Janie430

I'm getting really sick of the food service storyline in general. First, the idea that a food service place even at a community college has no structure is ridiculous, but also, community colleges do have grievance structures - in real life, she'd have been in HR with a complaint about her manager in two seconds for pulling the "I'm firing you for bothering me". More than that, I'm annoyed that Darlene is basically expecting everyone else to sacrifice for her choice to work in food service/Mark. Yes, Harris/ the Lunchbox are getting paid, but she's the one guilting her child to save her job and has never volunteered to go over and help Harris out. Now she's guilting her father to work extra shifts and take time away from his wife because she and her husband have changed their hours. This is a prime example of the family's basic co-dependency - there's helping your family, and then there's setting yourself on fire to solve someone else's problems. In Darlene's case, it's setting everyone on fire to save Mark and her.

Fogelman wanted it to be over because he didn't want to hand it over to another showrunner to finish. I don't blame him for wanting to be done after 6-8 years of obsessing, writing, editing and probably 70 hour weeks. Most showrunners depart after 4-5 years because they can't keep up the pace. But he could have handed it over to someone to run another couple of years.

Yes, but that's actually part of my issue with the story. Randall entered the scene as a Type A, overly intense, make all the decisions type who had it all - the great wife, the great family, the great career, the perfect son. At the time, the fly in the ointment was the panic attacks, and his biggest issue seems to be his need to be needed. At the end of season 1, it seems he's stepping back from the need to be perfect all the time, the need to be in control all the time but then - he buys a building when he's not working, which leads to him becoming a city councilman, which leads to him becoming a Senator. He's still got Beth (who forgives more than anyone not a deity should) and he's added to the family with Dacia, but more importantly, he still sees himself the way he did at the beginning of the series - the perfect son, the great patriarch, the man in charge. His anxiety issues ended up being about the adoption, which in part became about transracial adoption, but which is still all about him. The closest we came to seeing him really get and internalize that he cannot and should not be in control of everything was with the kids (Beth wanted to adopt an older child, Tess is gay, Dacia ran off with Malik) and I guess I would have liked it to seen it sink in better in later seasons. I guess I never felt like Randall really lost something that mattered to him because of his own choices, and since the writers wrote Kevin and Kate losing majorly because of their own self-destructiveness/issues, I wanted the same for Randall, so that he would parallel their growth. I don't feel like Randall is any wiser or different fundamentally as a person than the character was in season one, whereas my take on all the other characters is that they have transformed since then.

So I get that Kevin was a prat as a teenager, but my heart felt a little bad for him. I get that Rebecca was overloaded, but her husband was an alcoholic, she knew her father in law was an alcoholic, and her son is coping with a trauma by drinking. I wish Rebecca had been in a place where she could have had a real talk with Kevin about it, but they've written it that she was just unable to deal with Jack's alcoholism, and therefore couldn't talk to Kevin about it. Also, over the course of the series, we saw Kevin and Kate crack up and hit rock bottom, and see how all their coping mechanisms hurt them. I had always felt that season 5 would have had Randall hitting rock bottom, except COVID, and George Floyd. So I feel that they missed an opportunity. The series essentially ends with Kate and Kevin coming to terms with their own flaws and trying to change them and their life, and Randall's come through all his with his life approach and sense of self completely intact. I mean we have Beth telling him that he's treating his siblings like they were at the beginning of the series, but we still haven't seen Randall seeing that he didn't always see Kevin or Kate clearly even then. He was so dismissive of Kevin's work on the Manny then, and he acted like Kevin was never kind to him or treated him like a brother, and yet we saw incidents of Kevin being supportive of Randall throughout their childhood (if not enough of them). And he's never acknowledged the toxic mixture of comfort eating and spoiling from Jack and the complicated issues Rebecca inherited from her own mother and passed on to Kate. Kevin made choices based on family and cracked up because of his addiction, and he gave up being a "serious" actor - i.e. he accepted being a rich sitcom actor, but not getting serious roles or being seen as a player. Kate made choices based on her addiction, and her issues, and in order to grow as a person and be happy, she had to walk away from her first marriage. And Randall - the overachieving obessive with anxiety issues who does crazy things like buying a building on impulse that should crack him up somewhere - - - becoems a Senator.

This episode confirmed what my mother has been saying since the sixties - he back to nature hippies lack common sense! (sarcasm/humor here). My mother was in California from 1966 to 1968, and came from a farm family in upstate New York. She had thoughts on the hippies that were living in communes and claiming to be living off the land - i.e. they were heavily subsidized by someone and not in touch with actual Mother Nature. Seriously isn't the whole point of civilization to get as far away from being naked around wildlife as possible?

Yes,I remember, and that's one of the reasons I don't like Randall. He still thinks his way is the only way, and everytime he seems near to having to get to a place of minor humility, he detours around it (still bitter that his therapy never got into some of his deeper control issues).

To relate this to Jack and Rebecca again, Kate was used to Jack making all the big gestures and the major decisions, and Rebecca went along with it. It makes sense that she'd initally be very comfortable in a relationship with that dynamic. But like Randall realized he didn't want his relationship with Beth to be like that, I think it's normal for Kate to not want her relationship to be like that anymore. It would make sense to me that in learning to advocate for Baby Jack, even against Toby, and to having to make detailed plans and stick to them, that Kate would be find it easier to put her own needs in a relationship forward. Ironically, to me as Rebecca lost more and more of her independence and voice as her marriage to Jack progressed, Kate's needed to find it.

