‘This Is Us’ Recap: Season 6, Episode 6 Our Little Island Girl Part 2

There are far more important themes and developments that take place in this week’s This Is Us, but I’m going to start off this recap with the observation that has been dogging me ever since I saw the episode: the hair and make-up team’s dedication to maintaining Goran Visnjic’s stone-cold foxiness, despite the rigors of time.

This is a show in which the dewy Mandy Moore convincingly plays a 70-something. This is a show that coats Jon Huertas’ glorious mane in silver and white anytime the story inches past the mid-1990s. This is a show that would throw a prosthetic on a dog to denote the passage of years. But the good people in the hair and make-up trailers during the shooting of this episode took one look at Visnjic, lightly dabbed at his temples with a brush that had two molecules of gray powder on it, and said, “That’ll do. That’ll do.”

It’s quite a thing to behold — as is Beth’s evolution into the type of dance professional she always wished she had in her life. Read on for the highlights of “Our Little Island Girl: Part Two,” which was co-written by series star Susan Kelechi Watson and Eboni Freeman, then make sure to read Kelechi’s thoughts about the hour at the bottom of this post.

‘I CAN AND I WILL’ | The episode goes for the heart right from its open, which is a flashback to Beth asking her father to tell her the story of her taking her first steps in Jamaica. “And right then, you became my little island girl who danced before she walked,” he proudly tells his young daughter. Aw Carl Lumbly, you are the best.

In a present-day montage, we watch as Beth tours the dance facility for which she had an interview way back; it’s the same place that we’ve seen in the flash-forward to the time of Rebecca’s deathbed scenes. Beth gets a job overseeing the school’s scholarship program, and she channels Debbie Allen as she addresses the few kids she chose from the hundreds of applicants. “You belong, so you take up space, yes?” she asks them, then has them repeat, “I can and I will” until they believe it.

A student named Stacey isn’t as “polished” as the others, notes one of Beth’s co-workers, but Beth assures the woman that the dancer will be ready. But even Beth looks like she’s worried; the girl is clearly struggling.

One evening, Beth walks by one of the school’s practice rooms as Stacey is trying, and failing, to nail her pirouette. The teen dejectedly tells Beth that her father wants her to be a lawyer, and it’s clear that she’s thinking about giving up dance. But Beth bucks her up: “I chose you because I saw a fire in you that I recognized in myself,” she tells her.

THE FALL AND RISE OF BETHANY CLARKE | But that fire took a while to rekindle, as we see in a flashback to Beth and Randall: The College Years. When the young couple goes out to dinner, Beth notices her former ballet teacher Vincent (Visnjic) sitting at the bar. She freezes — “When my dad died, he didn’t even pick up the damn phone,” she tells Randall — but then gathers herself and approaches Vincent to give him a piece of her mind. But he’s very happy to see her, and that throws her off, so after they chat for a moment, she returns to her table and asks Randall to leave with her.

Back in the present, Beth is vibrating with nervousness before the scholarship students’ showcase. Randall, Tess, Déja and Annie are in the audience. Beth whispers that she can’t fail again, and Randall simply tells her “You won’t.” Which is sweet, but not enough, because she demands a Randall Pearson Patented Pep Talk from him… then runs out a few words in because she has to pee. (Ha!)

During the show, Stacey falls during the pirouette section of her solo. The devastated dancer is frozen to the ground in horror, so Beth walks out on stage in front of everyone and sits down beside her. After ascertaining that the girl isn’t hurt, Beth tells her that she, too, had a fall of sorts when she was a teen. And it was “bigger than this,” she reassures Stacey, who is mortified that she let Beth down. “You cannot disappoint me,” Beth promises, “and I ain’t going nowhere.” In the audience, Randall whispers to his girls, “You’re going to forget a lot about these years. But look at your mother right now and remember this: Don’t you ever forget how incredible that woman is.”

At home afterward, Beth calls Vincent, who just happens to be pulling a late night at his ballet academy. She gathers her courage to confront him about how abandoned she felt after her father died. “I’m sorry you felt that way, Bethany, but it wasn’t my job to coddle you,” he says. “It was my job to give you the technique you needed to be a star.” And that’s all the push she needs to tell him to take his toe shoes and shove ’em where the sun don’t shine: “I’m the little island girl who danced before she walked, and you took that from me,”…