It’s been a few days of non-stop tears since learning how beloved character Jack Pearson dies on This Is Us (but we’ll have to wait a while before it plays out on Aussie screens). In the meantime, we’re looking to the show’s creator Dan Fogelman who recently opened up about his creative decision behind the scenes.
(And if you don’t know how the beloved father meets his demise, stop reading now!)
Can’t. Stop. Crying.
To relive the heartbreak that was the show’s massive Super Bowl episode, the Pearson home goes up in smoke, but not before Jack heroically saves his family, their dog and some of their most precious possessions.
The sigh of relief to watch Jack emerge alive was short-lived when, while in hospital, he goes into cardiac arrest as a result of smoke inhalation, tragically dying.
Dan Fogelman recently spoke to Entertainment Weekly about Jack’s demise: “When I started to write this thing, in my mind’s eye, there was a fire at the house, and the patriarch of the family heroically got the family out of the house, and then died in a really small way, without proper cinematic good-byes, hours later in a hospital by himself. So we were always writing towards that.”
While it may have been their plan from the beginning, Dan also said there’s one moment surrounding Jack’s death that he would take back if he could. That particular scene occurred in season one, when Kate tries to explain to Toby why she finds it so difficult to talk about her father’s death, revealing she’s “the reason he’s dead.”
This is followed by a flashback to Jack phoning Kate to tell her that she was right — he needed to repair his marriage before drunkenly driving off to Rebecca’s road gig.
“That was a head fake on our part,” Dan said before noting he’d planned to resolve the mystery later in season 2.
“While I thought it was like, ‘Oh, that’s cool, interesting timing,’ and people might think that’s coming, I didn’t realize the narrative around that moment would get so strong. If I could take back a moment, that’s the moment I’d take back, just to have slowed the spread of our story.”
Kate has always struggled with her dad’s death.
Anticipation and theories over Jack’s pending death spread like wild fire for This Is Us fans, many assuming the big finale the show runners were building towards would finally reveal the truth. Instead, fans were disappointed to learn the big twist was about Jack and Rebecca’s rocky marriage.
“I think that we thought — and I still continue to think — that the big shock with the finale to people was going to be, ‘Oh my god, this marriage is suffering! America’s sweetest couple is in a state of disrepair and separation,” Dan said. “I thought that was the big kind of twist or misdirect: This isn’t about Jack’s death; this is about something deeper and darker, which is: these two are on different pages.”
In hindsight, Dan revealed he would have “changed the way we were messaging the big, big thing coming in the [finale], because we were referring to the separation. People are pre-programmed that characters die in finales.” He continues to point out that “Kate feels very responsible for Jack’s death, and that [was] explored in this season… but you don’t want to use up your favour in that way.”
