Mandy Moore: ‘This Is Us’ Season Finale Is Just Rebecca And Jack

Mandy Moore says the season finale of This Is Us will be entirely about main characters Rebecca and Jack Pearson (Moore and co-star Milo Ventimiglia). In an interview with WSJ Café, Moore, who plays the Pearson matriarch on the hit NBC drama, said the final episode will delve deep into the back-story of the This Is Us lovebirds before moving to 1996, the year that Jack is thought to have died. Mandy was careful not to drop too many spoilers, but she made it clear that the Rebecca-Jack episode will be a doozy.

Moore said that while there is one scene with other characters in it, the bulk of the This Is Us finale episode is just Jack and Rebecca.

“I’m not sure if I’m supposed to say, but the episode is really just Milo and I,” Mandy revealed. “There’s a scene with everyone else, but it’s really the origin story of how Jack and Rebecca met and where their relationship is present day, where we last sort of left them, which is ’96.”

Mandy Moore has long said that there’s a “line in the sand” when it comes to the years before and after the death of the beloved Pearson patriarch, and it sounds like viewers will get a big dose of it in the flashback format of the season finale.

“In the course of this family’s trajectory, everything is before Jack and after Jack,” Mandy told Entertainment Weekly earlier this year.

“This is that moment of utter loss and devastation and a family drowning in grief and sorrow. I mean, I can’t even imagine… It’s tragic. It’s beyond tragic.”

While Mandy Moore didn’t say if the This Is Us finale will finally reveal Jack’s cause of death, here’s what we do know: The final episode is titled “Moonshadow.” This Is Us fans know Mandy Moore’s character still wears the moon-shaped necklace her late husband gave her back in the late 1980s, despite the fact that she is remarried to his best friend Miguel (Jon Huertas) in the present day.

TV Guide posted the synopsis of the upcoming This Is Us episode.

“In the first-season finale, Jack heads to Cleveland to make things right with Rebecca on the night of her first big gig with the band. Then, Randall, Kate, and Kevin make big decisions about their futures.”

Viewers last saw Mandy Moore’s character getting ready to head off on a multi-state tour with her band. The timeframe was the mid-1990s, and Jack and Rebecca got into a wicked argument just as she was about to leave town. Ventimiglia’s character also capped off the Valentine’s Day fight with a nightcap of Maker’s on the rocks—after years of sobriety.

This Is Us fans already fear that Jack will die while Rebecca is out of town. And it doesn’t help that Moore and the rest of the This is Us cast recently posed for a Variety magazine cover shoot, which teases “an emotional finale that will ‘destroy America.'”

But Mandy Moore previously told CTV News that the final This Is Us episode definitely won’t tie up all of this season’s loose ends. Mandy told CTV there will be “a bit of a cliffhanger finale.”

Of course, This Is Us fans know that “Moonshadow” isn’t the only Jack-Rebecca centric episode of the season. Mandy Moore and Milo Ventimiglia previously held court in the standalone episode “The Big Day,” which detailed the day in 1980 that their triplets, the Big Three, were born.

You can see Mandy Moore talking about the This Is Us season finale in the video below.

[Featured Image by Kevin Winter/Getty Images]