‘This Is Us’: Milo Ventimiglia Reveals Jack’s Goodbye Message You May Have Missed

Milo Ventimiglia has a reason for you to experience all the feels from Sunday night’s episode of This Is Us all over again. He said there is a goodbye message you might have missed.

The episode, titled “Super Bowl Sunday,” finally showed us how Ventimiglia’s Jack Pearson died in the past. He saved Rebecca (Mandy Moore), Kate (Hannah Zeile) and Randall (Niles Fitch) from the house fire and survived. However, he had a heart attack at the hospital, a side effect from ingesting so much soot and smoke during the rescue.

When Rebecca hears the news, she still takes a bite from a candy bar she just bought. In that moment, Jack can be briefly heard saying “Bec?”

“Yeah, it’s so human, so simple, just the disbelief,” Ventimiglia told Esquire of the moment. “And if you caught this, when she’s at the vending machine, you hear Jack say ‘Bec?’ I had recorded a lot of different versions of that, some that were a little more ethereal like I was whispering. You’ll have to ask [creator Dan Fogelman], but my belief is that it’s a presence. That was Jack saying ‘Bec?’ She turns her head and everything.”

Ventimiglia also confirmed he will be back for future episodes of the series. After all, it plays with time frequently, and there are plenty of questions about Jack’s past left to explore.

“There are so many questions with Jack,” Ventimiglia told Esquire. “His upbringing, what happened to him in Vietnam, what happened to him after Vietnam before he met Rebecca? And those early days of Jack and Rebecca, I know is an era that Dan is excited to explore. His brother, I think is something that’s going to come up relatively quickly, and play out over the next season or so. There’s still so much to know about this man, from all the eras, so I’m excited to focus on how Jack lived as opposed to worrying about how he died.”

In a Glamour interview before the show aired, creator Dan Fogelman even said a scene with Jack in the present was on the table. We could see what life would be like for the Pearsons if Jack lived.

“Yeah, I mean, we play with a lot of things around time and memory and what could have been, so I think that’s definitely a possibility,” Fogleman told Glamour.

There are only four more episodes left of season two, and the first of those airs during This Is Us‘ regular timeslot Tuesday. The episode, “Across the Border,” will feature Jack’s funeral and the return of the beloved Dr. K (Gerald McRaney).

This Is Us airs Tuesdays on NBC at 9 p.m. ET/8 p.m. CT.

Photo credit: NBC