SPOILER ALERT: This post contains spoilers from “If You Could Read My Mind,” the Season 3 finale of Hallmark’s “The Way Home,” which streams on Hallmark+ and Peacock.
“The Way Home” kicked off its third season with the abandonment of a mysterious baby, and fans have waited all season to get more information about the enigmatic scene. By the end of the Season 3 finale, we know one key thing about the baby: who he was. It turned out that the cooing infant was Elliot (played by Evan Williams as an adult) as a baby. He was left by the pond by his time-traveling mother, who jumped into the frigid waters with someone who must be a male Landry, but whose face we never see.
Why they left Elliot by the pond and what connected Elliot’s mother to the as-of-yet unidentified Landry are questions to be explored in “The Way Home” Season 4 — Hallmark announced the show’s renewal the day before the finale. As Kat (Chyler Leigh) and Elliot investigate his family’s relationship with the pond, Del (Andie MacDowell) will be busy looking for Jacob (Spencer Macpherson) who disappeared after Lewis Goodwin (Philip Riccio) threatened to press attempted arson charges against him. We can’t imagine that Del will be too pleased to learn that her boyfriend, Sam (Rob Stewart), knows a lot more about Jacob’s time travels than he’s let on, but it was gratifying for viewers to have it confirmed that Sam has his own relationship with the pond, which was confirmed in the finale as well.
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While many questions still linger about Elliot, Jacob’s disappearance, Sam, and KC Goodwin (Vaughan Murrae), the Season 3 finale did answer a number of them about Colton (Jefferson Brown) and his time-travel adventures. Alice (Sadie Laflamme-Snow) took an unexpected trip to the ’90s to have a heart-to-heart with her grandfather and get answers her family desperately needed about what the patriarch knew about the pond when Jacob disappeared.
Variety caught up with showrunners Heather Conkie and Alex Clarke to talk about the baby twist, Easter eggs, closure, and what all the finale developments mean for Season 4 and “The Way Home” moving forward.
What does this ending mean for Elliot and his relationship with time travel?
Alexandra Clarke: It got a heck of a lot more personal, which is a fun new layer to all of this. It’s a really fun launching pad. As much as he enjoyed his five more minutes with Colton, and he’ll never forget that, Elliot has always been someone who kept time travel at arm’s length. To make this realization, or create this theory that involves his own family, takes that to the next level.
Elliot and Kat also seem to take their relationship to the next level after an important conversation in this episode. Are they in a better place to actually make this relationship work than they were at the beginning of the season?
Heather Conkie: It’s them coming to terms with the reality of who they are as people. They are not the same people that they knew in 1999; they have to shift gears. Alex wrote that wonderful scene. It’s one of those scenes that I think anyone who is having bizarre realignment problems in their relationship should watch, because it’s a master class.
Clarke: We started this season with them in love. They realized through the course of the season that it’s not a love that’s fully formed yet. They both do a lot of growing in this season and make mistakes, and do impulsive things. All of the arguments that they have aren’t really arguments. They are recognizing they’re at an impasse, and they need to work on themselves before they can work on them as a unit. I think this heartfelt conversation is the crescendo of that. They are realizing that to really love each other, they have to love who they are now and not who they were.
Going to the past is all well and good, but they can’t love each other with the past in mind. They can travel to the past, but they can’t live there. Elliot acknowledges that he’s always put her on a pedestal because her family was perfect, so any mistake she made he held against her because she was supposed to be perfect. Conversely, Kat realizes that she always took Elliot for granted because that’s how he was when they were kids. He was always there, and he never faltered. Her realizing she needs to appreciate that is really lovely too.
Courtesy of Peter Stranks/Hallmark Channel
Elliot isn’t the only one we learn has a deeper connection to the pond in this finale. You validated everyone who has theorized that Sam at least knows what the pond can do by showing him standing there when he’s talking to Del. What can you tease about Sam’s relationship with the pond?
Conkie: We put him in the exact position with almost the exact words as we had Elliot in at the end of the pilot. If you put the two shots together, they’re identical, literally. The lines are identical.
