This Is Us is back with new episodes and its season 5 premiere features Jack's (Milo Ventimiglia) biggest lie to Rebecca (Mandy Moore). Due to coronavirus, NBC's hit family drama was pushed back for several weeks, but now that it's finally returned, there's excitement over what this year has in store for the Pearsons — and that includes the family's patriarch. While Jack has long been dead, This Is Us jumping through timelines allows the series to still regularly include Jack in the narrative.
Returning with a special back-to-back episode, This Is Us season 5 kicked off, as it usually does, with the Big Three's birthdays. This year, Kevin (Justin Hartley), Kate (Chrissy Metz), and Randall (Sterling K. Brown) turned 40 and for this milestone, it made sense for the episode to look back at the events leading and following their birth four decades ago. This Is Us revealed the immediate aftermath of Rebecca's water breaking, which was the series' first scene when it debuted in 2016, showing the young couple making their way to the hospital.
The usually calm and collected Jack was obviously shaken with the upcoming birth of his triplets, but impressively, he was able to grab everything they need. To prove that he's on top of things, he told Rebecca that he even brought a razor in case she wanted to shave his full facial hair. This seemed to genuinely bother her, explaining she really loves her beard. But, if she ever changes her mind, she made him promise not to leave a mustache, to which Jack swore that he "will never, ever have a mustache" The problem is, this directly contradicts the character's appearance in his older years.
Since This Is Us jumps from one era to another, the show has already shown Jack in almost all points of his life — including the years before he met and got together with Rebecca. This means that he's also changed appearance a handful of times to highlight the decade an event takes place since the series doesn't provide exact dates. So while this exchange between Rebecca and Jack has just been released, fans already have an idea of what lies ahead for the Pearsons, and that includes their patriarch sporting a mustache and a goatee in his later years. Specifically, he was rocking a '70s-style mustache while the Big Three was in elementary school, and then onto a mustache-goatee combo during their high school years until his death. To be fair, there's only a handful of men who can pull off the look, so while Rebecca may not be exactly on-board with her husband's facial hair choices, she couldn't argue with the fact that he still looked good.
Past This Is Us' overall story's midway point, it feels like the show has covered more or less the big moments in Jack's life. While the Pearson patriarch will continue to be a key figure in the story, the focus will now shift to Rebecca, whose cognitive decline will be a major plot point moving forward. Then again, since the series' is rooted in the couple's relationship over the years, it's safe to assume that there won't be a scarcity of romantic moments between the pair in the upcoming episodes.