This Is Us celebrates young love and mature romance
Deja and Nicky take parallel road trips and reach major turning points
TV Reviews This Is Us
“Are you going to be a problem, sir?”
“Absolutely.”
The Pearsons are a lot. It’s one of the reasons This Is Us is a polarizing show. If you’re not able to get onboard with the over-the-top way they show love, the series can be off-putting in its melodramatic grand gestures. It’s hard to sympathize with characters who do objectively insane things like Google stalk old flings from the 1960s and then show up at their house completely unannounced. But, to its credit, “One Giant Leap” uses its two central romantic road trips to undercut the show’s usual storytelling mode.
Save for a quick opening line from Randall, the Big Three are almost entirely absent from this episode—both in the past and the present. Instead, it’s Nicky, Rebecca, and Miguel who take center stage in one storyline and Deja and Malik in the other. That gives “One Giant Leap” a different feeling than your average This Is Us episode. Deja’s secret trip to visit Malik primes us for melodrama only to serve up something wonderfully understated instead. And Nicky’s impulsive road trip to see Sally promises rom-com fantasy only to deliver a much more realistic take on romance and romanticism.
On paper, there’s a lot to like about “One Giant Leap” and the way it contrasts young love and mature romance in order to celebrate the beauty of both. In practice, however, it’s an episode that never fully gelled for me. That could just be because I spent most of its runtime reeling at the absolute insanity of Nicky, Rebecca, and Miguel showing up on Sally’s doorstep after finding her address online. (That’s some impressive internet stalking from Nicky considering how common her name is and how limited his tech skills are.) But I also think “One Giant Leap” struggles to find the right balance between showing and telling when it comes to exploring its central themes of age and romance.
Let’s start with the Deja storyline, which is the simpler of the two. Though Deja pulls the classic teen move of telling her parents she’s staying with a friend when she’s actually heading off to visit her boyfriend, this is otherwise an episode that emphasizes Deja’s maturity. She doesn’t lose her cool when Malik’s ex-girlfriend Jennifer greets her with a passive aggressive cold shoulder. And she’s gracious and understanding when it comes to the fact that Malik needs to spend some of her visit finishing his Harvard classwork.
Across the board, the Deja throughline is a wonderfully mature story about a teenage girl tentatively but purposefully taking a step towards adulthood—including deciding to have sex for the first time. For a show with so many different coming-of-age stories, I’ve always found it curious that This Is Us has never really focused on this particular milestone before. Here the show does Deja’s experience justice by underplaying it rather than overplaying it. I was reminded of the gentle ease of Jack and Rebecca’s road trip back in “Sometimes,” although the simplicity of Deja’s story also makes it somewhat of an odd contrast with the more heightened Nicky stuff.
While teenage Deja is growing up, 70-something Nicky is in full-on lovesick teenager mode. Though “One Giant Leap” is a spiritual sequel to the Nicky-centric episode “One Small Step,” it rivals “The Dinner And The Date” in terms of This Is Us cringe comedy. After their surprise arrival, Nicky, Rebecca, and Miguel quickly learn that Sally’s memories of Nicky are hazy at best and she’s married to a man named Eric. Nevertheless, the Pearson cohort are invited to stay for “the most awkward meal of all time,” where a conversation about the mental load of “sweating the small stuff” builds into a painfully raw sharing of long repressed feelings and frustrations.
I did enjoy how Nicky’s adventure is sort of hijacked by Rebecca, who winds up bonding with Sally about the difficulties of aging. They were both glamorous women of the 1960s and ’70s who have struggled to maintain the same sense of self-confidence as they’ve aged into older, more reserved versions of themselves. With the bond of a shared experience but the frankness of strangers, Rebecca and Sally are able to inspire each other to push past their insecurities and start doing things like taking self portraits and salsa dancing again. Yet while it’s lovely to see this kind of empathetic portrait of aging depicted onscreen, I struggled to fully invest in the emotions of a storyline with such a strange set-up.
At least “One Giant Leap” doesn’t give Sally and Nicky an idealized decade-spanning star-crossed love story, which might have been just a touch too saccharine even for this show. Instead, the trip grants Nicky a different sense of peace and closure. He realizes that the years he spent pining for Sally gave him a sliver of hope in his darkest moments. And the fact that he made her wall of old photographs is meaningful enough. Finally freed from the burden of unrequited love, Nicky finds himself open to a spark with a flight attendant named Edie, who does wind up being the person he’s married to in the future—another solid endpoint that feels slightly marred by the clunky path it took to get us there.
