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‘This Is Us’ Season 5 Episode 5: Why did Marc come back into Kate's life? Truth behind her traumatic flashback

Kate's conversation with Ellie opens up a door for her that she had wished to keep closed

Ghosts of the past lurk in dark shadows... and in a way, we create them, we haunt ourselves. In one such similar scenario, ‘This Is Us’ unravels Kate Pearson's (Chrissy Metz) wounds locked in her heart for decades. In Episode 4 ‘Honestly’, Kate and Ellie (Annie Funke) go to a doctor's visit where Kate calls the baby Chloe. Not too pleased to hear that name, Ellie's face immediately drops.  

While Kate thinks Ellie is having "second thoughts", Ellie narrates a devastating tale. A high school classmate named Chloe sabotaged her relationship with her husband Doug before the two even started dating. So, while Ellie thinks Kate and Toby are the perfect parents, she doesn't want that name for the little one. When Ellie talks about her regret for the one-night stand and the fact that she even considered abortion once, Kate thinks back to her own tragic past.

Kate's conversation with Ellie opens up a door for her that she had wished to keep closed. Confessing how know one knows about this one detail, she opened up to Toby about her toxic relationship with Marc and a flashback showed her going to the washroom and taking the pregnancy test when she was 18. To her horror, the pregnancy test is positive! So what really happened with Kate? Did she get pregnant with Marc after consensual sex or did he rape her?

A new promo for Episode 5 that begins with a roar of laughter leads to a shocking flashback. Marc is in Kate's room and he tells her, "I really did miss you," before planting a kiss on her lips. How does Marc come back into Kate's life?

Calling it "more treacherous than she thought it was going to be, unpredictable and cathartic," Dan Fogelman was tight-lipped when it came to revealing any details about Kate's toxic past. "I don't want to give away what the story is, but we certainly address the fallout," he said. Did Marc know about this pregnancy? "He'll be back to tell more of the story. But that's all I'll tell you," Fogelman says.

When he was asked if her trauma would affect Kate and Toby in the future, especially since kept it locked for decades? "That goes into the realm of our storytelling, but the exploration of that and how she deals with it and her relationship with Toby, that is something that we really investigate right away. It's a big thing in their lives, and it's really a big thing for her to deal with."

Now, fans have tons of predictions for when the show comes back after a two-month break. "My prediction for the new year... Kate is still seeing Marc and thought if she had his baby he will want her and stay," one said and another posted, "Wow. Was not expecting that at all...I thought the abuse was all that happened between Kate and Marc, which is awful enough." And a third said, "Everyone was wondering what happened to Kate between breaking up with Marc and her in her 20s. Wow." A fourth blatantly said, "And Marc...get the hell out of Kate’s house."

In fact, many Reddit fans had already predicted such a story long back. One wrote: "Does anyone else think the writers had something else planned for the Kate/Marc story line and then aborted it mid-stream? It really seemed like they were leading up to something a lot more intense than it turned out to be. Kate being raped, Kate being physically abused, Marc killing himself. Except none of that would have worked because why would Kate have never told Toby about it? With all the conversations they had about their past and "digging deep". With Toby telling Kate he didn't want to get married until his wife felt like she could talk to him about anything. I just don't think a trauma of dramatic proportions would have worked. Also, I really hope that the whole Kate/Marc thing is over with. To bring it back up after leaving it hang for so long would be really cheap."

The two-hour episode of ‘This Is Us’ premiered on Tuesday, October 27, at 9 pm ET on NBC. Following that, one-hour episodes aired weekly. Now, rest of the episodes starting from Episode 5 will be back on January 5, 2021.