Now, with only a third of the final season left to go, we finally get answers to many of those big questions. “Katoby” takes place almost entirely in flash-forwards, jumping between the events immediately following the previous episode and key moments in the years to come. We see the painful events that lead to Kate and Toby ultimately deciding to end their marriage, as well as the circumstances that bring Kate and Philip closer together. And as a bonus, we seem to get a big clue about Kevin‘s future love life– although when it comes to This Is Us, we know they’re always trying to throw us off the scent. Here’s everything we learned in Episode 12 of This Is Us, “Katoby.”
How do Kate and Toby try to make their marriage work?
After their harrowing experience with their son Jack in “Saturday in the Park,” Toby tells Kate he’s going to take the job in LA in order to save their family. Kate says they need to go to couples therapy, to which Toby quickly agrees. At their first couples therapy session, they have only nice things to say about each other, although it feels like they may be overly sugar-coating their situation in order to impress their therapist. We don’t see this tactic getting them very far. As Kate walks into her new classroom after accepting the full-time position at her school, she’s given a nameplate for her desk that reads “Mrs. Pearson-Damon”. Meanwhile Toby is shown his new office which is significantly less impressive than his office in San Francisco. The looks on both of their faces seem to indicate mixed emotions on their first days of work, although we doubt they’re for similar reasons. Six months into therapy, the couple is no longer concerned with impressing their therapist, Diane. When Kate shows up late to their session, Toby expresses his irritation that she spends so long talking to Jack’s teachers during pickup, since it makes it seem like she’s not prioritizing therapy, but Kate is frustrated that Toby doesn’t spend time developing relationships with Jack’s teachers because it feels like he’s not prioritizing their kid. After Kate says that it feels like they’re living in “a hellish version of Groundhog Day” (isn’t that just… Groundhog Day?) by having different versions of the same fight over and over, Toby says that if she can arrive late, he can leave early. And he does.
Why do Kate and Toby get divorced?
At their daughter Hailey’s second birthday party (which she shares with Kevin’s twins), Kate and Toby are still at each other’s throats, with Toby making a snarky comment about her low salary as soon as Kate starts talking about work. Kevin goes to check on her in her room, and she tearfully asks how she’ll know when it’s time to end their marriage. He tells her that if that time comes, he thinks she’ll just know. And that if it comes to that, she and the kids will be fine, and they’ll all be happy again. After 16 months of therapy, Toby asks, “How much longer are we supposed to keep coming here?” Diane suggests that they have dinner together, just the two of them, so after Toby puts the kids to bed that night, they sit down to eat a meal that Toby has prepared. But they’re only a few bites in before the fighting starts. Kate noticed Hailey was crying before bed, and suggests that Toby read her the wrong book. He gets upset because it feels like Kate is constantly criticizing his parenting, insisting that he’s a good dad. But Kate won’t even give him that much, saying he looks miserable half the time. “I look miserable,” he shoots back, “because you are in the room.” Toby explains that as he sees it, none of the issues they’ve talked about in therapy are the real problem, and that the only thing he’s really guilty of is “not being Jack Pearson.” But their fight is interrupted when little Jack throws his Boba Fett toy in the toilet in order to distract them from their argument. After Kate puts him back to bed, Toby tells her that he’d promised himself he’d never put his kids through what he went through with his parents fighting. Kate then expresses the truth they’ve both known for a while now, telling him, “It’s over. It’s time.”
Do Kate and Toby ever get back together?
