Is Jack really going to die on the ‘This is Us’ post-Super Bowl episode?

Who’s ready to cry at your Super Bowl party?

Let’s get straight to the “saved you a click” point: Yeah, we’re probably going to see exactly how Jack Pearson dies on the This Is Us episode airing after the Super Bowl.

I’m not 100 percent sure or anything — I haven’t watched the dailies or traveled into the future and returned, Biff Tannen style, so I could place a bet on Jack’s demise and everything else related to the Super Bowl (Pink will go over, as will “dilly” mentions; Bradley Cooper will be the first famous Eagles fan shown on TV; orange Gatorade; Patriots win).

BUT, they’re almost certainly going to answer the tragic question that has been hanging over the show since early in its run. When NBC first announced This Is Us was awarded the coveted post-Super Bowl spot, Jack’s death was practically guaranteed to come during this episode. And this season has all been leading up to it, if sometimes gradually.

*I don’t even know what constitutes a spoiler anymore, so I’m just going to slap a big ol’ SPOILER ALERT on this thing if you’re not caught up on the show.

What do we already know about Jack’s death?

In the first season, we got little hints here and there of how and when Jack died. We knew it wasn’t of natural causes, because his daughter, Kate, blamed herself for his death. We knew the three siblings were all teenagers when it happened, so around 20 years ago.

In the season two premiere, we found out:

• a fire had destroyed the Pearson house
• a teenage Kate sob-snotted all over a dog we’ve never seen before
• her brother Randall is comforted by a girl we’ve never seen before
• her other brother Kevin was not with with them, but was instead kissing his girlfriend, Sophie (hey, we DO know her), and sporting a leg cast we’ve never seen before
• and then there’s Jack’s grief-stricken wife, Rebecca, who is wearing a Steelers shirt and driving while a few of Jack’s (ash-free looking) belongings sit next to her. She stops at what remains of their house and breaks down.

Throughout this season, we discovered how the Pearsons got their family dog, how Kevin was injured, and the elaborate method Randall used to ask out a girl (we’re talking personalized Magic 8 Ball responses). In the most recent episode, we were left with a dread-filled cliffhanger: after the family had all gone to bed, a faulty switch on an old Crock-Pot (don’t blame Crock-Pot irl!) sparked, leading to a fire that started to spread quickly throughout the house.

Oh yeah, and the smoke detector didn’t have any batteries because the family forgot to pick some up at the mall. (ALWAYS MAKE A LIST!)

Why is NBC trying to turn Super Bowl night into a sobfest?

This Is Us is TV’s most NFL-friendly show, just edging out The Good Place. The Pearsons are all huge football fans and are all fiercely aboard the Steelers bandwagon — which would make this Eagles-Patriots matchup pretty much their worst nightmare, other than, y’know, their patriarch perishing in a traumatic way.

Present-day Kate watches Steelers games with Jack’s urn. Kevin had NFL dreams dancing around in his head until a high school knee injury permanently ended his football career (hence the cast that Teen Kevin was wearing when his father — presumably! — died). The upcoming episode is even called “Super Bowl Sunday.”

Super Bowl Sunday is a holiday for the Pearsons, like a second Christmas. In fact, Jack and Rebecca conceived Kate and Kevin with a little bar bathroom celebratory bow chicka wow wow during the Steelers’ 1980 Super Bowl win.

The Crock-Pot fire happened in 1998, right after the Broncos beat the Packers in Super Bowl XXXII. It’s poetic, if a little on the nose, that the same event that started their family ripped a huge hole in it, too. And that the episode it’d happen during would be Super Bowl night, which fit into creator Dan Fogelman’s plans exactly, as he told USA Today:

He always planned to resolve Jack’s death sometime late this season, hoping to link the tragedy to a holiday “that we could build into family lore.”

But when he realized the audience-boosting post-Super Bowl slot was available, he called NBC executives and pitched the Pearsons as “a football family.”

Whenever and however he dies, This Is Us shouldn’t drastically change. The flashbacks won’t stop. Jack will still be a large part of the show, which will no doubt keep throwing us curveballs and bringing us to tears while the acoustic stylings of Alexis Murdoch plays in the background.

*Whispers* but what if Jack doesn’t actually die in this episode?

At a certain point, if you string an audience along long enough, they won’t trust you — and they shouldn’t.

In recent years, Lost learned that lesson early on after the hatch non-reveal cliffhanger of season one (or at the very least, creator Damon Lindelof learned the lesson and was able to apply it to The Leftovers, a show that never promised answers and maybe or maybe not gave them to us, depending on your interpretation of the ending; either way, it was immensely satisfying). How I Met Your Mother and The Killing both red herring-ed their way to pissing off fed-up viewers.

