This Is Us Delivered the Miguel and Rebecca Story We've Waited Six Seasons For

[Warning: The following contains spoilers for Tuesday's episode of This Is Us. Read at your own risk!]

There are only a few episodes of This Is Us left and as we get closer to the end, more and more Pearson family mysteries are unfolding and being solved. In Tuesday's episode, we finally found out how Rebecca (Mandy Moore) and Miguel (Jon Huertas) got together a decade after Jack died. Prior to the episode, we knew that the two had grown very close immediately after Jack's death but then drifted apart when Miguel moved to Texas to be closer to his family — and to alleviate the temptation of falling for his best friend's widow. 

However, as time went on, Miguel realized that the family he created with his ex-wife wasn't the family he belonged with. When Rebecca reached out on Facebook eight years after Miguel moved away, it was a sign that what he needed was back in Pittsburgh, and Miguel went for it. 

The story of how Rebecca and Miguel came together wasn't the only thing revealed in the emotional episode though. The hour also went into how Miguel's family immigrated to America, his fraught relationship with his parents, and how difficult it was for Miguel to shoulder the burden of Rebecca's Alzheimer's. In an emotional scene with his stepchildren, they pushed Miguel into accepting their help and getting Rebecca a full-time nurse, and Miguel was forced to realize he couldn't handle everything on his own, no matter how badly he wanted to. 

We've waited six seasons — literally since Episode 2 of the series — to find out more about Miguel and Rebecca's love story, and just as we found out about the origins, we also found out about the end. The episode takes us through Miguel dying of heart failure, which confirmed why he wasn't at Rebecca's bedside in the future timeline. It was an emotional end to a poignant story and TV Guide spoke to Huertas about what went into this anticipated episode, and how he feels now that Miguel's story has finally been told. 

What was it like to finally get to tell this story, knowing people have been waiting for it for so long?
Jon Huertas: It was exciting to finally be able to tell the story. Of course, I would have loved to open up Miguel's story much earlier, but we had COVID that came in, and that really kind of disrupted how the story was going to be told because we lost two episodes that season. But it was exciting because the perfect writer was ready and had been made staff this season, Jonny Gomez. We were in the writers room talking about how we were going to tell Miguel's story. How far back are we going to go? What are the ideas? There were so many that I thought there was no way all of these things are going to be in the episode. Somehow, Jonny, as a craftsman, got everything in there. Everything that we wanted fit from the beginning. It's so good… It's all about timing. It was the perfect timing and the way it ends, it definitely makes it more emotional because we did wait so long. I think it makes it heavier when he's gone, when he dies. It makes it much heavier in our hearts. If we had started opening up his story before, it wouldn't have had that same emotional impact. 

I can confirm that I snot-cried. It was not cute. 
Huertas: When I first saw the cut I made this audible, weird, guttural kind of sound. I was watching it with Sterling K. Brown and we were on opposite sides of the room. When I made my audible noise, that inspired him to let go. We were definitely doing a blubbering fest from across the room. It was so impactful and heavy because we just go to know [Miguel]! Then he's gone. It's poignant, meaningful, and full. It was the perfect sendoff. 

What was the most important thing that you wanted in this episode after playing this character for six years?
Huertas: What was important to me was to really get to what shaped him into the man he [was] when he married Rebecca. It was important to understand what went on for the eight-to-ten years before they reconnected on Facebook. I really wanted to make sure that people saw almost a growth or transformation, finding out that he was not able to connect with the family he had hoped to and realizing the connection he has is with this woman, with her family. As much as we want to try and make something happen, we can't make things just fall into place. We can't necessarily always create our own outcome. I want people to understand that Miguel tries to connect with his family and his children and had to realize that [his family] was right in front of him, this woman that loves him. She was right there. 

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I'm going to be honest, my tears actually started when Miguel sat down with the Big 3 to talk about Rebecca's care and Randall says, "We're not doing this to you. We are doing it for you." Did you feel like that was them finally accepting Miguel in a way they hadn't previously?
Huertas: I think the mistake that even I made early on in the show is that we wondered why the Big 3 didn't accept him. It's not that they don't accept him. It's that he didn't realize how they were accepting him. In that moment, as Randall was explaining, "We love you and we love what you've done for our mother and you've been there for her when we couldn't because we had our own lives to deal with." I think they didn't even realize until Rebecca gave them that speech at the table about, "Hey, go live your lives. Don't worry about me so much. I have this person." I think in that moment they realize it, but Miguel needed to hear it from them in order to let them take care of him. He has to realize that he's not going to be around forever. 

I don't think it was necessarily Miguel realizing they've accepted him. It was more about the audience finally hearing their true feelings and Miguel was a proxy for that…The tears started for you and for me too because it means he's finally letting go of all the responsibility and all of the burden. For me, it means that he's letting go of his youth. He has to age, like Rebecca is aging, which means it's much closer to the end and that's why I started crying. 

Miguel dies at the end of the episode, but This Is Us loves to play around with time, so have we really seen the last of him?
Huertas: I can't speculate on that… It's This Is Us. We are time travelers, me and Mandy. You can't assume that we're not going to see Miguel. 

What do you hope people who never gave Miguel the benefit of the doubt take away from this episode?
Huertas: I hope they take away from this, regardless of what they thought, that beautiful love stories that we see in TV and film and read in books are never the ones that are shown in media. A love story is an individual story for two people. To be on the outside of that, to judge it, or take something away from it, I hope they realize that we need to let people experience love the way they want to experience love, that they need to experience love for themselves in their own way and it wasn't harmful to anyone else. It wasn't disrespectful to anyone else. 

This Is Us continues Tuesdays at 9/8c on NBC, with episodes premiering on Hulu the next day.