers of his own.
“You know Jack and Rebecca. You’re rooting for Jack and Rebecca. But Jack and Rebecca, it kind of took them a while to get there. They were very different people in their younger years … so I think it’s fun to see it wasn’t easy,” Ventimiglia said.
Moore shared that the key thing for the couple is that their “connection was always palpable and always there,” and Fogelman pointed out that the third episode of the season will feature that in a big way — one that reminded him of “Demi Moore and Patrick Swayze doing pottery in ‘Ghost.’”
On the flip side, though, Fogelman said Randall and Beth (Susan Kelechi Watson) won’t have smooth sailing all season. “Randall’s plotline in this season will go in a surprising direction,” he said. “We go deeper into the season with Randall and Beth. Clearly this is an unbelievable marriage and they have a great thing that jumps off the screen but [we’re] also putting them through their paces.”
Learning Kevin (Justin Hartley) is dating her cousin Zoe (Melanie Liburd) has certainly added stress to Beth’s life, and formally adopting Deja (Lyric Ross) will bring new complications, now that they have three young girls in the household.
With Beth telling Kevin that Zoe is a man-eater, it looks like he won’t have an easy season either, even before he decides to visit Vietnam to learn more about his father’s past.
“He honestly needs to be doing other things to take care of himself, but he meets this girl and he’s falling for her, and we’ll see how that plays out in his recovery and his health moving forward,” Hartley said, noting that at the end of the second season he was “doing well for the first time in his life..and feeling comfortable in his skin.”
When asked who might have the hardest time this season, Brown said simply, “Toby goes through some stuff.” Deciding to dump his anti-depressants to aid in Kate’s (Chrissy Metz) fertility treatments, Toby will fall back into a depression for at least part of the season.
But the entire Pearson clan will still be put through it, especially in the past, where Fogelman admitted they will spend the bulk of time this season.
“Next week we go into the period post-Jack’s death so we’re with the teenagers … and we’ll live a lot in that period, too: How does the family pick themselves back up?” he said.
“This Is Us” airs Tuesdays at 9 p.m. on NBC.