Some This Is Us fans were likely put off that Jack’s death didn’t happen at the end of the first season, but it’s easy to understand the decision. We knew William, Randall’s biological father, was going to die and we knew it would be from cancer. But it’d have been a disservice to the character to have him, for lack of better phrase, “compete with” Jack over who had the most affecting death.

Jack’s death isn’t the point of the show and never has been. But if they tease it any longer, the fans will riot, especially when Fogelman is out there saying things like this to Entertainment Weekly:

I mean, all signs point to that next week is going to be the Big One. This was always the plan from inception, that this time in season 2 is when we’re going to show the answer to this question.

Will Jack for sure die in the fire?

It seems likely that he’ll die because of the fire, one way or another, but it’s not out of the question that he succumbs to, I don’t know, a brain aneurysm right after they’re all safe and sound.

Jack Pearson was near perfect, the type of extraordinarily romantic husband and supportive father who only seems to exist in fiction. But he had his faults, too: alcoholism, father issues, a jealousy streak.

The way his family speaks about him in the present, you’d think he was a saint who never so much as jaywalked in his life. Or perhaps, a father who heroically saved the lives of his family and his only daughter’s dog. All those pieces fit into the puzzle of what we’ve seen so far, including how Adult Kate almost didn’t adopt THIS FACE because she has dog baggage:

But with this show, which has delivered a number of twists ever since the pilot and delights in throwing us for a loop, there is assuredly more to Jack’s death than just that. And whatever it is, it will be gut-wrenching.

Will I even understand what’s happening if I’ve never seen the show before?

Well kudos if you’ve read this far, then. But I get it: There’s so much good TV out there, it’s impossible to keep up. It’s stressful, even. It’s a little hard nowadays not to feel a twinge of panic when you find out that yet another streaming service is starting up and has bought the rights to a new show starring an A-list actress duo. (Next, it will probably be Tom Hanks and Denzel Washington reuniting for a series centered on a CIA agent teaming up with the president’s estranged brother to take down a conspiracy that goes all the way to the top. Coming July 2019, on Zoof.)

Anyway, you should be able to jump in and watch This Is Us, whether you’ve seen it before or not. Unless you plan to binge the entire show this weekend, here’s a quick primer:

The Pearsons are dad Jack (dead), mom Rebecca (Mandy Moore), and their three kids all the same age: twins Kate and Kevin, and adopted son Randall (the best one, in any time period). Present-day Randall has his own awesome family, Kate has a fiancé and a very good dog, Kevin has his six-pack, and Rebecca is married to Jack’s old friend Miguel. It’s a Game of Thrones-esque cast, but that’s the Cliffs Notes version.

Most of the show takes place in four different time periods: today, when the siblings are teens (1997-98ish), when the siblings are in elementary school (1990ish), and when the siblings are babies (1980-81ish). Sometimes, it goes back further, just never to the future … yet.

What’s so big about the post-Super Bowl episode anyway?

As much as TV is changing, and has changed since the post-Super Bowl episode heyday of the ‘90s and early aughts, this is still the biggest sporting event of the year and the biggest showcase for any network program.

Historically, the Big Three — networks, not Pearson siblings — have gone one of three ways with this timeslot:

• Premiere a new series
• Try to get your critically acclaimed but low-rated darling a boost
• Appeal to a wide range of fans and give the spot to your most popular show

This Is Us, almost miraculously, is the latter. There has always been — and should always be, at least until the Black Mirror future kicks in, the networks all become obsolete, and we get shows beamed directly into our brains — a place for tearjerker family dramas that put the audience in a state of heightened emotion. The characters aren’t miserable, but there’s a bit of a Job-like quality to their lives. The challenges never stop, in a way that we can relate to on a visceral level, if not on a day-to-day basis.

In that way, This Is Us is a direct descendent of Parenthood, Friday Night Lights, My So-Called Life, etc. — beautifully crafted shows that could leave you feeling alternatively triumphant and full of heartache. None of those shows could be classified as hits, though. Beloved gems, yes. Ratings winners, no. This Is Us, while not without its own flaws, is somehow both.

Post-Super Bowl episodes also tend to break down into a few different categories:

• Introducing audiences to the show (The Wonder Years, Homicide, 24: Legacy, I guess?)
• Hey, let’s try to have a little stunt-casting fun (Julia Roberts and JCVD on Friends; Prince, RIP, on New Girl; that bizarre Jack Black/Jessica Alba/Cloris Leachman triple cameo on The Office)
• The very important episode you do not want to miss (blowing up the premise of the show, like Alias; or literally blowing someone up, like poor Kyle Chandler on Grey’s Anatomy)

Once again, This Is Us is almost certainly falling in that third group. It might seem incongruous, following up the spectacle of the Super Bowl with what will be a harrowing episode of a well-liked show. But it makes sense that Jack’s death would come at this point, on this night. And who knows, the next day, you might find yourself talking more about the Pearsons than about the game itself.