‘This Is Us’ Recap: It’s Game Time

Warning: This recap for the “The Game Plan” episode of This Is Us contains spoilers.

Were you ready for some football … and all of the supercharged emotions that surround the traditions of watching “America’s game”?

Just like anyone of a certain age we have ever met from Pittsburgh, the Pearson family from This Is Us grew up worshiping at the altar of Terry Bradshaw and his Super Bowl champion Steelers. Bleeding black and yellow, it turns out, can be traced back to long before Kate, Kevin, and Randall were conceived, and it has continued to help at least one of them connect with their dad in the present.

JACK AND REBECCA
As Jack and Rebecca sit in a bar — with Jack preoccupied by the TV — Rebecca remembers being told to play in another room and keep it down while her dad watched football, and watching her mom wait on him hand and foot. Rebecca demanded he teach her the game because she refused to become her mother, who just stared at her dad while he only had eyes for the game. His tutelage turned her into a superfan. and before long they were living the Miller high life, waking up with jerseys and booze in bed, tailgating and pregaming in bars while Rebecca tried to make it as a singer in the same taverns.

Flash-forward to Super Bowl day, and Miguel and his wife are a maybe for the pigskin party because they have trouble finding a sitter. “Why do people have kids?” wonders Rebecca, future supermom, aloud. Once Miguel and his wife show up, they launch into a story about projectile vomit, crying, and baby-slapping.

“Promise me we are never having kids,” Rebecca pleads with Jack. This time Jack’s reaction doesn’t seem so casual, and he presses her for why they shouldn’t pop out some rugrats. “We always say we are going to talk about it and we don’t,” he says. “I want kids. There’s gotta be something bigger than me and you.” Rebecca digs her heels in. “You knew when you married me that I did not want to be one of those women whose sole purpose in life was being a mother. If that’s what you wanted you should have married my mom. I’m not there yet. I am only 29.”

Their fight makes Miguel excuse himself from the booth and disturb some other drunk fan. “Sid and Nancy, settle down. You need to control your woman,” he barks. “We can’t hear the game.” And because this is pre-sobriety, hot-headed Jack, he winds up punching the guy. Rebecca takes off, adding sarcastically, “We should really be having kids.”

This leads Jack and Miguel to have another heart-to-heart. “If you have kids, you can kiss this life goodbye,” warns Miguel. “What if she doesn’t want kids? Is that really a deal breaker?” So Jack heads outside to find his wife. “If it is between you and having kids, you win every time. No question,” he tells Rebecca. “My father let me watch football with him as long as I sat on the floor and didn’t talk too much. I always imagined when I had kids I’d watch the games with them too, except I would let them talk as loud as they want.”

Rebecca admits that she too sees a future with little ones, just maybe not as soon as he does. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me. All of my friends my age have kids. Maybe it is because I am still singing at Froggy’s and I am not as far along as I thought I would be,” she admits. “But when i think of our future, I see us with kids. I just love our life right now and I am so scared of changing it.”

RANDALL AND KEVIN
Kevin has made himself at home at Randall’s house, and for anyone not quite so wrapped up in himself, it would be obvious that his extended stay is working his brother and sister-in-law’s last nerves. (For example: Randall makes Kevin a smoothie. Kevin says he doesn’t like blueberries and that he will make a list of his food dislikes later. Suddenly, the kids won’t eat blueberries either.)

Related: This Is Us Postmortem: Justin Hartley on Kevin’s Beautiful Painting Scene and What’s Next

Meanwhile, when Beth gives William his pills, she and Randall tell the inquisitive and worried children that the pills are only vitamins. Kevin is surprised. “You told the kids he is Grandpa but not that he is sick?” Beth and Randall decide to ask Kevin when he’s thinking of leaving.

Kevin says with a sigh that the play wasn’t going well, the people he’s working with are riding him hard, and that it’s too quiet and lonely in his big, luxurious hotel suite. Randall sees an opportunity to get away for a night from their stressful daily lives and asks to take said luxurious hotel suite for the night. Kevin is fine with that and even offers to babysit. What could possibly go wrong? After all, he played a manny on TV.

“We aren’t normally in the habit of leaving our kids for the night, especially not with two men who haven’t spent much time around kids,” says Beth, before Randall adds, “One of them is best known for leaving a kid at a fire station.”

Still, Randall is so excited to get away he can hardly contain himself. He’s already planning their every move — they’ll have “no-kids-in-the-other-room loud adult shower sex,” wear robes, order burgers, eat in bed, and watch Florence Foster Jenkins — when Beth drops a bomb: “I’m a week and a half late and I feel like crap and I almost threw up when I looked at pizza. I can’t bring myself to buy a pregnancy test. I am bugging out, baby. I need you to talk me down.”

