11:19 P.M., Sunday, February 4, 2018

(Warning:  This blog entry contains major spoilers for the February 4th episode of This Is Us.  If you don't care about the show or haven't seen it yet, do not read!)

Sunday, February 4, 2018, at 11:19 p.m., a doctor said to Rebecca Pearson, "We lost your husband."

Rebecca Pearson's response was to bite into a Twix candy bar and tell the doctor that, "you'd better go find him."

And then her next response was to go looking for her husband where she'd left him, in a room in the hospital's emergency department.

When she saw him lying on the bed where she'd left him, she broke down sobbing, along with millions of Americans who stayed up after the Super Bowl to watch This Is Us (or who, like me, just turned in to the last part of the game just so that could see the following show!)

11:19 p.m. was the time of the Great Reveal, the moment that This Is Us has been teasing since Season 1, Episode 5, "The Game Plan", where we found out that Jack had died but didn't know when or how. 

The writers and producers teased us again with flashbacks to Jack's funeral, then a flashback to a burned house, and then with more and more references to the death. 

Last night, it all came together.

It started with the house fire, with Jack rounding up the kids and safely getting them to his bedroom, then lowering them and Rebecca down to the ground . . . and then, after hearing Kate's dog bark, going in to get him . . . and bursting through the front door moments later with the dog and a pillowcase full of memorabilia.

Okay, he didn't die in the fire. 

What he ended up dying of was a heart attack caused by smoke inhalation.

Everything seemed so normal; well, as "normal" as everything could be when your house has just burned down and you've lost everything.  The kids would go to Miguel's house (Jack's best friend); Rebecca would go with Jack to the hospital, he'd get treatment; everything would be okay.  Right?

Remember, this is This Is Us we're talking about, the show that has a tendency to kick you in the gut when you least expect it. 

This is 1998, Super Bowl Sunday; and even at the hospital, Jack is interested in the game.  His final words to his wife, as she is ready to leave to make some hotel reservations and other arrangements?
"You're standing in front of the TV."

She chuckles and leaves. 

While she's on a pay phone trying to make hotel reservations, we see the frantic running of doctors and nurses behind her. 

We hear Jack's voice calling, "Beck?"

We see her standing in front of a nearly empty vending machine, finally selecting a Twix bar (from slot B3, naturally--B3, Big Three, get it?) and as she gets it and turns around, that's when the doctor shows up. 

She suspects nothing and keeps talking until the doctor says "cardiac arrest" and "we lost your husband."

Rebecca heard him.

She did not hear him.

If she had, she probably wouldn't have bitten into that candy bar. 

Then comes the shock, the scream of grief, shots of where she has to sign papers and take away Jack's possessions; and the moment where she tells Miguel that she has to go inside and ruin her kids' lives, and she was going to be strong for them, and if he couldn't, he needed to take a walk around the block until he could. 

In the present, 20 years later, Rebecca, Kevin, Kate, and Randall have their own ways of coping on the anniversary. 

Rebecca makes Jack's favorite lasagna and looks for a reason to laugh, which Jack sends her every year without fail.  Miguel--now Rebecca's husband--gives her space.

Kate watches the last tape of her and Jack together--a tape Jack rescued from the fire.

Randall throws a Super Bowl party.

And Kevin?  In past years, he would have hooked up with a model and gotten drunk or high.  Not this year.  This year, he's committed to sobriety . . . so he goes out and finds "Dad's tree", a tree where I think some of Jack's ashes were scattered, and makes the apologies that he wasn't able to make when Jack was alive. 

He promises to be a better man.  And then he calls his mom . . . and in the middle of the conversation, he says, "I think I'm at the wrong tree."

Through her laughter, Rebecca says that this was Jack's way of making her laugh.  "This year, he sent me you."

There are other parts of this epsiode that were also poignant. 

For now, the biggest question in TV history since "Who Shot J.R.?" was finally answered.

As my son would say, "Time of death," 11:19 p.m., Sunday, February 4, 2018.

R.I.P, Jack Pearson.

Just my .04, adjusted for inflation.