While Rebecca may have laid down the law with her kids on Tuesday's episode of “This Is Us,” the tension between Kate and Toby continued to escalate when the couple fought over how to feed baby Jack during the Pearson family Thanksgiving.
Kate and Toby exchanged hostilities because he was concerned she was giving him too much sugar. During dinner, things reached a crescendo when Kate got annoyed with how Toby was feeding Jack.
“Are you worried Jack’s going to get fat?” she asked.
“Am I not allowed to have any opinion about what we feed our son at all?” he replied.
“Yeah, you could have a say, but you’re criticizing and you always do that,” Kate shot back, while noting she’s with the kids each day “doing the hard work.”
“I support our family, all right. I am not some absentee father throwing parties in San Francisco,” Toby said. “You can’t treat me like a bystander in our children’s lives. And, yes, I am worried that we are overfeeding Jack a little. I think we would be insane not to acknowledge our genetics here.”
After dinner, they calmed down and tried to hit the reset button. Toby said they were both fat kids and Jack has their genes.
“So, if I can help him to eat healthy and to avoid any of that pain, I’m going to do it,” he said.
She explains how she tried to stop herself from eating after her dad died and has consistently struggled with dieting and eating.
“Food has always had this intense power over me and I don’t want it to have that power over our kids. I want them to enjoy Thanksgiving without having shame about it. Toby, I need you to know that I’ve put a lot of thought into what I feed our children. A lot of thought. And I just don’t know how you don’t know that.”
Viewers have known for some time that Kate and Toby eventually split up, with the show hinting at some sort of incident with a smoker being the final straw. The worst may yet be to come and viewers may want to brace themselves for what’s ahead for them.
“Be wary. Be on guard, but it’s coming your way,” Sterling K. Brown said about the doomed couple while speaking to reporters during a conference call.
“This Is Us” creator Dan Fogelman also said Kate and Toby never had the most ideal relationship.
“The way Toby and Kate always came together I’ve always thought was beautiful and romantic, but it was also kind of imperfect,” he said in the conference call. “It was two people who often kind of needed different things at different times
Fogelman also said a future episode, directed by Mandy Moore and written by Chrissy Metz, who plays Kate, will address the fractured relationship.
“I think Mandy’s directed recently a really beautiful episode that Chrissy co-wrote and that starts kind of this journey and we have some really big stuff for them coming up,” he said.