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With only one episode left in the series after this, the penultimate episode of This Is Us takes us to the end of the road (or should we say track?) for Rebecca Pearson (Mandy Moore), as her family gathers around her bedside to say their final goodbyes in Episode 17 of Season 6, “The Train.” The series has been building toward Rebecca‘s death of Alzheimer’s for many seasons now, with the very first glimpses of Rebecca‘s final days occurring all the way back in Season 2, but Season 6 has been dwelling in this far future timeline much more than in seasons past, and “The Train” takes place almost entirely in this setting — with one notable exception.
Also in this episode, we finally learn the identity of the father of Déjà’s (La Trice Harper) baby, as well as get an answer to where Kate (Chrissy Metz) has been all this time. Here are all the major developments from This Is Us Season 6 Episode 17, “The Train.”
Related: Who Is the Wedding Singer on This Is Us? All About Katie Lowes
“The Train” opens on a family we haven’t met before on their way back from one of the children’s — youngest son Marcus — travel soccer tournaments, where he won MVP. As the kids bicker in the backseat, the father is distracted, then swerves to avoid oncoming traffic and drives off the road, flipping the car. Who is this family, and are they okay? More on that later…
In Kevin’s (Justin Hartley) house, as the family takes turns saying goodbye to Rebecca, Déjà goes to sit by Randall (Sterling K. Brown), playing Jenga by himself in the living room. Making him promise not to react, Déjà tells him she’s pregnant. “You’re going to be a grandfather,” she says, which feels particularly well earned considering her teenage self told him earlier this season that he wasn’t her father. Adult Déjà is conflicted, though. “We’re not even married yet,” she says about the baby’s yet-unnamed father, lamenting that she’s just started her medical residency and he is always working. “You know how he is about work,” she tells Randall.
We then cut to a young man in a lab whose coat reads “Marcus Brooks.” He’s working to reduce cell inflammation in pancreatic tumors, and walks with the assistance of a cane. As he moves through the lab on the verge of a breakthrough, we see a framed family photo – the family from the car in the opening. So this is the grown-up child from the car, who we last saw getting unbuckled and climbing over the back seat to retrieve his soccer ball before the car went off the road. Could he be the father of Déjà’s baby? Is this the work she was referring to?
Marcus retrieves his boss to examine his lab results, but the man fails to match Marcus’ enthusiasm, telling him that the cancer drug he’s testing is one of many, his findings are interesting but not groundbreaking, and that their lab is shutting down due to lack of funding. “Go home, kid,” his boss tells him. “Don’t you have someone nice to be home with?”
Randall sits by Beth (Susan Kelechi Watson) as she picks at her chicken, trying to get her to tell him what she said to Rebecca, but she refuses, saying it’s a secret. “I’ve got a secret too,” Randall brags smugly, but Beth beats him to the punch. ” Déjà’s pregnant.” No, their daughter didn’t tell her yet, but Beth just knows. “I’m that girl’s mother, Randall. I knew she was pregnant before she did.”
Later that evening, as her parents engage in some much-maligned (by Annie) PDA in the living room, Déjà sends a text to the father of her baby, telling him that she’s pregnant.
That night, as Déjà sleeps, her door is cracked open by a man who gently calls her name. We expect to see Marcus, after he was sent home by his boss, but it’s… Malik! He rushed out of work as soon as he got her text. She tells him that she knows the pregnancy is unexpected and complicated, but he assures her it isn’t. “I’ve loved you since I was sixteen,” he tells her. “I want to marry you. I want to have this baby with you.”
Related: The This Is Us Cast Reveals the Scenes that Have Them in Tears!
In Kevin’s house, as the family stands vigil, he arranges a feast of takeout Chinese food. There’s a tense moment when Toby (Chris Sullivan) seems like he’s challenging Kevin on insisting on paying for the food, but then he reveals he’s joking. “A callback to our old dynamic.” (Is this actually funny, Toby? Is it?)
Finally, Philip (Chris Geere) and the kids arrive in time for dinner, but Kate is still MIA. However, the mystery of her whereabouts is immediately answered: Philip says he spoke to her in London, where she rushed to catch a redeye flight that will arrive in the morning.
Rebecca’s nurse Laila (Danielle Larracuente) interrupts the family dinner to inform Kevin and Randall that Rebecca’s blood pressure is dropping and her legs are going cold. “Things are happening quickly now,” she tells the brothers, somberly informing them that Rebecca will likely not make it through the night and that it’s time to start saying goodbye. But Kate won’t arrive until the morning! After all this, will she really be too late to say goodbye to her mother?
