‘This Is Us’ Finally Revealed How Jack Died and Fans Are More Than a Little Fired Up About It

There aren’t enough crying GIFs in the world

Mandy Moore (Rebecca) and Milo Ventimiglia (Jack) on "This Is Us" Season 2
NBC
Jennifer Maas

(Major spoiler alert: Do not read ahead if you have not seen the post-Super Bowl episode of “This Is Us” that aired on Sunday, appropriately named, “Super Bowl Sunday.”)

Well, NBC and “This Is Us” kept their promise. During the special post-Super Bowl episode of the family drama, viewers did in fact find out how Jack Pearson (Milo Ventimiglia) met his untimely end — but not in the way most fans were expecting him to.

See, the show had drilled into its viewers that Jack died the night of a horrific house fire on Super Bowl Sunday of 1998, which was started by a very old family Crock-Pot with a faulty switch. The promos for Sunday’s episode featured shots of the Pearson home ablaze, so the majority of the fandom’s recent theories revolved around how Milo’s character would die in the flames.

But when the episode aired, we learned Jack made it out fine. In fact, everyone made it out fine, including Kate’s dog, who Jack went back in to save. Heck, the world’s best dad even managed to grab some family mementos before the house was burnt to a crisp. But it was those acts of kindness that led to his shocking fatality, which actually occurred at the hospital where he was getting checked out post-fire.

Our fearless patriarch ultimately died after going into sudden cardiac arrest due to smoke inhalation. Fans were not emotionally prepared for this revelation, and neither was Rebecca (Mandy Moore), who had left Jack’s hospital room moments before his death to make a phone call and hit up a vending machine.

Viewers used every crying GIF in existence to express their anguish on Twitter. But several found a way to laugh through the pain, by tweeting screen shots of altered versions of the Wikipedia entry for smoke inhalation and how it “can be avoided if you don’t go back in for the dog.”

Check out some of Twitter’s most intense, tragic and hilarious reactions to Jack’s cause of death below.

The next episode of “This Is Us” will air in the show’s regular time slot, on Tuesday at 9/8c on NBC.

https://twitter.com/VictoriaWFrank/status/960376921409380353

https://twitter.com/bzod42/status/960372131690418177

https://twitter.com/BlessedZvy/status/960377360284569600

Jennifer Maas

Jennifer Maas

TV Reporter • jennifer.maas@thewrap.com • Twitter: @jmaasaronson

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