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‘This Is Us’ Ends With Huge Twist, Creator Talks About All The Clues You Missed

By Mandy Robinson
Published on: 18:03 PST, Sep 20, 2016

Tonight on NBC viewers got to see the big premiere of This Is Us. This show is one everyone has been looking forward to but had no idea how it would end tonight. The big premiere of This Is Us ended with a huge twist that nobody saw coming. EW shared that creator Dan Fogelman explained why they decided to have this huge twist on This Is Us and what clues the viewers missed to realizing what was really going on tonight.

Dan started out explaining that was the plan for This Is Us all along, but the fans just didn’t know it. A few spoilers for This Is Us came out, but nobody figured out that the parents were really in the past. Here is what Dan explained.

“It was always designed to be exactly where it is. It was written as such. Looking back on the pilot, obviously the locations are very well-disguised. John and Glenn [Requa and Ficcara, who directed the episode and serve as executive producers] did a brilliant, brilliant job of making everything correct. Even the lighting palette of the rest of the show makes it so that segment doesn’t stand out but still looks very much of the time. The biggest thing was, in the original script, the firefighter didn’t light the cigarette, and that seems to be [the moment of realization] … If you have no idea coming into the pilot that there’s a twist in it, it’s pretty much 100 percent that you will be surprised by it. I found very few people who hadn’t. And it comes to everybody at different places in the last minute and a half.”

During that last minute and a half of This Is Us, fans went crazy on social networks as they finally figured out what was really going on. The one thing on This Is Us that viewers should have noticed was that cigarette being lit where it normally couldn’t be. This was a huge hint that This Is Us was showing you something from the past. Dan shared that, when he showed his family, his mom and sister figured it out about 20 seconds before his dad. The fact that they are all related on This Is Us changes everything.

One hint that everyone missed on This Is Us was at the very start of the show when you saw photos from the past. As Dan explained, everyone would just assume these were out because it was their birthday, but that wasn’t the case. This was the very first hint that This Is Us was partially in the past. The doctor was doing a few things also that would make you realize it was 30 years ago, but these things were not really noticeable and might just make people think that he did things old school, according to Dan.

Dan also feels like doctors and nurses might be the first to figure out what was going on because of the medical equipment. There were so many things that viewers missed on This Is Us. He said, “Milo is sitting there in full denim with long hair and a beard, and people are crossing in the background, and you don’t notice it.” They tested it with several people, and he knew that they had done things on This Is Us right.

Hollywood Life shared how the premiere of This Is Us brought the viewers to tears and shocked them right away. This is the kind of thing that will keep the viewers coming back for more. Jack and Rebecca are the parents of Kevin, Kate and Randall, and you never saw that one coming.

Were you totally shocked by the twist at the end of This Is Us tonight? Did you realize that the parents were actually in the past? Sound off in the comments section below on your thoughts, and don’t miss new episodes of This Is Us when they air on Tuesday nights on NBC. He also teased to expect another twist at the end of Episode 2.

[Photo by Alberto E. Rodriguez/Getty Images]

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