The only other timeline visited in “The Day of the Wedding” is circa 1986, when Rebecca (Mandy Moore) decides to get an ill-considered haircut. That may seem like an odd juxtaposition for a wedding episode, but it turns out that Rebecca‘s hairstyle choice is actually a manifestation of some deep-seated concerns she has, which gain new significance when we know what happens to Rebecca later in life. The episode also features a sexy mystery, an original song and the origin story we never knew we needed. Here’s everything we learned in This Is Us Season 6 episode 13, “The Day of the Wedding.”
Who will Kevin end up with on This Is Us?
In the morning before the wedding, Madison (Caitlin Thompson) and Beth (Susan Kelechi Watson) enter Kevin’s (JustinHartley) room to get the twins’ clothing. While there, Beth finds what appears to be a love poem written on a napkin in female handwriting, and Madison sees a bra flung over a chair with a floral wrap, leading them to conclude that Kevin is having a “secret wedding weekend romance.” The pair sets out to solve the mystery of who he may have hooked up with. Candidates include the flirty wedding singer (Katie Lowes), Kevin’s ex-wife Sophie (Alexandra Breckenridge)—except she’s married and that’s not her MO—and Cassidy (Jennifer Morrison), Kevin’s plus-one. Beth checks that their investigation isn’t weird for Madison (who planning to marry Kevin at one point), but Madison reassures her that their romance is in the distant past and that she’s happily moved on with Elijah (Adam Korson). Later, on the elevator, Cassidy mentions to Kevin that she left her floral wrap in his room the previous night, perking the ears of Madison and Beth. If the floral wrap is hers, then it’s safe to assume the bra is too, right? Mystery solved. But a bit later still, while walking with his mom, Kevin tells her he’s gotten himself into “a bit of a pickle,” and that he feels “lost romantically.” Thinking he’s Jack talking about Kevin and Sophie, Rebecca tells him that they just need some time to figure things out because they got married so young. They then run into the real Sophie, prompting a short but awkward conversation about how Sophie only got “a little” sleep the night before, which Beth and Madison overhear. Were they wrong about Cassidy? Could Sophie be Kevin’s secret paramour? The plot thickens even further when the wedding singer comes to Kevin’s table at the reception and Madison and Beth hear her start a whispered conversation with the words, “about last night.” Ah, so it was her all along! No rekindled old romance, just a one-night stand. Or… was it? As the episode closes, Randall (Sterling K. Brown) asks Kevin what happened to him the night before, to which Kevin responds that “it’s a long story.” Randall asks in reply, “Is it a good story?” as we see brief flashbacks of him with all three women the night before—walking with Sophie in a vineyard, sitting beside the wedding singer at a bar and walking into a hotel room with Cassidy. “I don’t know yet,” Kevin responds.
Is Rebecca sick on This Is Us?
In the present-day storyline (now set a little over four years in the future from the last time we caught up with the Pearsons in the “present”), Philip comes to visit Kate before the wedding festivities start, both of them shrugging off traditional superstitions about brides and grooms on their wedding day. As the second wedding for both of them, they’re beyond such things. But Kate does have one worry: Rebecca’s musical performance later, fretting that if her mother forgets her song, she will be devastated. Philip assures her that it will go great, saying he’s been working with Rebecca for a year and has quadruple-checked her sheet music. In her own room, Rebecca tells her stylist she doesn’t need her hair done, but Miguel (Jon Huertas) reminds her it’s for Kate’s wedding. It takes her a bit to remember, but she seems to get there… eventually. As her stylist prepares to get to work, Randall comes to check on Rebecca and remind her of the song she’ll be performing later. Rebecca mentions that she can’t wait for his father to arrive, which Miguel waves away although Randall is troubled, saying he’s never seen her forget Jack’s death before. During the photos, Rebecca calls Kevin “Jack,” and then gets very upset when Randall reminds her that Jack hasn’t been with them for a long time. To calm her down, Kevin takes Miguel’s spot by his mom in the photo (although hopefully they also got one later with Miguel in his rightful place, so that Kate’s wedding photos don’t serve as a permanent reminder of Rebecca’s illness beginning to pick up steam). Later, Kevin and Kate bring Randall up to speed, telling him that the doctor has instructed them not to correct their mother when she gets mixed up, and that the best thing to do is just roll with it until the episode passes—which means Kevin has been doing a lot of standing in for Jack. The Big Three wonder if she shouldn’t perform later, but Philip pushes back, reminding them that the whole wedding schedule has been structured around Rebecca and that her doctors think performing the song will be good for her. He reassures Kate that her mother can do this. “Once she finds her key, she’ll lock in.” However, while accompanying Randall to check on Rebecca, he admits he’s mostly putting on a brave front for Kate’s sake, and has no idea whether Rebecca can pull off the performance. Later, while watching Golden Girls with Nicky (Griffin Dunne) and Edie (Vanessa Bell Calloway), the door opens and Jack walks into the room! He takes a seat by Rebecca, who notices he seems uncomfortable, but when she asks what’s wrong, he says he just had a rough night. But of course, it’s not Jack at all; it’s Kevin, unrecognizable to his mother. Nicky seems concerned about how having to role-play his dead father in order to soothe his ailing mother may be affecting Kevin emotionally, but he assures his uncle that he’s fine. At the wedding ceremony, little Jack and Hailey serve as the ring bearer and flower girl, respectively, before Miguel walks Kate down the aisle. In their vows, Kate admits she and Philip hated each other a little bit at first, but that although theirs wasn’t a typical fairytale romance, it’s worth more because of what they had to fight through in order to claim it. Meanwhile, Rebecca looks a little confused in the audience (to the point where she seems to forget she is even at a wedding, as evidenced by her failure to stand when the bride walks in), but makes it through the ceremony without incident. The wedding toasts are a bit of a mixed bag, with Kevin deciding to recite the Impressive Clergyman’s speech from The Princess Bride in its entirety, and one of Philip’s semi-drunk Scottish relatives admitting that he hasn’t prepared anything, but Randall delivers his heartfelt congratulations, telling the couple that Kate’s smile is the same one he remembers from when they were kids. Once the toasts wrap up, it’s time for the moment we’ve all been waiting for: Rebecca’s musical performance. At first, Rebecca remains seated when Randall introduces her, but she rises at a prompt from Miguel. One small hurdle down, but one big one left to go. Once seated at the piano, Rebecca plays a few tentative notes as her family holds their collective breath. But sure enough, once she finds her key, she locks in and sings beautifully, moving her loved ones to tears. And the tune is surprisingly familiar to those of us who have been watching This Is Us from the beginning—the original song gives words to the musical theme that plays at the end of each episode, and has popped up many times in the score throughout each season.