I don't think the focus on achieving is anything new for Abishola's side of the family. They've made a point all along that that side of the family has always been ambitious (the entire episode about "and then (med school, more apartments for Tunde, etc)" and Abishola has been shown struggling with her perception of herself as high achieving versus fun-loving. It would make sense that her family would be excited about the expanding business, and it was sweet that Abishola would admit to herself that she really likes that Bob was more relaxed than her.

So I agree Kate spent a lot of time resenting her mother for no reason, but Rebecca and Kate had some issues in Season 1 and 2 that the show backed away from. Rebecca's mom had control and weight issues (ordering Rebecca a Tab instead of a coke and insisting she have a salad), and there was a sense from a couple of episodes that Rebecca complained about being "heavy" when she was very thin (I think Jack swung her around and she said 'Don't, I'm too heavy'). Plus, it was clear that instead of feeding all the kids healthy foods, the boys got sugary cereals and Kate didn't. It's also clear that Jack was sneaking Kate food treats all the time and encouraging her to lie to Rebecca about it. Which was horrible of him, because it meant that Kate grew up not being able to be open with Rebecca. I would say that Randall was Rebecca's favorite, and Kate was the child she was most worried about. But sometimes in trying to help our troubled children, we do inadvertent damage, if we have our own issues driving it. It's interesting that one of the things I see in Kate and Kevin is that they don't seem to trust themselves emotionally, but they also have taken a long time to get to where they trust Rebecca emotionally. At the point of the flashback, Kate just got out of an abusive relationship and had an abortion and didn't want to tell her mother anything. Heck, it's not clear she told Kevin about the abortion at the time.

I actually don't think it is out of character for Jack. Jack has always been determined to be the bestest dad and husband, and he sees part of that as being the in charge hero. When he can't be that, he gets insecure and either tries to make the other person reassure him (Rebecca in NYC or with the tour) or ups the ante to try and save the other person. Nicky wouldn't run away so when his mother and Nicky are struggling he enlists? He thinks somehow, once he's over there he can save him. Nicky tells him he's lost, Nicky's CO tells him Nicky's safe where he is, he manipulates the CO to get released. When it all blows up, he shuts down completely. He can't fix Marilyn's issues entirely when he gets her out, so he shuts down. Same pattern - when he can't make it all better, and he can't pretend he can anymore he shuts down and shuts people out. As the OP said, unhealthy.

So the TK has hypothermia makes sense in the fact that he got wet, but didn't make sense in term of Tommy not saying once they got the kid stabilized "OK, TK, now you" and having him strip out of his clothes at the very least. She's not an idiot. Also, yes, it would have been cheesy as heck if he did have a white Malboro Man stallion, but the thing is - Owen would have totally owned it that he got the horse for no other reason to complete the look. He embraces his extra-ness so well.

I agree. As this is wish fulfillment in some ways, I wish Kevin had said to the guy "You mean the day when you finally wrote something that allowed me to act, brought in a high profile actor to play opposite me, and then decided I didn't deserve to have at least one good thing for my reel? Yeah I remember that day too!"

I do not condone Spencer's stalking at all, but for a 40-something year old man to be trying to get revenge against his clearly troubled 18 year old son is awful, and not soapy. And I am getting a little sick of Laura just going "I expect you to do xy and z for me" (treat Cam better (right thing to do, treat Kevin the really bad psychiatrist better, maybe not). I would have loved Spencer to have said "No" when Laura demanded he treat Kevin better and walk off.

To be fair, he inherited the store, and we don't know what the debt/rent/overhead situation is yet. Plus, Ben wasn't making a lot of money as an Uber driver, he was paying Dan at least a token amount of rent, their magazine folded and may have had debt, and he also bought all that podcast equipment. If he had a lot of high interest credit card debt, and his credit score is not great, it might be better for him to live for a few months free and try and get the credit card debt down to a reasonable amount.

In Rebecca's defense, she seems like she's been trying to have the conversation with Randall for a week, and he's been ducking her. Randall was leaving the next day, so she had to pin him down that day. And I've been waiting for Rebecca to say that she justified her lying about Randall's parents on the basis of the fact that they were addicts, so I was happy about that. But they're writing Randall as romanticizing Laurel, and it is annoying. She was an addict. She messed up, and ended up in jail for five years. She then self-destructed for the next 30 until she died. Nicky self-destructed for 50. William self-destructed on and off for 30 years (since he was an active addict when Randall was being adopted, he was sober six years later when Rebecca went to see him in Philly, and then the show seems to have thought he would have been using again when Randall was 18 in the Sliding Doors episode). I love that this show is about showing how the past shapes us and people don't just "get over" some things, but does no one in the Pearsons' world ever move on from anything really bad? Or rebuild their life? You can build a life that's better than living alone on a vegetable farm for 30 years and still regret not reaching out to your child who you might have thought was already in a stable loving family. Or go the William way and show her as a relapsing addict, not that she just wallowed for 30 years.