Where this episode really soars, however, is in its low-key celebration of Miguel—just about the only man in the Pearson family’s orbit who isn’t a lot to deal with. Miguel truly puts Rebecca first in a way that even Jack, with his showily performative love, never quite did. It’s why Miguel can barely even process Rebecca’s concern that instead of getting the “showroom model” of her, he got the “used classic with a lot of miles.” Rebecca is worried she’ll become a burden as she starts to lose her memories. But to Miguel, this is just another part of the life and love they’ve carved out together—one where he’s still happy to be the steady support system he’s always been. Creator Dan Fogelman has promised that we’ll finally see Rebecca and Miguel’s full love story in this final season. Now that’s a road trip I can’t wait to take.
Stray observations
- This episode made me realize that I’ve totally lost track of how old Deja is supposed to be at this point. I’m also a little confused about Rebecca’s age too. She talks about being “in her 60s” like it was a long time ago, but if she was supposed to be about 30 when she and Jack had the triplets in 1980, wouldn’t she only be 71 or 72 today?
- “How was breakfast at Tiffany’s? haha” is an absolutely perfect Randall dad text.
- A poster in Deja’s room suggests she’s a fan of the Freeform TV series Good Trouble, and I just want to commend her on her excellent taste. It’s one of my favorites too.
- I love that you can tell Tess knows Deja’s true road trip plan by the way she hugs her and wishes her good luck.
- It’s weird to have Sally get into that big fight with her husband in the same episode that also confirms Nicky is married to Edie in the future. Are we supposed to be wondering whether Sally is still going to reenter Nicky’s life in some way?
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Rebecca was born in 1950, so she’d likely be 71 now, 72 by the end of the year.
Is it weird for a 71 or 72 year old to reminisce about their sixties? I don’t think so.
My problem was the episode mostly focused on people that I don’t care that much about. Deja is…fine, but I’m not invested in her romance. Nicky just has not caught me, so I don’t care about his pining for the long lost Sally. Edie seems like a nice enough person who is going to end up with a guy I have zero feelings for. Both of the romances were kind of a waste for me, although I liked Deja’s better than Nicky’s.That said, I did like the sharing of the little things that bother us even when we have more important/difficult things in our lives. I really loved the Rebecca/Sally bonding. Miguel is always kind of a highlight for me, so that worked for me as well.Nicky finding Sally makes even less sense than this review stated. Sally got married and unless she married a guy with the same name as her maiden name, she probably changed it when she married, so I don’t see how Nicky found her under her maiden name and how he found her by adding photograpy (which she doesn’t do professionaly) and likes animals, which half the Internet likes. I’m a woman of that era. Women who kept their maiden names did so because they had a professional identity or they were really, hard core feminists. Sally didn’t strike me that way. She fell into a job in pharmaceuticals, so there wasn’t a lot of indication she had a professional identity pre-marriage . I guess we are supposed to see her as a big feminist who ended up marrying a man who eventually made her unhappy, but it just didn’t track for me.
This is one of the few real misses of the show, for me.
Agree. The writing and direction was way way off this episode from normally how excellent it is.
Yeah the main character ages are easy enough to remember just because my twin sister and I are exactly (well by year) the same age as the big three, and my mom is Rebecca’s age (and luckily not dealing with any scary health issues).
OK, I’m always embarrassed when I miss a major plot point on this not-exactly-subtle show, but I really didn’t clue in to the fact that Deja was lying about her trip (well until the end). I sorta missed a line I think with Randall joking about her partying with a friend, but still… That said—wouldn’t Randall absolutely contact her friends’ parents to make sure the trip was OK? Maybe watch her get on her bus and notice it—hey—is going to the city where her boyfriend is?
Not sure how I feel about the Nicky story but I did like the Rebecca/Sally scenes, and was glad the dinner party didn’t go *completely* off the rails (when we found out about the issues between Eric–hey it’s the guy from my fave Once and Again!–and Sally I was worried that would escalate with Nicky really interfering and acting out against Eric or something).
I missed out on the clandestiness of Deja’s trip too, for some reason. Next week’s teaser did indicate that Randall will find out in possibly the worst way. I hope this will not end up in yet another botched pregnancy scare plotline.
I had that concern too but Malik surely wouldn’t risk getting someone pregnant again? Still, I was surprised they didn’t show a condom or something else to make that clear.
Hopefully no pregnancy scare. I’d have a tough time buying the idea that Malik would let that happen again.
why some people feel obliged to teel about future episode or its promo in previous one?