Toby moves out of their house, into a small and very beige apartment. The two go together to meet with a lawyer, who walks them through the mediation process, commending their decision to just do whatever is best for the kids. As they leave her office, “I Will Always Love You” starts playing on the elevator, making them both erupt in giggles at the irony—before going their separate ways. Toby works on making his apartment a fun place for his kids, putting together child-sized furniture and attaching their artwork to the fridge with magnets. But after bringing their kids back to Kate’s one night and tucking them into bed, Toby tells Kate that there’s still time and they don’t have to go through with the divorce. “Don’t do this,” Kate says, reminding him that they’re signing the divorce papers in two days. Toby pushes, saying he wants to go back to marriage counseling, saying he thinks it would be effective this time. But Kate admits she doesn’t want to do that, saying she feels better than she has in a long time, and she thinks the reason they’re both doing better is because they each have their own space. Toby admits he is scared to be alone, to start over, to be apart from his kids for half of his life. “This cannot be the way that our story ends,” he pleads, before kissing her. But Kate stands her ground, saying she can’t try to make their marriage work anymore. “Well, I guess that’s the last time I’ll ever kiss my wife,” Toby says in hopeless realization. After the signing, Kate stops Toby outside the building to tell him, “This is not how our story ends. Just because our marriage is over doesn’t mean our story’s over.” She goes on to insist, “We were meant to be together. And now we’re meant to be apart. And one day, you will see it.” But Toby just shakes his head. “Kate, I promise you, I will never see it.”
How do Kate and Philip get together?
After signing the divorce papers, Kate receives a text from Philip, asking her to hang out in an attempt to help cheer her up. He suggests they go to Koreatown to… sing karaoke? In an extreme gamble that almost falls flat on its face, he convinces her to duet with him to Chumbawamba’s “Tubthumping” to what appears to be an empty room. At first, Kate is profoundly not feeling this, but Philip’s exaggerated enthusiasm eventually wins her over, coaxing out a reluctant smile. Sometime later, on their first real date at a Mexican restaurant, a mariachi band comes over to serenade them. “Personal attention makes me really uncomfortable,” Philip admits, leading to Kate jokingly taking his hand in support… only to realize it doesn’t really feel like a joke after all. She heads outside to take a minute for herself, and when Philip comes out to check on her, she admits that she and Toby didn’t work out because, among other things, they swallowed their feelings instead of talking about them. So she asks him directly what he’s doing with her, since from her perspective, she doesn’t fit the mold of the women he typically dates. Philip, though, says she’s being presumptuous to assume she knows anything about his romantic history, and tells her about his first wife, who was blind. When they had trouble conceiving, they went through three rounds of IVF, which “sucked all the lightness and laughter out of our home.” Philip refused to try a fourth time, leading her to pack a bag and head for her mother’s, with the understanding that their marriage was over. But she was only five minutes down the road when she was hit by a drunk driver and killed. “I am trying to be happy again,” he tells her as his explanation for what he’s doing. “And you make me happy.” They kiss, we assume for the first time. After the two of them have been together for a while, Toby asks Philip to meet him at a sports bar. They skip over the awkward small talk so that Toby can tell Philip what his expectations are around how Philip engages with his kids, now that he and Kate are getting serious. Philip agrees that the conversation is important, admitting that he’s actually preparing to propose. It turns out Toby only has one demand: that Philip never yell at or around the kids, which Philip says won’t be a problem: “British people don’t yell. Even when we’re furious, we just wrinkle our noses disapprovingly.” Philip then tries to reassure Toby, telling him that he loves his children and would be honored to help raise them. Toby then realizes that Philip knows absolutely nothing about American football, and in a gesture of goodwill—knowing how important the sport is to Kate’s family—he begins to educate Philip on the rules of the game. Not long after that, Philip is at Kate’s house for dinner with her and the kids when he drops to one knee between the main course and dessert. He says he’s known since their first date that he wanted to be with her forever. “Before you answer,” though, he says… Jack and Hailey hold up signs urging their mother to “say yes,” which Kate happily does. At Kate and Philip’s engagement party, Rebecca (Mandy Moore) appears to have aged a lot in five years. She is happy for Kate, but struggles to remember Philip’s name. Still, Kate’s thrilled that her mother is there to help her celebrate. Kate takes the stage, saying that “a few years ago on an unusually hot day in Koreatown, this song changed everything for us.” With that, Philip joins her on the stage to play keyboard and accompany her to… “Tubthumping.” Of course.
What happens to Kate and Toby in the future?