On the plane, Kate calls her brothers, assuring them that she’ll be there in less than 12 hours… but of course, that may not be fast enough. Randall reluctantly informs his sister that there’s a chance Rebecca will be gone by the time her plane lands, and Kate expresses that she should never have taken her trip, which we learn was to take the music curriculum she wrote international. But her brothers assure her that “taking the big swings” is exactly what Rebecca would have wanted for her.
Related: What Happens on the This Is Us Series Finale? What We Know—And Don’t Know—About the Pearsons’ Future So Far
As Laila speaks to an unresponsive Rebecca in her bed, a younger Rebecca in a red dress sits in a fancy train car gazing out the window, reminiscing that this is the kind of trip her father always promised her they would take. We then see that she’s talking to William (Ron Cephas Jones), also younger, who recites the poem for her that inspired Randall’s name. He invites her to accompany him to the bar car, but she declines, saying she’s waiting for someone. But he tells her it’s okay and persuades her to join him anyway.
As Rebecca moves to the back of the train car, she passes her father and her younger self reading The Catcher in the Rye before seeing Beth in one of the seats engrossed in The Little Red Caboose, the picture book Rebecca was trying to remember in the season premiere. The Beth in the train car starts to speak, but then the real Beth’s voice is projected over the train car speakers as she says goodbye to Rebecca in her bed. She talks to Rebecca about parenting and lets her know that Rebecca’s parenting inspired her own throughout the years. She thanks Rebecca for raising Randall and supporting him this far, assuring her that, “I got him now.”
As Rebecca continues her journey through the train, she sees Dr. K, (Gerald McRaney) the doctor who delivered her babies, staffing the bar car. The bar is lined not with liquor bottles, but with remnants of Rebecca’s past: a World’s Greatest Dad mug with Jack’s (Milo Ventimiglia) face on it, a bottle of champagne labeled “Ka-Toby,” a segment of a wall with her children’s names written on it, a TV playing the last Super Bowl she shared with Jack before the fire.
At three nearby tables, Rebecca sees multiple versions of Randall and Kevin all sitting together: at six, as teenagers, and as adults. For a second, she basks in the sight of her sons interacting with their former selves, but then sadly observes, “Kate’s not here.”
Rebecca tells Dr. K that she’s concerned that she won’t be able to look after her children anymore after spending her whole life caring for them, but he assures her that “there’s nothing left to do,” and tells her to “trust the process.” Rebecca worries she made too many mistakes, but Dr. K reminds her that there are “no perfect games in parenting.” He then reveals that he’d thought she wouldn’t survive childbirth all those years ago, but she pulled through against all odds and made something spectacular of her life. But now, “you, my dear, have earned a rest,” he tells her.
With that, she accompanies William to the next car. Throughout the night, the rest of the family gets in their goodbyes as Rebecca experiences them from her perspective on the train, although we don’t see all of them. Sophie’s (Alexandra Breckenridge) goodbye sparks memories of her and Kevin throughout the years; Toby can’t resist getting in one last joke after his sincere goodbye, asking Rebecca, “You love me more than Philip, right?”; and Annie (Iyana Halley) thanks her grandmother for helping her understand that it’s okay to be quiet as long as she wasn’t afraid to be loud.
Eventually, everyone heads to bed except for Kevin and Randall, the last ones to say goodbye. They tell Rebecca that Kate is on her way as they take their places by Rebecca’s bedside. Passing the time, they talk through their memories of childhood and their father (“strangely ripped for a dad in the ’90s,” Kevin observes). “I wonder if any of this is getting through to her,” Randall muses.
But we know it is, because the next car in Rebecca’s train journey is filled with images from the very memories her sons were just discussing. She examines the snow globe Randall bought when Kate was hospitalized for appendicitis before her attention is drawn to a man in the corner. “Hey you,” a young Miguel (Jon Huertas) greets her, sipping red wine from a crystal glass. “After all these years, it’s still you,” he tells her. “My favorite person.”
But her reunion with Miguel is unfortunately short-lived, as William ushers her into the next car. However, when she realizes it’s the last car—the caboose—Rebecca refuses to go in. “I told you,” she tells William, “I’m waiting for someone.”
The following morning, Rebecca is still hanging on as sunlight streams in the windows. As the kids play four-square outside, a breathless Kate rushes in, straight from the airport. She made it in time! “It’s okay,” Randall tells her as she runs into the room, letting her know she hasn’t missed their mother’s final moments.
