This Is Us Premiere Focuses on Rebecca’s Heartbreaking Memory Loss

By its sixth season, This Is Us has mastered how to connect its characters’ adolescent experiences with their adult emotions. Everything from days at the local pool to a Thanksgiving spent watching Police Academy 3 have foreshadowed major storylines for the present-day Pearsons. The NBC drama’s final season premiere followed suit, anchored in how the 1986 Challenger space shuttle explosion influenced Kevin, Kate, and Randall’s current coping skills.

This flashback is no coincidence. Back in the show’s pilot, Kevin told a pair of bikini-clad women it was the Challenger explosion, thirty years earlier, that set his life on the wrong course. After the six-year-old Pearson siblings watch the tragic space mission at school, Jack and Rebecca struggle over how to discuss the day’s events with their children. Each character grapples with the tragedy in a way that mirrors their adult tendencies. Kate focuses on the positive, choosing to believe the astronauts were closer to heaven when they died by being in the sky. Randall is only concerned with whether someone is cooking dinner for astronaut Christa McAuliffe’s children. And Kevin brushes it all off, telling Jack, “It was just a story on TV. It wasn’t real.” 

Later that evening, Rebecca worries that her children’s response to this day will majorly impact their futures. She ponders whether Randall “is too good for this world,” worrying that his “life will be this beautiful but perpetually disappointing ride.” But Jack assures Rebecca that Kevin won’t “wind up a 40-year-old man who can’t stop talking about the Challenger explosion.” Alas: This Is Us viewers know this prediction won’t age well. 

The present day takes place on the Pearson siblings’ 41st birthday. Kevin and Madison are in an increasingly awkward co-parenting situation after calling off their wedding. Kate and Toby struggle through a partial long-distance relationship—she raises their children as a single parent while he works three days a week in San Francisco. Randall is once again preoccupied with the home invasion that rocked his family after the burglar’s arraignment is scheduled. At first, he plans on confronting the man, David, in-person. But after learning of his addiction and mental health struggles, the too-pure-for-this-world Randall bails David out of jail and finds him a bed at a nearby shelter. True to Rebecca’s decades-earlier predictions, David never shows up to claim his spot, leaving Randall’s goodwill unappreciated. 

The episode’s most affecting storyline, however, belongs to Rebecca. The memory loss she has experienced over recent seasons is worsening, and a scan confirms plaques are building in her brain. While Rebecca’s cognitive deterioration has previously slanted towards after-school special territory, the season premiere is effective in its simplicity. Unable to remember the word “caboose” while on a train ride with her grandchildren, Rebecca finds herself submerged in two distant memories. In one, she rides the train with her father as a young girl. In another, Rebecca reads a book to her kids titled The Caboose. 

Despite her efforts, the word won’t come to Rebecca. She erupts into frustration in front of her family, forcing her to share her dire test results. In the season’s first truly tear-inducing moment, Rebecca finally remembers the word just before bed, softly whispering “caboose” as her husband Miguel looks on, the weight of her diagnosis settling on his face. For a show that overly relies on nostalgia, the dissolution of Rebecca’s memory is a particularly heartbreaking development.

Just as a young Kevin eventually acknowledged the gravity of the Challenger explosion—crawling into bed with Kate and declaring, “Mom and Dad are gonna die one day”—adult Kevin reaches a similar place of acceptance with Rebecca’s health. “Mom’s really sick, Kate. It’s really happening,” he says. Ever the optimist, Kate assures Kevin that “if the world stopped for the bad stuff, then everything would be dark.” She promises that “the world keeps going so we can find that crack of light on the other side of the door,” adding, “we have found the light before, big brother, and we’ll find it again.”

Toeing the line between sincerity and saccharine, it was an episode of This Is Us that delivered what the show does best—setting the stage for its final string of twists and meeting its one-tissue-per-episode minimum.

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