‘This Is Us’ Fans React As Kate Confronts Her Creepy Ex

Spoiler alert: This article contains spoilers from the This Is Us episode “The Long Road Home.”

This Is Us fans are reacting to Kate’s closure with her ex-boyfriend more than 20 years after her brothers kicked him out of the family cabin.

In the Season 4 5 episode “The Long Road Home,” the all-grown-up Pearson daughter (played by Chrissy Metz) opened up about an unplanned pregnancy she had when she was 18-years-old.

Flashback scenes showed teen Kate (Hannah Zeile) about to tell her abusive ex Marc (Austin Abrams) that she was pregnant. She ended up not telling him and went alone to have an abortion.

The character then decided to face her past in a powerful way.

In a present-day scene, Kate tracked down Marc (Lucius Baybak) at a used record store in San Diego after her husband Toby (Chris Sullivan) questioned if she has really left her past behind. What followed was an explosive confrontation that ended with Kate telling her ex that he was the “disease” in their relationship, even as he tried to paint her as “broken.”

In comments on a post shared on the official This Is Us Instagram page, seen here, viewers reacted to the powerful moment in which Kate confronted her man-child ex and gave his toxicity back to him.

“Kate saying all the things so many people never get to say to their Marcs,” one viewer wrote.

“That last scene made me want to shout!! I felt like Kate said that on behalf of every woman who ever endured an abusive relationship! Love her!!!!” another added.

“I loved how brave Kate was confronting her past, head-on,” a third wrote.

In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Chrissy Metz revealed that the confrontation scene was a difficult one to shoot for many reasons. The actress dished that the scene was shot on the streets of L.A. with real buses and car horns in the background.

But she also addressed how difficult the task of facing the past for her character was, and how much or little she should say to this man who changed the trajectory of her life and squashed her self-esteem.

“It had been so many years,” Metz said. “It was hard to [calibrate] the idea of not letting him have too much of her because he already took so much of her and standing in her own power, and also not crumbling but finally making a turn and being a bada**”.

This Is Us airs Tuesdays on NBC.