Recap of ‘This Is Us’, Season 5, Episode 11: ‘One Small Step…’

If you have been watching These are U.S from the beginning, or even for just a few episodes, you know that this program is not too concerned with taking the plot forward. It is embedded in the premise, really, with all the backward looking to understand the present. His priority has always been to constantly develop and expand our knowledge of the characters that inhabit this world, no matter how peripheral they may be to the central story. If extensive character development is what you’re looking for on a TV show, then the lack of forward motion may not bother you (although this season has seemed particularly slow, perhaps because of how late the episodes have been for cause of COVID, but not entirely).

At times, these deep character dives may seem a little disconnected, but “One Small Step …” is an example of how well they can work when performed well. If you summarize this episode to the beats that move the Pearson family story forward, it literally comes down to “Nicky travels to California to be with Kevin”, which is a hit that really happened last week – so basically, no movement. Rather than the development of the plot, this episode is about a big moment for the character: Nicky traveling around the country because he is finally ready to open up to be part of a family. To understand how great this is for him, the episode shows us some other moments in his life when he tried to open up to love and failed. All of this is to say, if you’ve been waiting for things to pick up These are U.S, this is not the episode for you. If, however, you are like me and find Nicky one of the most interesting characters in the series, you may be in this episode centered on Nicky.

Things start with Nicky showing up at Kevin’s door without warning (but vaccinated and regularly tested for COVID thanks to VA) because he would like to meet his namesake (and “the girl”, he adds). Kevin does not believe that Nicky would fly to California to meet the children, but his uncle replies that “it was nothing”. The whole episode is about showing us how this whole thing is definitely no nothing for Nicky Pearson.

It is July 20, 1969 and the Pearsons are gathered around the television to watch Neil Armstrong walk on the moon. Nicky is especially interested in this – he even made a toy model of the lunar module and is proudly showing it to his father. In fact, this historic moment looks like something Nicky and Stanley could bring together. I mean, Stanley still sucks, but things look calmer at Pearson’s house than at any other time we’ve visited. Recruitment for the Vietnam War is on the radar (it won’t be until December of that year), but Jack seems more concerned with getting Nicky to move out of his parents’ house and meet a nice girl – to start living his life – from what about anything else.

And he is interested in a girl: his colleague Sally at the animal clinic. We’ve heard of Sally before. It is from the sad story that Nicky told Kevin and Cassidy about the girl he bought his trailer for, in the hope of finally making the trip through the country they talked about before the war; when he went to look for her to make that big gesture, she was not at home, so he just gave up. Now let’s meet this Sally.

She’s great! Nicky is weird as hell, so Jack tries to pressure him to ask her out. After all, it’s hard to say that you can’t do something when a man is literally walking on the moon for the first time at that very moment. It turns out that Sally is able to ask Nicky out on her own. They fall in love talking about the moon and photos and standing in the back of her van, Pearl. She is even a big hit with Nicky’s parents. Then, one day, Sally asks Nicky to come to Woodstock with her; from there, they can take a road trip across the country and eventually end up in California, where a relative owns a farm and they can work on it until the next time they feel like taking a trip. She wants to start an adventure with him. Nicky says yes, but he is scared. Just before meeting Sally in his van, he tells Jack that he is worried about not fitting in California and that eventually Sally will leave him. He wants to go so badly, but he is worried about being rejected and cannot afford to accept the love Sally is giving him. Nicky will never find Sally.

We met with Nicky again some time after his return from Vietnam. Thanks to a useful little scene with Jack and his lieutenant, whose engagement brings together some of Jack’s war friends, we know it’s around the time that Jack is about to propose marriage to Rebecca, if you need help getting him in the timeline. What Jack doesn’t know while asking his lieutenant for advice about Nicky and whether to tell Rebecca the truth about what he did in Vietnam (she thinks he was just a mechanic, remember?) Is that a troubled Nicky is sitting in the parking lot, desperately wanting to get in to see Jack, but terrified of doing so.

