The most telling moment so far of This Is Us’s third season happened not in its recent mid-season finale, but back in Episode 8, when Randall Pearson learns that his wife Beth has a group chat with his stepfather Miguel and his brother-in-law Toby.

“It’s mostly gifs,” Beth explains, “but sometimes we talk about how messed up y’all are.”

Because really, the Pearsons are kind of messed up.

If there was a scale for outsized, long-lasting reactions to dead parents and that scale went from Luke Skywalker to Batman, the entire Pearson family would rank somewhere juuuust below the Dark Knight. And it is...exhausting. It is exhausting to watch this family refuse to budge from their sanctified image of Jack, and their obsession with his ideals is destroying them all.

For better or worse, This Is Us finally seems to be acknowledging that the Pearsons’ preferred Jack-ish method of dealing with their trauma — which is to say, ignoring it until the opportunity arises to monologue extensively while drawing on barely related childhood anecdotes — is unhealthy and weird as hell. Several times in the mid-season finale, the opportunity for a true Jack Pearson moment arises and has the exact opposite results from what might be expected.

Most saliently, Tess Pearson’s coming out to her parents is portrayed as something she explicitly wants to do on her own time. She cuts off her grandmother and father when they try to Dead Jack their way into her heart with platitudes (Rebecca does get through for a second) and says the one thing a Pearson has never uttered on the show before: “I don’t want to talk about it.”

Good for Tess! Coming out with a personal truth is hard enough. Randall trumping her process with some story about going hiking in the woods or whatever would have cheapened the part of her character that deserves to exist on her own.

Image: NBC

Other characters had moments where the tried-and-true formula went helter skelter, in ways that outline how repetitive it is to rely on the expectation that a good Pearson Talk is the only surefire way out of a crisis. Kate’s job rejections leads her to take a hard left in her life and go back to school, and Randall’s rousing speech at his debate isn’t enough to pull him up in the polls — and his refusal to bow out of the race at Beth’s request could put his relationship on a dangerous track.

It’s precisely Randall’s adherence to what he thinks Jack Pearson would do that damns him to the couch, further allowing the weight of his father’s legacy to wreak havoc on his life.

Also, Kevin’s desire for closure on the story of the Vietnamese woman in his father’s old pictures leads him to an entirely different answer than the one he was seeking. I mean, yeah, it was weird when the old historian in the cabin just happened to have a relatable story about his own father that helped Kevin find some form of closure. But it’s quickly undermined by the finale’s biggest twist, that Jack’s brother Nicky faked his death and survived the war.

Here is where its characters can begin to really interrogate what it means to emulate Jack’s long-winded ghost so far into their adult lives.

Nicky being alive is perhaps the biggest example of This Is Us realizing the failure of Pearson Talks as a universal panacea. Right before he fakes his suicide in a boat on the lake, Jack delivers the Jack-est, most Pearson-y speech ever — one about completing their mission in Vietnam solely to ensure they make it home safe. It’s beautiful and rousing, exactly what we expect from ol' Jack, but it’s ultimately pointless.

Nicky’s false death harmed Jack emotionally for the rest of his life, and his refusal to return home will become a source of unimaginable pain for the other living Pearsons when they inevitably find out he didn’t die in the war. Jack couldn’t Pearson his way into stopping his brother from making his own choice, and now he’s not alive to protect his family from the fallout.

Maybe this mid-season finale is the turning point for This Is Us. Here is where its characters (and, to be honest, the audience) can start lowering the tint on the rose-colored glasses through which the Pearsons are viewed and begin to really interrogate what it means to emulate Jack’s long-winded ghost so far into their adult lives.

Maybe Kate, Kevin, Randall, and Rebecca will start talking less and listening more, and actually get to the heart of why Jack’s death is still so present for all of them. It can only make them better characters and people, and might be the only way the Pearsons get to move on with their lives.