On paper, Tuesday night's episode of "This Is Us" looks slight. The plot describes a one-off hour focused on a so-far minor character with only a brief few visits into the Pearsons' universe marked on her passport. Add in next week's finale, and surely this week would ease comfortably into its dramatic conclusion, saving the hefty material for the season-ender. 

Instead, the show busted out one of its finest hours.

Even with all my preaching about how the best episodes of "This Is Us" hone in on just one character rather than trying to tick every cast member's box each hour, I couldn't have predicted something as great as "This Big, Amazing, Beautiful Life," a big, amazing, beautiful 60 minutes of television that took an intimate look at Deja's path to the Pearsons' doorstep and grew that thoughtful premise out into a grand statement about humanity, using every tool in its arsenal – its terrific cast, its inventive time-hopping structure – to graceful perfection.

The story for "This Big, Amazing, Beautiful Life" appears pretty straightforward, drawing a line from Deja's birth to barely able to sleep living on the street in her mom's car. But throughout the episode, like a light beam through a prism, her life refracts into similar memories from the Pearsons over the years – her birth is crosscut with Randall's mother, Rebecca and Beth all doing the same; generations of Pearsons join Deja across time in a nightly reading of "Goodnight Moon" – the different hues of the same touchstones, the same pains and the same pleasures, all heading in their own universal but scattered directions. 

Simplified to its essence, this theme – "we're not all that different, you and I" – sounds like some trite kumbaya drum circle material, but as brought together on screen by director Rebecca Asher, it made for some uniquely powerful television, bounding across storylines to wordlessly show the common experiences, good and bad, that make us one – while not ignoring the differences that make some journeys particularly painful and difficult. After all, while Deja is cooking meals for herself and her mom is out working on her birthday to survive, Kevin is on the TV, a pampered Hollywood star. While the Pearsons had a generally idyllic family unit and stable financial situation to cushion their falls, Deja and her mother had to endure every mistake's blow. The briefly glimpsed similarities only make the differences all the more stark. 

A show with sharper fangs might've dug a little deeper, maybe a little more angrily, into those different levels of privilege. That would be a different show, though, and not automatically a better one. The focus of "This Is Us," instead, is more on what connects us despite those sharp dividing lines, a tribute to humanity that radiates through the episode as we follow Deja's birth to a 16-year-old single mother, sour after giving birth but quickly sweetened by holding her child for the first time – a moment shared by mothers and fathers throughout the show's short-lived but already substantial timeline. 

The easy trap for a plot line like this is The Bad Mom trope, the script punishing the mother of a troubled child by making her irredeemably cruel, selfish or unintelligent and making the audience's sympathies cruel, clean and simple: She's poor and dumb because she deserves to be poor and dumb. Thankfully "This Is Us" continues to put forward the effort in avoiding that ugly cliche. Yes, Shauna is immature and selfish as a single teen mother, weak to temptations without room for the luxury. But the script and Joy Brunson's performance makes sure to note that she's still strong and loving, trying to be better for her child – even when we, and eventually she, knows she's failing. 

Deja grows up with her and her grandmother, played by screen legend Pam Grier, who crafts an already beloved character in just five minutes until she suddenly passes away. Her death leaves the two young women fending for themselves, Deja often doing just as much tending to the house and adulting as her mother. For a surprise birthday dinner, however, she adults too far, slipping while opening a can of tomatoes and giving herself THE WORST CUT I'VE EVER SEEN on her hand. The last "Saw" movie didn't even come close to this terrifyingly mundane accident's cringe factor.

She rushes to the hospital (while the Pearsons had each other, Deja is left to her own brave devices) where their small, strained family unit's seams begin to fully pull apart. Because of Shauna's absence, the alcohol on her breathe – it WAS her birthday – and their financial woes, Eric's mom Debra Jo Rupp's Social Services agent takes Deja out of her house and into a foster home, where things are both better and worse.

The beds are nicer, and Deja even has a sister of sorts, but their foster father is a drunken abuser (cue the reflections of Jack's similarly brutal childhood). After one particularly brutal night, Deja tells the adoption official about his violence, and they're immediately removed – much to her step-sister's annoyance. The hitting may have been bad, she says, but at least it was one bed to sleep in at night, rather than the rotating chairs of the foster system. 

Other than her abusive father, "This Is Us" works hard to show there are no bad guys in this story, just unfortunate situations. Just like how Shauna is not a bad person, instead one with her own battles she's attempting to conquer, Rupp's adoption official is not a villain. She just wants to put Deja in the best possible place while dealing with the imperfect foster system. Hopefully that's with her reformed mother – but if not, somewhere else.

Even Shauna's rehab boyfriend gets to be a human character, one who wants to be there for his step-daughter but eventually succumbs to his Jack-echoed alcohol addiction – and eventually gets Deja removed from Shauna yet again thanks to a misplaced gun. 

Which brings Deja to Randall and Beth, who after finding the two living in their car last week, invite them into their house. It's finally a great night for Deja, allowed to be a child in a way that she's rarely been able to indulge in, but it's also the episode's most crushing sequence. We watch the evening through Shauna's eyes – happy for her daughter but also devastated and disappointed in the realization of what she's put Deja through, the life she's never been able to offer and the carefree joys of youth she's robbed her of.

Brunson's performance is terrific, heartbreaking in her human imperfection, and it's sad to see her go as she decides in the episode's final moments to leave Deja with the family that can do the most for her. "What would I do without you?" is her catchphrase throughout the show to Deja, but at the end, she painfully realizes it's time for her daughter to see what she could do without her.

Tear-jerking and twisty episodes like the extended #CrockpotGate Jack Pearson Death Watch of the past season may bring in all the eyeballs, headlines and Kleenex advertising revenue. Moments like Tuesday night's episode, however, prove why "This Is Us" truly deserves to be one of television's biggest shows, one that made me sad every time these characters temporarily disappeared for a commercial break. Even when Deja's final speech might've bluntly hit the point one more time than necessary, I couldn't vote against an additional showcase moment for young standout Lyric Ross, whose eyes communicate all of the conflicted feelings battling away in her old-too-soon brain. 

The end result is a culmination of everything "This Is Us" does well: warm humane characters, lived-in diverse performances and a time-jumping structure that isn't just for gimmicks but for speaking to greater ideas and beautiful moments – like strangers across time suddenly finding their individual stories on the same page of the same classic bedtime tale, unknown neighbors across time.

Not bad for a "slight" episode. 

This Is Sadness Rankings 

I watched this week's episode with my mother, and as the show bounced from family to family reading "Goodnight Moon," my mother joined in, my real-life childhood memories weaving in with the fabric of these fictional characters. And I just did not drink enough water to balance out the tears lost. And that was BEFORE Shauna's hard-earned final realization that she wasn't enough for Deja. So I'll give this a Patrick The Starfish Somehow Still Crying While Underwater.

So, like, an 8 out of 10.