Spoiler alert: This article contains spoilers from the This Is Us episode “The Long Road Home” and teasers for “Birth Mother.”
This Is Us will delve deeply into the mystery of Randall’s deceased mom Laura in a new episode titled “Birth Mother.” A trailer for the titular chapter of the Pearson family’s history was seen at the conclusion of the series January 5 episode where he was put in touch with a Vietnamese man named Hai who said he had information about her.
In “The Long Road Home” Randall learned that Laura was dead for only five years instead of the 40 he was led to believe by his deceased birth father William.
Their conversation came about after Randall’s shirtless dancing video went viral and Hai used the comments section of the post as a way to contact the congressman. He shared he and Laura met when they were in their 20s and knew each other until she died of breast cancer in 2015. The man also told Randall that William honestly believed Laura died after childbirth, and created a sense of calm for Randall, who believed he had been lied to by his dead father.
Randall and his wife Beth, who were together when Randall contacted Hai and made plans to meet him to see where Laura lived, what she loved, and to help uncover more of the life she lived away from her son.
In the video seen below, the series will see Randall finally put the pieces of his background together.
In the clip, Randall is seen walking towards Hai’s home and meeting him for the first time. He and Beth sit at the man’s kitchen table as he shares information about Laura from the beginning of her life.
The video then segued into a shot of a little girl walking by a river and later when she first met Hai as a young woman. Randall was seen as he visited the area where his mother strode as a child.
“What I really want to know is why didn’t she try to find me? Why didn’t she? What stopped her?” he asked Hai.
Flashback scenes were seen as Laura and Hai kissed, showing their close relationship.
Laura was seen in a hospital where she confided in someone off-camera that she had a child and she didn’t know where he was. Police visited the young woman as she lay in the hospital after the overdose that William believed took her life. He would leave with their son as police declared his love dead and brought him to a firehouse where he knew he would be safe.
Laura was later seen wearing an orange jumpsuit, which led viewers to believe she might have been jailed at some point as a voice-over is heard of her asking, “Where’s my baby? Where’s my boy?”