This Is Us season 3 will offer answers to flash-forward story

Just in case you were worried that This Is Us season 3 is going to draw out its flash-forward storyline to the far reaches of the universe, that doesn’t appear to be the plan.

Instead, what’s going to happen over the upcoming episodes is that you’re going to get a sense as to precisely who an older Randall and a grown-up Tess are. At the end of season 2, a scene indicated that the two characters going to see someone, a woman, and that neither one of them were ready for it.

So what is the plan for resolving this mystery? That is something that show executive producer Dan Fogelman described in a recent interview with Entertainment Weekly:

“It’s a mystery that won’t play out over seasons … There will be answers given in the course of the season. Part of the fun of any family is looking at somebody in certain time frame or a family in a present-day time frame and hypothetically jumping forward 15 years and [seeing] who’s still in the picture, who’s not in the picture anymore, who has become ill or other. We’ll be slowly getting pieces by process of elimination or more questions…until we get to the answer — and not string it out too long.”

This is valuable for This Is Us, given that we don’t want this to become a series that becomes too based on morbid curiosity. That was one of the biggest problems with a lot of season 2: So much of the dramatic tension was based on the idea of how Jack died. We think some of the episodes, especially in the first half of the season, are probably better to go back and watch now that the specter of Jack is lifted. It actually helps to inform more of the struggle that some of the characters are going through. We actually think it’s better to start the flash-forward timeline with the news of who is there / isn’t there before seeing too much of what these characters’ lives are like.

Related – Mandy Moore already knows the end of the series

This Is Us season 3 is going to premiere on NBC Tuesday nights this fall and we are going to be with you every step of the way as the new season unfolds with previews, reviews and spoilers (but nothing to spoilery!).

What do you think should be done with the flash-forward story? Share right now in the attached comments!

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