After their divorce, Kate and Toby settle into a new rhythm as coparents. Toby buys a house, getting Jack all the same furniture as his room as Kate’s house and laying it out in the same way so that he can navigate more easily. The two eventually grow comfortable in this new dynamic, and Toby even occasionally stays for dinner with Kate and Philip after dropping off the kids. On Kate’s wedding day, Toby calls her to say “I see it now,” referring to Kate’s comment the day they signed their divorce papers. Kate seems grateful that he told her that, telling him, “Life would be much simpler if we could live it backwards.” (It’s worth mentioning that this scene occurs early in the episode, so that the audience actually gets the experience of witnessing many of these events backwards.) At some point—although it’s unclear whether this happens before or after Kate’s wedding—Toby meets a woman in a coffee shop when they both reach for the last parfait. They hit it off, and years later, we see Toby and the woman—now his wife—meet up with Kate and Philip in a bar, getting ready to see a now-adult Jack (Blake Stadnik) perform. Not only does this tell us that the two eventually get back to a good place with each other; it also seems to answer the question of whether Kate is still alive and well in the flash-forward scenes in the cabin. After all, Nicky and Franny only appear to be around 10 years old in those scenes, while the Jack Damon we see in “Katoby” —who is only about a year older than the twins—is clearly an adult, meaning that Kate is definitely alive (and probably on her way, along with Philip) during those future scenes at the cabin. It does beg the question, though, of when exactly Toby meets his future wife. The coffee shop scene doesn’t appear to be set all that far in the future, but in the cabin scenes, Toby seems depressed and disheveled, with his beard having grown out and no wedding ring on his finger. Do they break up and then later get back together? Does he go through some sort of transformation after Rebecca’s death? We’ll have to wait to find out.
Do Kevin and Madison get back together?
Meanwhile, at Nicky, Franny, and Hailey’s second birthday party, Madison (Caitlin Thompson) and Elijah (Adam Korson) are married, indicating that things must have moved pretty fast after her conversation with Kevin in “Saturday in the Park.” Doing his best to show how okay he is with Madison settling down, Kevin is also there with a date—“the new Trojan Girl.” Later, at Kate and Philip’s engagement party, Madison is pregnant! And standing by Elijah, who is quickly established as the father of her baby, in case any of us were still wondering. Kevin is there with a different date who he introduces as Leslie, “the State Farm girl.” It turns out that she is just the latest in a string of [Brand Name] Girls that Kevin has been bringing to family functions, none of whom have much staying power. Meanwhile, Sophie (Alexandra Breckenridge) is also there with her husband. Kevin claims he is fine, although he does not seem fine.
What happens next week on This Is Us?
The synopsis for next week’s episode, titled “Day of the Wedding,” reads merely, “The Pearsons gather for Kate’s wedding.” Of course, we assume this means her wedding to Philip, which we have already seen bits and pieces of, although centering a whole episode around it implies that there is a whole lot more going on at that point in time besides Kate’s carefree nuptials. We know that by Kate’s wedding day, Toby is in a better place, and we’ve just seen in the flash-forward that Kate remains married to Philip for at least the next couple decades, so whatever drama is happening around Kate’s wedding seems likely to involve people other than Kate and Toby. But there are plenty of other storylines also going on at the time of Kate‘s wedding. Randall‘s campaign for senator seemed like it was going well as of Kate’s engagement party, and of course we saw previously that there was a recent article labeling him as a “rising star.” We also still have a lot of questions about the identity of Kevin‘s eventual bride. Obviously, Madison is now married to Elijah, and the two have a child together by the time of Kate’s wedding, seemingly taking her out of the running (and we couldn’t help but notice she’s still wearing her wedding ring when she shoos Kevin out of the dressing room). We also saw at Kate’s engagement party that Kevin‘s first wife, Sophie, will also be at the wedding (with her husband). But considering that we’ve only got a handful of episodes left before the show ends, we’re betting that at least one of these marriages isn’t going to last much longer (after all, this show has already killed off Jack Pearson and split up Kate and Toby, proving that no relationship is sacred on This Is Us). Then there’s a matter of Rebecca‘s deteriorating condition, which we saw was getting more severe at Kate’s engagement party. Could there be an incident regarding Rebecca‘s health at Kate’s wedding? Whatever happens, we sure we are in for a dramatic day as the Pearsons watch Kate tie the knot for the second —and hopefully last—time. Were Kate and Toby always meant to be apart? Creator Dan Fogelman explains why the couple needed to split up.
