“This Is Us” returned with an all-new episode Tuesday night and answered one of the questions that fans have been asking for weeks: What’s wrong with Rebecca?
The matriarch of the Pearson family saw a specialist who determined that she has a “mild cognitive impairment.”
Randall managed to get his mother an appointment with a neurologist in Los Angeles to figure out why she is not acting like she usually does. He accompanied her and Miguel to the hospital where she underwent a series of memory tests.
The doctor later sat the three down and said Rebecca had a cognitive impairment and she would like to pursue further blood tests and an MRI before making any sort of official diagnosis.
In a previous episode, we saw Rebecca on her deathbed. “This Is Us” executive producer Isaac Aptaker says that’s only a small part of her story.
“We’re a little bit ahead of Randall, because we’ve seen that final flash-forward. That said, we saw a little moment. We haven’t seen very much of how Rebecca ends up. So we’re pretty much along the ride with our characters,” he told Entertainment Weekly.
Viewers can also expect more answers when it comes to Rebecca’s storyline.
“We’re headed toward the blood test, the MRI, and there will be some more clarity on Rebecca’s condition. But it’s something that we’re going to be very medically accurate about, and the answers will come as they come,” Aptaker said.
Monday’s episode also featured a series of scenes in which Rebecca appears to be remembering the early days of her relationship with Jack, leading up to her decision to say she loves him.
Aptaker says Rebecca has a fear that their story will soon slip away from her memory.
“She lost her husband too soon, but she has always had the comfort of these amazing years they’d had together,” he said. “They had such a romantic, great love story, and the notion of forgetting all of that and not having those memories to lean into is incredibly scary for Rebecca.”