What happens to Miguel in This Is Us?
Earlier in the day, when the recently sworn-in Senator(!) Randall arrives to check on Rebecca, Miguel intervenes before she can respond to his invitation to go over her song, insisting that he accompany him to a wine tasting instead. Safely away from Rebecca, Randall voices his concerns about his mother’s deterioration, worrying she may start calling him William (his biological father) and that maybe it’s the beginning of a “bigger slide.” But Miguel doesn’t want to talk about it, saying he thought they both could use a break from Alzheimers and remain focused on the wine. So Randall shifts topics—to Miguel, saying he notices a tremor in Miguel’s hand, and that he saw some blood pressure medication in their room with Miguel’s name on it. Still, Miguel only wants to talk wine. Later, though, when Randall seems reluctant to even let Miguel load boxes into a car trunk, Miguel lets him have it, saying that the tremor is just a side effect of his medication and that what he’d really wanted was just unplug and enjoy some wine with Randall, since they both appreciate wine the same way. But Randall wasn’t allowing him the break he so desperately needed from Rebecca’s rapidly deteriorating condition.
Why did Jack shave off his beard on This Is Us?
As Rebecca prepares school lunches and runs family errands in the episode’s circa-1986 scene, everything about her daily routine seems very… routine until she decides to change things up with a short Princess Diana haircut. “It’s all right mom, hair grows back,” little Kate (Isabella Rose Landau) tries to reassure her mother when she debuts her new hairdo at home. Meanwhile, Kevin (Kaz Womack) is pretending to be Captain Hook because he thinks she looks like Peter Pan. Later, Rebecca admits to Jack (Milo Ventimiglia) that she also hates the haircut, but that she cut it because she feels like she’s moving through her life on autopilot. She hates feeling like all she is a mom, and that she’s become completely predictable to everyone around her, even the guys at the deli who call her “Pound of Ham.” She misses the spontaneity of their earlier days together. “I don’t want to lose myself and forget who I am,” she admits, which packs quite an emotional wallop when filtered through the lens of her eventual Alzheimer’s diagnosis. In solidarity, Jack spontaneously shaves off his beard, resulting in the ’90s Jack Pearson look we’ve come to know and love. “You look like Magnum P.I.,” Kevin says. But although Rebecca initially describes Jack’s new look as a cross between a pizza delivery guy and a porn star, they both must warm up to it eventually, since although Rebecca grows her hair back out, we know from the show’s many other flashbacks that Jack keeps the solo ‘stache for around a decade after this.
What happens next on This Is Us?
It sounds like the mystery of Kevin’s evening will be the focal point of Episode 14, titled “The Night Before the Wedding.” The official synopsis for the episode reads, “The night before Kate’s wedding, Kevin’s love life takes an unexpected turn.” Since we obviously just saw the wedding itself, we expect “The Night Before the Wedding” to be a slight flashback, during which we will almost certainly see the context behind Kevin’s encounters with the three targets of Madison and Beth’s investigation. Somewhere during the course of the episode, we will learn the story behind the love poem (or, more likely, song lyrics, based on the fleeting glimpse we saw of the wedding singer at the bar in Episode 13) on the napkin, the wrap and bra on the chair, and the awkward encounter with Sophie. However, we aren’t ruling out the possibility that Kevin actually didn’t hook up with any of the women he crossed paths with the previous night, and that when he told Rebecca that he got himself into “a bit of a pickle” and that he feels “lost romantically,” he was talking about someone else entirely (the now-married Madison, perhaps?). After all, This Is Us loves to throw us off the scent, so when the show comes out and hands us a seemingly straightforward mystery to solve, we’re always going to be searching for the ways in which it may be messing with us. Only five episodes left to go before we say goodbye to the Pearsons forever (or at least for now), and we fully expect each one to pack in as many twists and turns as possible. Next, how will This Is Us end? Here’s everything we know (and suspect) about the series finale.
