Adult Kate confronts Marc on This Is Us Season 5, episode 5

Did Kate get some much-needed closure on This Is Us Season 5, Episode 5?

On the January 5th episode of This Is Us, Kate’s bombshell revelation prompted her to seek out her ex-boyfriend Marc, 20 years later.

Did that conversation give her the closure she needed? Let’s talk about what happened with Kate this week on This Us.

This Is Us: A longheld secret comes out

At the end of the last episode, a heart-to-heart conversation with Ellie, the woman whose baby Kate and Toby are looking to adopt, prompted Kate to confide in Toby about her past relationship with Marc. In doing so, Kate revealed that following her break-up with Marc, she learned that she was pregnant with his child. However, not wanting to be connected to him for life, she’d secretly gotten an abortion.

While Toby is disappointed to learn that Kate has kept this secret from him, he ultimately understands.

However, although Kate tells him that she’s made peace with their relationship, Toby suggests that may not be the case. This assumption seems to prove correct, as that night, while Toby slept, Kate Googles Marc. The next day, Kate tells Toby that she learned he lives in San Diego, and she wants Toby to accompany her on a trip to see him, to which Toby reluctantly agrees.

Kate’s weight struggles stem from a combination of jealousy and admiration toward Rebecca and guilt regarding Jack’s death. However, this new revelation adds a new layer of complexity to the equation.

Amid Jack’s death, Kate found solace in Marc. Things quickly went south, forcing Rebecca, who had a seemingly perfect relationship with Jack, to step in. Unfortunately, Kate would then find out she was pregnant with her abuser’s child and, feeling ashamed, go to tell him. However, she quickly realized that a romance like the one her parents shared would be impossible to have with him.

So she’d go it alone, holding on to this secret for 20 years, eating away the pain and telling no one why. However, as we’d see, eventually, she’d decide that it was time to confront the source of that pain head-on.

Letting go of the past

So she’d end up tracking Marc down outside the music shop where he works while he takes a smoke break. The first sign that he’s still the same old Marc comes when his boss comes outside to scold him, and we learn that he spends more time taking smoke breaks than working.

After his boss leaves, Marc asks Kate why she’s there, to which Kate asks him what he remembers about their relationship. To this, Marc has a less-than-gracious response, asking her why she wants to rehash the past before telling her that she was “broken in all the right places” and that despite things getting “intense” at times, they were kids.

To this, Kate reminds him that he was an adult that took advantage of a grieving child. She tells him that he held on to her self-esteem and crushed it, leaving her to eat her feelings for years while feeling broken. However, standing in front of him now, she tells him she realizes he was the broken one, a disease she refused to carry any longer.

With that, she’d head to the car, and on the way home, says thanks to Toby for supporting her and allowing her to be her own white knight. They’d then go home to watch Airplane, laughing all the while as Kate realized she’s finally gotten the love story that she always wanted. Is this the first step to allowing herself to heal? Possibly, but she’s got a long road ahead of her.

While Marc exacerbated her insecurities, he didn’t cause them. If Kate wants to see real change, she must commit to making it happen.

What did you think of this week’s episode of This Is Us? Was Kate too hard on Marc? Was she not hard enough? Let us know in the comments.

This Is Us airs Tuesdays at 9/8c on NBC.