As Kate tells her that she’s here and that she loves her, Rebecca listens to her voice over the speakers of the train. That was who she was waiting for, and she finally nods and tells William, “Okay.” He opens the door to the caboose car, which houses a bedroom. A six-year-old Kate sits in the corner, holding a jar full of fireflies.
“We’re good now,” Randall says to Rebecca. “You made us good.” After each of the Big Three tell their mother that they love her, Randall has the last word. “You tell him hey.”
As Rebecca lays down alone on the bed in the caboose car, she turns and sees she’s not alone after all. “Hey,” she says to Jack, who smiles back. “Hey.”
Related: How Did Rebecca and Miguel Get Together on This Is Us and Does Miguel Die?
So who is Marcus, and why is he relevant to the story of Rebecca’s death? As always with This Is Us, the answer is surprising.
Following the car accident, young Marcus undergoes surgery as the rest of his family sits in the hospital waiting room. Marcus’ mother gives her husband an update: the doctors are concerned about blood circulation to Marcus’ foot. Meanwhile, his father assures Marcus’ brother that it’s not his fault, or anyone’s fault, that the car crashed. Realizing it’s going to be a long night, he goes to get coffee, and standing at the coffee machine is none other than Jack Pearson!
Judging by the facial hair, this scene takes place in the ’90s… and as we take in the bandages on his hands and the soot on his clothes, it becomes clear that this scene must be set right after the fire. Which means this encounter happened mere hours (or maybe even minutes) before Jack died.
“My house burned down,” Jack tells Marcus’ father. He believes everyone is okay, although Jack got “a little dinged up,” a line that feels cruel and unusual when you know what’s about to happen to him.
The father then admits that his son is in surgery following a car accident, and tells Jack that this is the worst night of his life. In response, Jack passes on a bit of wisdom that was once given to him, which we later hear an adult Marcus joking about in a restaurant with his siblings, saying their family motto is something silly about using sour lemons to make “something resembling lemonade.” This is a callback to the day Jack’s children were born, right after he’d learned that their third triplet, Kyle, had been stillborn. Trying to comfort him, Dr. K told him that someday, he hoped Jack may be able to tell another man in a horrible situation that at the lowest point in his life, he “took the sourest lemon that life has to offer and turned it into something resembling lemonade.” Apparently Jack fulfilled Dr. K’s wish in the moments right before he died.
After Jack and Marcus’ father part ways, Marcus begins crashing in the operating room, but the operating team is able to get him back thanks to some swift intervention by his doctor. However, at the exact moment that the doctor was saving Marcus, Jack was going into cardiac arrest, and the doctor wasn’t there to save him. In that moment, it becomes clear that Jack’s death and Marcus’ survival have always been inextricably linked.
“This is quite sad, isn’t it?” Rebecca says to William as she prepares to enter the caboose. “The end.”
“If something makes you sad when it ends, it must have been pretty wonderful when it was happening,” William observes. He then urges her to step back and look at the big picture, where sad things may just be “the start of the next incredibly beautiful thing.”
To illustrate that point, we then flash far into the future, where an older Marcus is being presented with an award for his “pioneering role in the development of drugs targeting Alzheimer’s disease.”
Related: This Is Us Creator Dan Fogelman Explains Why Kate and Toby’s Ending Will Be a ‘Beautiful’ Thing
After taking such an emotional walk down memory lane (memory train?) with Rebecca, the final episode of This Is Us will likely look toward the future of the Pearson family, exploring some of that “big picture“ perspective that William urged Rebecca to try to see in her final moments. Titled simply “Us,“ the series finale of This Is Us will see “The Big Three com[ing] to new understandings about life,” according to the official synopsis.
Of course, considering that This Is Us is a show that has always placed a high value on mystery and reveals, we don’t have many hard and fast details about what to expect in the series finale. All we know for sure is that it executes on the vision that creator Dan Fogelman has had for the series almost since the beginning, and that the cast promises that it will be an emotional and satisfying experience. Fogelman also promised that by the time the credits roll on This Is Us for the final time, all of our lingering questions will have been answered, although whether we’ll like those answers is another matter. One thing is for sure, though, saying goodbye to the Pearsons won’t be easy, but we wouldn’t miss it for the world. See you here next week, with plenty of tissues.
Will we ever see the Pearsons on the big screen? Here’s everything we know about a possible This Is Us movie.
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