Spoiler alert! Do not proceed if you have not watched the season 5 finale of This Is Us.
This Is Us’ fifth season ended with a wedding, just not the one you thought.
On Tuesday’s season closer, Kevin (Justin Hartley) and Madison (Caitlin Thompson) prepared for their wedding day in the Adirondacks. But as the big moment approached, Madison was the one who pumped the brakes on saying “I do,” because she couldn’t marry someone who didn’t love her fully. While the revelation devastated Kevin, he seemed to accept the reality of their broken engagement — after all, they didn’t have the most romantic of courtships.
So color us surprised when the finale fast forwards four years later to when the Big Three are 45 and it’s revealed that it’s Kate (Chrissy Metz) who’s getting ready to walk down the aisle… again. The groom? None other than Phillip (guest star Chris Geere), who hired Kate as a teacher’s assistant after some initial hesitations. (There were hints that something was amiss between Kate and Toby in the not-so-distant future and now we can start to fill in those blanks.)
Even more surprising? That Kevin and Madison are on friendly terms years later and that Randall (Sterling K. Brown) is a “rising star” in something.
“Chris is going to be a big part of the show next year… We owe a lot of him,” creator Dan Fogelman told a handful of reporters, including ET, of the twist. “He’s an actor we’ve been following for a while and are big fans of on the show. It’s obviously a plot point that we’ve known was coming for quite some time — Kate’s second wedding — and we knew it would be revealed at the end of the season. We actually had Chris come down and meet with Chrissy much earlier in the season under severe testing protocols and everything so we could put them together and feel them out, because it was such an unusual season of shooting.”
Fogelman emphasizes that the finale twist has “been part of our plan all along,” confirming that the fan theories that Kate and Toby’s relationship would ultimately end on the rocks had meat to them. “We’ve hinted at many times that something was not normal between Chrissy and Sully, and here we are.”
“One of the things I loved about this finale and the execution when it was all done is despite multiple reveals of marriages not quite working out, when you come to that period in the future, everyone feels good,” he adds of the wedding flash-forward. “On first viewing, you’re registering the twist and shock of what you’re seeing, but on second viewing, you can see the feeling and the smiles that exist in that moment. That was something we were trying to capture.”
