This Is Us Reveals Who “Her” Is and More in Fall Finale

Don’t you just love a This Is Us ending montage? 

Tonight’s was a true doozy. It solved some mysteries, announced some happy news (it’s a boy!), and introduced a whole new mystery we’ve never been so excited to solve. For once, someone’s alive instead of dead, but we’ll get to that in a moment.

First, we finally know that future Randall and Tess are on their way to see Rebecca, but we’ve still got a whole lot of worried questions. 

In the present, we got a somewhat devastating scene of Randall (Sterling K. Brown) being banished to the couch. He and Beth were fighting over his refusal to drop out of the city council race, despite the fact that his poll numbers were dismal and despite the fact that Beth asked him to drop out after he had promised he would if she wanted him to. 

We jumped right from that scene to Future Randall asking Tess (Iantha Richardson) to let her mom know they were on their way, which of course made us start worrying that Randall and Beth aren’t together anymore, because this show is rude. We then saw future Beth, a fabulous older lady running a dance studio, tell her assistant they were going to visit Randall’s mother, and then ask if she had brought her the game of Pin the Tail on the Donkey from her office. The addition of that childhood game, which the Big 3 used to play at their childhood birthday parties, gives us this horrible sinking feeling that Rebecca might not be doing so well, and might be mentally stuck in a time when her kids still play Pin the Tail on the Donkey. And now we’re gonna cry, so let’s move on to some happier news. 

We’ve spent most of this season hoping that Nicky (Michael Angarano) is alive, since that made for a more interesting direction for all those scenes with him and Jack (Milo Ventimiglia) during the war. We saw that Jack believed Nicky had died when a boat exploded and he went running into the water, but all we saw after that was Kevin learning that no Nicholas Pearson appeared in the database of those who died in the war. 

Then, we saw a blurry man in a small house, with a closeup on a piece of mail addressed to Nicholas Pearson, meaning Nicky is still alive and getting mail! He lives at 2125 Songbird Rd., Bradford, PA, 16701, and according to our Google maps search of that address, it’s smack dab in the middle of a forest. Now, we just have to wait for the show to return to explain why Nicky lives in the middle of a forest and why his family hasn’t heard from him in 50 years. We also get to find out what Michael Angarano looks like in old age makeup, which we are weirdly excited about! 

UPDATE: Turns out Angarano won’t be getting in the makeup chair after all. Deadline reports that Griffin Dunne will play present day Nicky when the show returns in January. 

Elsewhere, after a lot of anxiety and worry, Kate and Toby found out that their baby is a boy. Kate also decided to go back to school to finish her college degree, so she can be a music teacher, but all of that only happened because the doctor didn’t want her sitting in her car so much while driving to her Adele-o-gram gigs. So instead, she’ll be sitting in a classroom, but hopefully not for too long. 

And finally, after some encouragement and a beautiful speech on not holding things in by Rebecca, Tess (Eris Baker) came out to her parents, and they reacted exactly as you’d expect Randall and Beth to react by saying they loved her and supported her. The fact that Randall and Beth didn’t see this coming and had been so busy and uninvolved in their kids’ lives lately is what sort of started their argument, and what later landed Randall on the couch. 

So now we’ve got two months to wait and wonder what happens next, and it’s gonna be a long two months. 

This Is Us will return to NBC in 2019. 

E! and NBC are both part of the NBC Universal family.