Jack, Kevin and the emotional ‘cavemen’ of This Is Us
A quiet through-line of This Is Us has been how the Big Three live daily with Jack’s death and “Deja Vu” draws that attention specifically to Kevin.
The third episode of This Is Us season 2 offered no additional hints as to how Jack died, focusing instead on the more emotionally intricate subject of its impact. The episode opens with Jack, at an AA meeting, expressing his difficulty talking about his feelings and his hope that his sons won’t grow up to be “cavemen like their dad.” And it ends with Kevin holding back tears and popping pain pills while Kate, across town, tells Jack’s urn, “He’s just like you.”
For lack of a better way to phrase it, This Is Us hasn’t really given Kevin a reason to be emotional up until now. His Sophie storyline and Manny-vs.-Off-Broadway struggle were endearing and occasionally presented him with crossroads, but he was mostly the sounding board or foil to Kate and Randall. He was more an element of their emotional growth than on a trajectory of his own. But now, it appears that the This Is Us is turning their attention to the third Pearson and it’s going to break your heart.
Like Jack, Kevin seems able to express some feelings, but not all of them. Jack, even as he calls himself a caveman and eulogizes the end of the ‘strong silent type,’ is still able to give Rebecca answers, some explanation, when she pushes as to why he’s been so distant. Even articulating that it’s hard to talk about your feelings is more articulation than you get from a caveman. Similarly, Kevin, too, is able to call Kate at the end of the episode and apologize — even if, like Jack, he’s not quite able to fully disclose what’s bothering him or talk about Jack’s death yet.
(Jack doesn’t include Kate in his hope that his sons do not grow up to be cavemen, he reflects largely in gendered terms, but Kate, too, has shown difficulty expressing her feelings. She still has told Toby exactly what happened to Jack or why she blames herself, at least not that we’ve seen. She struggled in “A Father’s Advice” to express to Rebecca her frustration with their relationship and even in “Deja Vu,” she tells Kevin that, while she spoke to a therapist, she discovered she found it hard to talk about Jack’s death with the therapist either.)
In light of this episode, though, Kate’s remark that Kevin is just like Jack, for the first time, takes on darker undertones. The season 1 episode “Jack Pearson’s Son” showed Kevin step up for Randall in a heroic, Jack Pearson style. Kevin has also filled the void Jack’s left in Kate’s life, as her go-to and sometimes total pre-Toby support system. But it’s becoming clearer that some of the hero complex that prevented Jack from dealing or recognizing any of his trauma has similarly affected Kevin’s ability to understand how his dad’s death impacted him.
(Randall, on the other hand, is almost hyper-articulate about his feelings. As a teen, we see him able and willing to share his attempt to find his birth parents with Kate and Kevin, as well as sharing the emotional reasoning he felt driven to do so. As an adult, he’s — usually — a model of communication with his wife and rarely have we seen conflict between the two last more than one episode without being addressed. Even through the death of a second father, Randall was far more comfortable with his feelings than Kevin or Kate, even comforting Kate at William’s wake. That said, Randall, too, has not — that we’ve seen — spoken about what happened to Jack.)
Additionally, “Deja Vu” indicates Kevin, like Jack, may struggle with substance problems. The show never showed him taking pain pills in the first season, but then the audience didn’t know about his childhood leg injury at the time either. Addiction to pain meds — opioids — would be a highly topical choice for a show that has, so far, shown a deft touch with telling the stories of addicts.
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Mostly, Kevin’s trauma, especially in the context of Kate and Randall’s varying degrees of emotional maturity, drives interest, and questions, surrounding Jack’s death. More than just the event of it — though that, too, is of utmost curiosity — but the environment in the Pearson home before and after. How Rebecca and Miguel experienced and in some ways modeled grief, and how that shaped the Big Three. What happened, what’s mapped onto the moment in time, that makes it so hard for Kevin, Kate and Randall to talk about it, twenty years later?
It all comes back to Jack’s death.