There’s Not Much Funny About Vietnam, But This Is Us Can Still Make It Weird S:3 Ep. 4 "Vietnam"

Here are this week’s Really? Moments:

We see a 20-something Jack in his underwear, but he’s wearing tighty whities. Maybe this was the look at the time, but it wasn’t a good look. Couldn’t they give Jack sexy underwear?Something in mesh? A banana hammock? Or is that too much for a 9pm show?

This Is Us can follow an insane timeline in a short amount of time. In this episode we go backwards three weeks; then jumped back fourteen months earlier; then another year earlier; then a BIG leap back fourteen years; and then finally seven years before that. I was pretty sure we were going all the way to Jack in the womb, but no. This was a special episode, but why not make it really special by going in chronological order? Next episode, we track the Pearson family back to the caveman days, where Jack’s long dead ancestor liked to abuse his wife with a club, then got trampled by a mammoth.

I never understood that the Vietnam Draft was a terrifying real life Hunger Games. I thought that men received a letter in the mail that they needed to report to the Army. Who knew people gathered around televisions and bars, watching numbers being picked like some cruel reverse lottery. No Mega Millions or Powerball, just a chance for warfare in torrential rains, then PTSD.

Producers want to give Milo Ventimiglia a chance at an Emmy. Even though the Emmys are giving network television the cold shoulder, the producers are hoping a whole episode of Milo could be magic. Valiant effort, but the next Best Actor in a Drama Emmy is already going to an HBO actor playing a deposed king who makes meth to support his robot family in a futuristic park.

For an hour, we got a break from hearing the rest of the Pearson family whine. It was nice just delving into Jack’s backstory and discovering how Jack became Jack. No dewy eyed looks from Rebecca; no complaining by Kate; and no odd occurrences involving Miguel.  

Really? (Rating from 1-5: 1 means nothing too far-fetched happened; 5 means that someone else has died at the hands of a faulty crockpot):

I give this episode a 1. This was a fairly realistic episode on Vietnam; a dysfunctional family; and a drunken dad.