I was confused by Deja’s trip, because I didn’t catch where it was that she was supposed to be going or who Tiffany was. Malik has such a baby face that it’s hard to buy him as a college student. Per my middle schooler, “He looks like he’s 13.”
Rewatching the beginning, it was so obvious she was going to see Malik, but not sure if I just saw the plot description or the review of “previously on”, or whatever, or was just obvious the way she brushed her teeth and eyed herself in the mirror and packed that red dress. There was no doubt she was headed to see Malik, so you really had to key into the dialogue to figure out that she lied to Randall about it. I didn’t really pay attention to the text she got from Randall at the end. My tv is a little too far away to read texts that characters expose, I have to make the effort to pause and go up to see it on the tv, and then it didn’t make any sense until after I read the review, and then rewatched the beginning to catch it. It was very subtle that Randall was left out of the loop and everyone else seems to know where Deja was going.
OMG the way tv shows nad movies show texts on phones drives me CRAZY! Do an extreme fucking close up on the phone for christ sake if your going to show text messages!!!! We dont need to see their hands and feet in hte shot of the phone! I literally have given up on reading text messages on my tv. I dont give a fuck anymore Ill just miss it. So annoying.
Certainly her sister knew–hence the focus on their hug. Maybe I had been spoiled by last week’s preview that she was meeting Malick but that always seemed obvious–I just didn’t fully clue in that she was telling Randall she was just… going for a sleep over? I still think it’s out of character that he wouldn’t check with a parent…
The actor is 20 years old, but he does look younger.
Also why are those two Deej and Malik, so scared of sex?! They’re teenagers for christ sake! That makes zero sense.
Malick might be scared off due to already having a child, but…
Malik has the living embodiment of why it’s reasonable to be hesitant to have sex running around his apartment. Also, Deja had a lot of life trauma with a mother who probably shouldn’t have had a kid and she may be concerned about disappointing Randall & Beth.
She’s a virgin and he’s a freshman with a 3 year old he co-parents. Seems like good reason to be tentative and careful about to me.
Yeah, still not very realistic. Kids wanna bone down.
Add me to the list of people who missed the “secret” of her going to visit Malik…
I too didn’t realize that Randall and Beth didn’t know she was visiting her BF.
They didn’t say it outright, but Randall assumed she’s going to stay at a female friend’s to study together
I may be misremembering, but wasn’t the consensus that Randall & Beth had broken up at the time of everyone coming to Rebecca’s death bed? Guess Randall’s hug wasn’t with Beth, so maybe they are still together. Or maybe Beth’s dead. Please don’t kill, Beth, This Is Us.
We know Kate and Toby aren’t together–would they break up another couple? I can’t remember the Beth flashforwards to be honest.
I can’t remember all the fast forward hints either, but I think the part of Randall hugging a middle aged or older Black woman who he didn’t arrive with was shown before and the conclusion was that was Beth and the two of them weren’t living together .
They teased that, but no, by the time we got the second full view of it, they both showed up with wedding rings on, embraced each other and I’m quite sure Randall even said “Hello wife” or something obvious of the sorts. Beth is present, working in the dance industry and presumably married to Randall.
Nah, that was a fake out to scare us when Randall and Beth were going through a rough patch. Another flashforward shows them hugging and kissing with wedding rings on so they’re fine.
No, they show Randall and Beth together when Rebecca is dying.
Wasn’t a huge fan of this episode. Even though I love Griffin Dunne, I just never really cared for the Nicky character, and him getting together with the stewardess means zero to me, especially this late in the game. And seeing Edie pull up in the future timeline…hard to feel anything momentous for a character I literally met two minutes ago…
I hope there’s something more to their meet cute—I’m not sure how many flight attendants would be so charmed that they’d want to keep in contact with a passenger who jokes about not putting up his seat…
My feeling was, like, Rebecca saying the universe would put the right person in Nicky’s path or something… like, immediately though? I don’t actually know this actor from other shows or movies. I feel like this is a gap in my appreciation. Nicky was really damaged a long time ago. He refused to get out of his draft assignment, and he was really bitter to Jack for coming to get him. Jack pretended he was dead. He was bitter and broken and etcetera for a very long several decades. He has had some strained episodes where he’s hostile or embarrassed or things just not going his way. Now he is just comical and a little awkward and mostly kind of adorable awkward guy playing tropes of being on facebook and trying to choose between 15 nearly identical plaid flannel shirts to pack for an overnight, and like some stewardess connects with him so quickly on his trip to move back to the east coast. Was the casting for older Nicky on point, or was this softening of Nicky’s brittle and isolated persona a careful pivot into a gentler older Jack-ish relative they wouldn’t want to throw back into the wild? Did the AA and VA and I forget that other lady’s name that was also a veteran, and Kevin (I guess) really make Nicky into some social less-broken person who can banter casually? Was this some spell Sally held over him, and now he was free to banter casually?
