‘This Is Us’ Creator Dan Fogelman On “Cathartic” Season 5 Premiere, Big New Twist & COVID-Impacted Storylines - Deadline

SPOILER ALERT: The story includes details about the Season 5 premiere of NBC’s This Is Us.

It packed an emotional punch in the two-hour Season 5 premiere, which tackled COVID-19 and the George Floyd protests through the lives of the Pearsons, still reeling from the Kevin-Randall fight in the Season 4 finale that threatened to tear the family apart.

While declining to reveal whether Laurel is alive in present time, Fogelman promised that answers will come pretty quickly — within the first half of the season — on her fate and what happened after she took that deep breath at the end of the premiere.

“That’s a big part of Randall’s journey in the front half of this season,” Fogelman said.

Fogelman said that Randall will start the search in Episode 3 and will find a new therapist who will be a recurring character this season.

“At the end of this episode, when Randall makes his move to change therapists and returns home to his family, he’s pulling away a little bit, for a moment, not just from Kevin, on the heels of the fight, but from his family in general,” Fogelman said.

That is a precursor of things to come this season, Fogelman said as This Is Us will finally tell the duo’s love story.

“It becomes a bigger part of the season in the back half of this season and heading into next, where you’re really experiencing, post-Jack, this courtship period, what came to pass between them.

While editing their scenes from tonight’s opener, “I found it really enjoyable to be with them and watch them be sweet with each other and to watch them hold each other up,” Fogelman said.

For the new couple, “things are happening in reverse, in hyper-speed, in a show that very much treats love very romantically,” Fogelman said.

Despite the seeming bliss, engagement and twin babies on the way, “it’s not just going to be this easy love story like some of our other love stories have been,” Fogelman said.

We were supposed to see more of Eli this season but that is now very much up in the air, and neither was in the Season 5 premiere

“That’s one of the few things that we had to change a little bit,” Fogelman said, “It’s complicated, as I had a baby during this period in quarantine, and it really changes what doctor appointments look like and feel like.”

After the big Randall-Kevin fight in the Season 4 finale, there was another sibling face-off in the Season 5 opener

“I think the scene, which I can’t really take credit for, came a lot from Kay’s soul,” Fogelman said of his co-writer Kay Oyegun

There are a lot of “very cathartic” moments in tonight’s premiere, and the Randall-Kate scene stands out among them, Fogelman said