Move over, Game of Thrones Starbucks cup. There's a new gaffe in town. But this time, it's way more consequential to the plot.
Last we saw of young adult Kate on This Is Us (in Season 5, Episode 4, "Honestly"), she was holding a peculiar test in her hand. As present day Kate had just started telling Toby that she got pregnant at 18 by her manipulative ex-boyfriend, former music store co-worker Marc, we flashed back to teen Kate staying home on her family's trip to New York to visit Kevin.
Her friend Molly wasn't actually coming over to make fun of Dawson's Creek and cheer her up after her break-up with Marc, like she'd fibbed to her mom. Instead, once everyone's gone, we see Kate pull out an Effortless ovulation test from a bag hidden in her bedside table.
But cut to a few moments later, and Kate is holding a positive ClearBlue pregnancy test in her bathroom. Wearing the same flannel and floral dress, seemingly all in the same timespan. So what happened there? Was Kate trying to get pregnant? Why wasn't she holding a pregnancy test from the start? Was it just a faux pas?
Since the episode aired in November, fans have been pleading with the writers for answers, as this is a theory that they wanted nipped in the bud.
Well, ahead of tonight's This Is Us return with Episode 5, "A Long Road Home," where questions to Kate's past are set to be answered, executive producers Isaac Aptaker and Elizabeth Berger cleared the air with Entertainment Weekly.
In essence, no, that was not supposed to be an ovulation test. While Aptaker admired how fans of This Is Us are "so awesome and pick up on every little hint," this hint was nothing more than a road to nowhere. "As soon as we saw that people were misinterpreting, of course it drove us crazy," he said. "So let the record officially show: That was [meant to be] a pregnancy test box."
Pregnancy Test Gate was just "a casualty of how absolutely impossible it has been to make television this year," Aptaker said, as the crew was "fried" from all of the COVID regulations for filming and they missed that one detail.
Berger even conjured up her own theory for why the ovulation test was there. "I've told myself she was hiding her pregnancy test in her ovulation kit box so that nobody spots her with a pregnancy test," she joked. Aptaker continued the riff, "Her mom finds it and she's like, 'I just like to know when I'm ovulating.'"
While Aptaker and Berger weren't keen to divulge too much about what to expect from tonight's This Is Us, as to whether Kate had an abortion, a miscarriage, or put the baby up for adoption, they did confirm that "A Long Road Home" will be a key episode for Kate. "It's a really important episode in learning a little bit more about the whole psychology of this woman," Berger said.
Aptaker also noted that fans won't have to wait too long into the episode to find out the truth either, as "we pick up immediately into that conversation with Kate and Toby right when we come back from the break, and then we're going to explain the story of what happened."
This Is Us returns Tuesday, January 5 at 9 p.m. ET/PT on NBC.
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