This is Us 3x11 Review: Saving One Little Boy

For some odd reason tears didn't fall as I watched this week's episode of "This is Us -Songbird Rd. Pt.1". This show used to make me bawl like a newborn baby but not lately. Yet as my fingers hit the keyboard, I thought about what I watched, my eyes got filled to the brim and started to leak like a busted pipe under a sink. It started with a slow drip, easily ignored. The more I thought about the loneliness and pain these two brothers, Jack and Nicky, held on to for over forty years, the pipes burst. I don't know if it was my pain I cried about or theirs.

Jack and Nicky were each others everything.

They were all each other had which could shield them from this mean mean world. Jack was Nicky's protector, and he always would be until everything changed one day, on a boat, in a little fishing village in Vietnam. On that day, the hope and faith Jack held on to for saving his brother died with a little boy and there was nothing Jack could have done to save them. Not getting the Vietnamese boy medical care so he wouldn't die from an infection because on this day, Jack couldn't save him from blowing up in the boat. He risked his life to join the war in order to find Nicky just so he could protect him but he couldn't save his baby brother from the drugged out heartless person the Vietnam war turned him into. Jack didn't know this person, this was not the little boy he came to protect. That person died on the boat that day.


Due to the numerous times Nicky lashed out at the villagers out of hate and in anger, Jack couldn't let himself believe that when Nicky pulled the ring on the grenade, it was nothing other than intentional. A loud explosion, a mother's cry, and one little shoe in the water floating by. It was this moment when

Jack looked at his brother and decided there was nothing in him left to save. He was dead to him.

Years after Nam, Nicky reached out to Jack hoping to explain that what happened on the boat was an accident, and it was. Yes, it was stupid to take a child out in the water to fish with live grenades, yet still an accident. However Jack would never know because he ignored his postcards.

Nicky sent one final card which read, "Okay, last one." So Jack went to see his brother for the first time since that explosive day but only to remind him not to reach out to him again. For a moment he tussled with himself on whether or not he should build those bridges between them again or let them stay burned down. Jack chose the latter and the bridge was burned down forever because unbeknownst to Nicky, Jack died from a heart attack caused by smoke inhalation from when his house burned down.

So I sat and thought to myself about how many bridges have I burned. I wondered how many people are sitting on the other side of one full of regret and remorse. Here I am going about my life trying to forget they existed and they too may have tried to tell me the truth, some bit of truth which would make me realize they still the person I was there for, but I wouldn't listen. Jack was good at holding grudges. I hold grudges like this.

 Jack's father was dead to him, his brother was dead to him but truthfully Jack was the one who was dying inside because he was holding onto so much anger and pain all those years. In the end, after trying to save his mother from his father, his brother from the war, Randall from the hospital, and his family from the fire, after trying to save all these people but holding on to all that pain  he was the one little boy he couldn't save.

Maybe I should call my father. 

When Nicky learned of Jack's death, something wailed inside of him like the cry of the mother who lost her son on the boat that day. For forty years Nicky was left alone regretful of what happened. He was more pained than ever to learn his brother died  having lost all faith in him because he didn't know the truth. Nicky had nothing left to live for. After Kevin, Randall, and Kate went on their way Nicky sat at his table with his gun but Kevin recalled his father saying don't make the same wrong choices I did and he couldn't do what his father had done. He went back for Nicky right in the nick of time. In some strange way, this was Jack's way of saving him.






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