I haven’t seen them in ages, but I enjoyed Griffin Dunne in American Werewolf in London and After Hours. They’re probably worth a watch.
Yes, he’s usually good but I don’t think I’d seen him in anything for at least ten years before This is Us.
He’s a central character in I Love Dick which only lasted one season. There is…a lot of nudity on his part. It’s kind of a ballsy role. Pun intended.
Is that about Philip K. Dick?
American Werewolf in London and After Hours are definitely worth one’s time. Dunne also starred in a great episode of Better Things (season 3, I believe).
The flashbacks we’re pretty good at establishing that he was always kind of weird and anxious – that part makes sense. We also know he was regularly attending therapy for awhile at one point. I assume he did trauma therapy. If he did something like EMDR it’s entirely possible he’d be able to reprocess the trauma to the point that he has an easier time functioning, especially if he started taking anti-depressants. We also know he relapsed when he lost his therapist, but if he’d developed some coping skills something like AA might be helpful enough to keep him functional even though PTSD never really goes away. His behavior throughout this episode shows he still struggles with a lot of anxiety, but it also seems like the entire experience cathartic enough that he’d feel comfortable flirting with a woman which he probably hasn’t done in YEARS. It is bit of a stretch, but not necessarily impossible.
Was this some spell Sally held over him, and now he was free to banter casually?I think that’s the idea they were trying to convey. That the unrequited love, the mistake of not going to Cali with her was baggage that wasn’t letting him move on with his life. He found his closure and release with this visit.
I guess they’re trying to jam in a happy ending for Uncle Nicky. Realistically, I think a recovering alcoholic with PTSD who had lived in a trailer away from society for however many decades probably wouldn’t be even as stable as they show Nicky, especially with him being away from his doctors/therapist for this long. Also, Rebecca & Miguel would have to be seriously bored in their lives to want to entertain him for this period of time.
I thought that Nicky might have married Jennifer Morrison’s character, but there’s still a chance that her and Kevin get married since we see him with a wedding ring at Rebecca’s death bed and it’s not likely he marries Madison.
Shoutout to Rebecca’s “oooh” reaction to Sally’s offer of Costco sheet cake for dessert. I had to jump back to watch it again, it was an excellent little moment.
Sally was played by Dey Young from Rock and Roll High School (and Star Trek).
I still don’t understand what was so urgent that they couldn’t stay for some Costco sheet cake???
Nicky felt he overstayed?
I really wish This Is Us had decided to go the Grey’s Anatomy route of just definitively stating that we’re living in some post-COVID fantasy. Scenes like Nicky, Miguel, and Rebecca showing up to Sally’s house uninvited or Nicky being an asshole on a plane with no one wearing masks don’t land as cute in a world with N95s and PCR tests.
I think that is what we are supposed to assume, isn’t it? With the sixth season, it seems as if they have dropped COVID from the scripts?
I think by seeing those scenes you can figure they’re in a post-COVID world.
Knowing that TIU is always a more cynical than it seems…I kind of assume the absurdity of Nicky finding Sally was intentional? I can believe he put effort into figuring out how to google stalk – he’s bored and sitting around in Rebecca and Miguel’s house. He then makes an assumption based on an instagram post which frankly seems like something an old man would do. The fact that it’s her strains credulity. But so do a LOT of the grand gestures these people do. The fact that we get to watch the whole thing play out in such a cringe worthy way reinforces how pointless these grand gestures can be. It’s a lot of cringe to get to catharsis and that tracks.
Nicky was easily the weakest link of this episode. He’s lowkey a creep, stalking Sally and showing up unannounced, shamelessly recounting the moment she and her had sex for the first time… They tried to play it off as charming but it was hella weird. I had to suspend way too much disbelief in order to keep watching this episode. I liked seeing Rebecca own her diagnosis. Miguel humble-bragging about his beautiful hair was so unnecessary during this convo but Miguel is so lovable so I didn’t count it against him. I thought Rebecca and Sally’s convo about aging and self-expression was refreshing, though it was also giving very much White and First World Problems.
I think fight was both a red herring to make us think she would ditch him for Nicky, and foreshadowing what will happen to Kate and Toby.