Nicky hasn’t spoken to Jack in years and is clearly afraid that Jack will reject him again. He wants to show Jack that he’s changed, that he’s getting better, but the moment Nicky finally gets up the courage to get out of his truck and talk to his brother, he watches Jack walk across the parking lot and look at an engagement ring. Jack moved on with his own life, and all self-doubt and hatred and fear came rushing back. Nicky just can’t make that kind of leap. He lets Jack go.

This brings us to our current Nicky. He receives an invitation to Nick and Franny’s baptism (it’s a Zoom event, but Nicky doesn’t understand), and we see him debating whether to go. He wants to, so he decides what he’s going to do. He buys a ticket, gets his vaccine and asks Cassidy to explain how Amazon-dot-com works so he can buy everything he needs to make gifts for the twins; he even persuades Cassidy to wrap them up for him without telling her what they are. She’s proud of him for doing that – he hasn’t left Bradford for decades, except for that Thanksgiving trip to Philadelphia. He hasn’t been on a plane since he was evacuated from Vietnam.

If only he had told her what those gifts were: he made handmade snow globes for the twins (one from an astronaut on the moon!), But they were confiscated at the airport. After a small security scene, the snow globes fall to the ground, ruined. It’s Nicky’s first sign that it might be a bad idea.

Things are going well when Nicky first arrives at Kevin’s house. And then Kevin, as Kevin usually does, starts talking nonstop about being excited to have him there and everything they can do together and what the twins will call him: not grandpa, obviously, but he needs a nickname. It’s too much for Nicky.

He ends up calling Cassidy in the middle of the night and telling her that it was a mistake and that he can just leave now without saying anything to Kevin. He’s overwhelmed – overwhelmed by all of Kevin’s plans and the fact that Jack’s son would name his own son in honor of him. “Jack must be rolling in his grave,” he tells Cassidy. But she is not buying it. She tells him the truth that we saw several times over the course of the episode: “You hated yourself for so long,” she says, and now he is surrounded by people who love him and that is strange. She knows that Nicky has spent a lifetime trying to make Jack proud. “Don’t you think he would be proud?” she asks. “It took a while, but you made it to California.” Now this is some These are U.S shit if i ever heard that. I mean it in a good, emotionally destructive, if not a little sugary way.

With that phone call cutting him deeply, Nicky goes to visit the sleeping babies. This speech! Griffin Dunne and this master class! He explains the situation of the gift and gives them the only other gifts he managed to get at the airport: two brochures by John Grisham. Inside, he wrote notes for them about regret and life and other things that old people think of as they look out the airplane window, I think.

He says that his life in his trailer was exactly the same for 50 years and that when the invitation to baptism appeared, he started thinking about landing on the moon: as one day the idea of ​​a man going to the moon seemed impossible, so, the next day, it was not. “The impossible has become possible that way,” he says. That’s how he thought about leaving his trailer and taking a plane to California. It was impossible until it wasn’t; he did that. “You two are my moon,” says Nicky to his brother’s grandchildren.

So no, there is not much strong plot and momentum for the show in general here, but there is a story about an old man who chose the moon, and it is very adorable.

• When Nicky expresses hesitation to leave everything behind and go to California with Sally, Jack tells him that if he had a “girl like that” and she asked him to go to California, he “would die in the blink of an eye “. We know that eventually a girl like that will ask him to go to California and he will not hesitate. Again, how These are U.S in These are U.S!

• Friends, please remember that in the flash-forward of Kevin’s house, Nicky is sitting next to Rebecca’s bed, a part of the Pearson family, and he is wearing a wedding ring. Will Nicky find out that Sally’s family farm is still out there in San Francisco, will he go to her and they’ll fall in love again? That’s all I want for this man.

• Nicky still wears the Samsonite bag that Jack gave him in 1969! Be quiet, my heart!

• What a showcase for both our Nickys: Michael Angarano and Griffin Dunne. I never thought I would be thrilled for an adult man to present two newborn babies with John Grisham novels at the airport, but here we are.