Randall starts kissing his dreams of early retirement in Charleston goodbye, which understandably annoys Beth. “I am so sorry I am screwing with your super-secret Charleston dream, honey,” she snaps. “My issues are nothing compared to yours. Who has two hands and was about to go back to work full time and maybe remember who she was but now will have to split her time between a home office and a diaper station?”

As they sit on the bathroom floor, waiting for the test results, Randall admits that a son wouldn’t totally suck and the girls would love a sibling. After all, they make good kids. “What has two thumbs and loves his wife so much it hurts?” jokes Randall. (#couplegoals). Of course, neither of them are all that dismayed when the test results come up negative.

Meanwhile back at the Casa Pearson, Kevin leaves the girls in front of the electronic babysitter while he tries to learn the lines. The kids want to play Barbie fashion show and need Uncle Kevin to be the celebrity judge, but he persuades them to help get off-book for rehearsal the next day instead. But when the girls criticize his choices for a line, Kevin, being as insecure as he is, lashes out and makes fun of their line delivery too. “See, not that easy.”

The subject matter — ghosts, death — is a little heavy for the girls, and they start asking questions Kevin can’t really answer, like “When you die you become a ghost?” and “Is Grandpa going to die?” Is it any wonder that Uncle Kevin chokes? “I wouldn’t get too attached,” he stammers, before frantically trying to dig himself out of the hole. “It was a joke. It is natural. I’m gonna die. You two are going to die. Your mom and dad are going to die. Oh, my gosh, it is getting late. Go brush your teeth.”

KATE AND TOBY
Toby asks Kate what her plans are for Sunday night. She says she had a date with her TV for the Steelers game. He offers to watch with her, and she kindly declines. “Thanks, but I’m good. It’s my thing, my little ritual. This is something that I do alone,” she says mysteriously.

Of course, Toby will not be sidelined. He passes her a note at their diet group inviting her to watch at his apartment. She hesitates, but clearly in an effort to give the relationship the old college try, Kate agrees. It’s a decision she quickly regrets: When Kate arrives at Toby’s house, she finds his friend Shooter there as well, and neither Shooter nor Toby take the game as seriously as she does. They want to talk about TV quality and the origins of jicama, pause live just as a big play was going down, and reminisce about the time they accidentally went to an Ashlee Simpson concert. Kate makes an excuse and gets the hell outta Dodge.

Later, Toby shows up at her place to figure out what happened — and that’s when Kate drops a bombshell on Toby, and us. “Growing up, I used to watch the Steelers with my dad, until I grew up and moved out here and forgot about it until the 2006 [playoffs]. I wanted to watch them with my dad. I did and they won, and then they won the Super Bowl,” she explains. “So I watch them every Sunday with my dad.”

Toby replies, “He sounds like a cool guy. I’d like to meet him sometime.” Kate removes the urn from the mantle and introduces Toby to Jack. “Football is a really big thing in my family,” says Kate. “I was conceived in a bathroom during the Super Bowl.”

POSTSCRIPT: THE MANNY
Kevin goes to the girls’ room to say sorry for being a jerk and asks if they would forgive him if he told them a secret he’d never told anyone before. (And that secret is not that he and Demi Lovato dated. “We were just friends.”)

No, it turns out that whenever he gets a new script, he paints the way it makes him feel. He whips out the one he did for the play and uses it to explain his thoughts on life, death, and how we are all a part of the same life painting. “I think I scared you before all that talk of dying and ghosts. That is confusing adult stuff,” he says. “I felt like the play was about life, and life is about color [that] goes on to infinity. We are all in the painting everywhere. My dad is not with us anymore, but he is with me every day. It all fits somehow, even if you don’t understand how. People will die in our lives, people that we love, in the future — maybe tomorrow, maybe years from now. Just because you can’t see them or talk to them anymore doesn’t mean they are not still in the painting. There’s no you or me or them; just us. What if we are all in the painting everywhere?”

As he’s giving his spiel, the action flashes back to all the kids watching the Steelers with their parents. Dad’s lucky beanie features prominently as everyone jumps around and cheers at a winning play. We then flash-forward to the present day, when Kate and Toby are watching the game while that same beanie sits atop Jack’s urn. And the episode ends on Randall, who’s crying as he puts his dad’s stuff away. Not sure if he’s finally letting go of his feelings about his bio dad’s illness, or crying at the thought of not having a son.

This Is Us airs Tuesdays at 9 p.m. ET on NBC. Watch clips and full episodes of This Is Us on Yahoo View.