NBC’s “This Is Us” has time-traveled across decades.
Now, it’s heading around the world to follow a young Jack Pearson (Milo Ventimiglia) during his 1971 tour of duty in Vietnam.
Tuesday’s episode, “Vietnam” (9 EDT/PDT), is significant on two fronts: It establishes Jack’s relationship with his little brother Nicky (Michael Angarano), who's also serving in the war, and opens a new storyline that will play out for the rest of the season.
In the time-jumping nature of “This Is Us,” viewers who have seen Jack’s life as a husband and father – and even his death – will learn about a pivotal experience and relationship that shaped him. Although the drama usually shifts between several character stories in an episode, Tuesday's show focuses only on Jack in his younger years.
“We have established this character that people love, and now you’re going to meet him before he was that guy,” says creator Dan Fogelman. Jack “had a messed-up childhood. He was not from a happy home. He had one core, loving relationship with his little brother. Then he went to Vietnam and came back (and) built himself into this man.”
Fogelman wrote the episode with Tim O’Brien, a novelist whose collection of short stories, “The Things They Carried,” was inspired by his military service in Vietnam. It features scenes shot during two visits to the Southeast Asian country. Ventimiglia makes his first trip there Tuesday to shoot scenes for future episodes.
In last week's episode, a young Kevin Pearson gets a glimpse of Jack's feelings about Vietnam when his father reacts harshly to his interest in war costumes and props. As an adult, Kevin (Justin Hartley) becomes more curious about his late father's war experience and this season will visit Vietnam. (Hartley will also travel to Vietnam to film upcoming episodes.)
Ventimiglia has been imagining Jack as a Vietnam veteran since first-season conversations with Fogelman about the character's backstory.
“I remember saying, ‘I’m going to tuck it down my heart like Jack is (a veteran).' The discipline, the heartbreak, the horrible stuff you see in war that you don’t want to expose your family to, I’m going to plug that into his psyche,” he says. “It just uncovered so much of what we’d already established and reaffirmed the way he lives his life based on what he experienced in his early 20s.”
The war affects Jack for better and worse.
“His experience in Vietnam both strengthens his leadership qualities, the calm under pressure, but it also created obstacles, these things he had to bury deep,” Fogelman says. “You’ll never see Jack completely break the façade because he is so strong and inherently good. But what a burden on the guy to be that perfect but have that much imperfect stuff that happened in his background.”
The episode also establishes an adult relationship between Jack and Nicky, who was seen briefly as a child in a Season 2 episode. Viewers already know Nicky died in the war, and that tragedy looms large for Jack, who ended up in Vietnam only because he felt a need to look out for his brother.
Having O’Brien aboard has been “a gift” in describing a war that ended before many of the show’s viewers (and writers) were born, Fogelman says. “Tim has all these visceral things he speaks about … the grime and the mud of that particular war, the murkiness and grayness, both literally and figuratively.”
Jack, like some veterans, keeps much of his war experience to himself, which is having an affect on his children, O’Brien says. “Jack is doing everything he can to protect his family, to not have them sullied by this war. There’s a cost to that. And part of the season is investigating that cost to all of his children.”
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