This is Us Season 6 Episode 8 review: It’s taken Kevin 41 years, but he’s finally getting his act together

3/5

Story: In the first of the Big Three Trilogy, This is US focuses on Kevin, his years of feeling inadequate and trying to be like his late father – the man he wants to be. As a starter, present-day Kevin decides it’s a great idea to fly across the country with his twins, and no other help, to be at the cabin site with uncle Nicky, Edie and Cassidy, during a break from his The Manny reboot. He’s got to prove to himself and everyone that doubts him that he can be a great father, just like his own.

Review: Okay, we’ve known from the start that Kevin’s quite shallow, a fact his own siblings drive home a lot. But they’ve also been confident that there will come a day when he comes into his own – well, it’s taken him 41 years, but it appears that Kevin is finally finding a purpose to life and it’s not onscreen with the glamorous life of a celebrity.

This week’s episode also flits between three time zones, as has been the case for a while. The past gives us a clearer idea about why certain people/things are the way they are. So, there’s a very young Kevin wanting to jump off the springboard into the deep end of the pool before he’s even learnt to swim, a young adult realizing the failings of his own character and just how shallow he is, and present-day, where he’s trying to give wings to his father’s dreams of building a bigger cabin for the family. Jack Pearson was a builder and it was his dream to branch out on his own with Big Three Homes, which as we come to see on the episode, is where Kevin finally finds a firm footing.

Having entrusted Cassidy with supervising the construction of the new cabin, Kevin meets the army veterans she’s hired for the job and learns that they used to build schools in war zones. An expertise he wants to explore by building more homes. And that’s Kevin’s way of following in his dad’s footsteps. But, of course, the realization of what he needs to do comes only after a few typical Kevin moments, where, after a rough flight with the twins, he arrives to find the foundation of the new cabin being ripped up to be redone and takes his frustration out on Cassidy. Although they make up over dinner, it becomes clear that she’s still dealing with ghosts of past. PTSD is real and debilitating, and in Cassidy’s case, she’s not getting a lot of sleep, fretting over the ones she left behind in the war. Solo drives apparently calm her, but she then ends up being in a near-fatal crash, which may not have been accidental, after all.

Verdict: Truth be told, Kevin’s not the most interesting of the Big Three. His story arc has more often been about his love life, so it was a relief that there was no romance here, except, maybe that hopeful glance at Cassidy after dinner. This was an hour directed by Milo Ventimiglia, who plays Jack on the show, which, sadly, wrangled with not being sure – the makers in this episode and Kevin in himself. And that did not make for a great watch.