Clarke: That was a very purposeful choice to mirror. Our show is all about the echoes of the past and the present. The past is never gone. We love the call back to our first episode because the whole finale is about going back to the start, which is why we chose Coldplay’s “The Scientist” right off the top. We’re showing the audience that this has been in the works for a while. We’ve had these ideas since Season 1 and we’re finally showing it to you.
So many loose threads with Colton were tied up in this finale. Does it fully close the loop on his time traveling, or is there more to discover there?
Clarke: I don’t think you can ever count Colton out. The lore of Colton is the foundation of our show. He is such a fascinating character, and we do definitely reveal a lot between Episodes 9 and 10 about his experience with time travel, and why he made the choices he did. There’s always more to the story with Colton. There are so many questions that I hope people ask about those final moments of the episode with younger Del, and Colton taking Elliot in. What are the implications of that? That’s part of Elliot’s story that certainly our audience hasn’t been aware of. There’s definitely more secrets to unveil.
One of the things we did confirm in this episode is that Colton knew who Kat was at the crash site and he didn’t just forgive her, but always loved her. What does having that knowledge do for Kat going forward?
Conkie: It certainly frees her of the intense guilt that she’s been feeling ever since she made that fateful decision to try and change things. I think it’ll change her in some ways, but Kat is also very “onto the next.”
Clarke: One of the things that’s really intriguing about Season 4 is what Kat looks like after getting closure. Colton knew he was going to die, and he stopped Alice from telling him anything about how it was going to happen. He was willing to do whatever needed to be done in order to bring Alice into this world and have this moment with him in February 2000. He was resolved in his decisions. That is going to free Kat in a way that we haven’t seen her be free before. I’m intrigued to know what that means for her, whether it means looking for the next or whatever it means for her confidence. There’s a lot of roads to go down with her after this.
Courtesy of Peter Stranks/Hallmark Channel
Del also got some closure in this season. She finally jumped in the pond! What does the trip back to the ’70s do for Del and her relationship to the pond?
Conkie: The pond has been the enemy. This was the first time she realized it could be absolute magic. The wedding is one of my favorite scenes in the entire life of the show. I loved the music. I love the way it was filmed. It’s really quite something, and very emotional.
Clarke: She needed that trip to be a gift in order to see the pond in a new way. She’s only ever known it as a vessel that takes people she loves away. Giving her the gift of seeing those people for five more minutes is going to allow her to see it in a different light moving forward. She’s a very practical woman. She’s not going to become obsessed the way that Kat or even Alice are, but she needed to have a positive experience with the pond to move on.
We also learn that Susannah left Lingermore to the Landry family. What can you tease about what that means for Season 4 and the Goodwin/Landry feud?
Clarke: It’s such a delicious way to end that story right now. They have this paper in hand — what are they going to do with it? Do they actually want to go down that road? It opens up a lot of questions about the relationship between the Goodwin and the Landry families. Don’t forget, Louis Goodwin already knows that the will exists —KC showed it to him in Season 2. What will it mean if it comes back to haunt him? Those are exciting questions to be faced with.
KC returns in this episode and confirmed that they not Alice’s daughter. We still don’t know exactly who they are though, so why did you want to give that tidbit of information?
Conkie: This clears the slate for Alice. She’s been ruminating and dreading all season that she ends up with Max Goodwin. Is that really the future and is everything preordained, or does she have a choice left in this world? Then she finds herself actually being attracted to this guy and it’s a relief to her to know she still has a future she can choose, just like Elliot and Kat now have a future they can choose together.
Clarke: In the writers’ room, we always try to associate these three incredible female characters with the past, present, and future. This was a season where Del was questioning her past. Kat was questioning her present and where she fit now that her mission to bring Jacob home was over. Alice was really questioning her future because of the existence of KC and what that meant. At the end, we wanted to see these characters get a sense of freedom from those questions. Del was free of her questions because she got to go back to her wedding and it was exactly like she remembered. Kat and Elliot having this incredible conversation, and arguably through her experiences with Thomas this season, she was able to free herself to be in the present. Alice — because of the KC of it all, and the closure they give her — is free of any doubt she may have had about the future. It was important to show in our finale that they are now all free.
The idea comes up this season that the pond can punish people for breaking the rules. Obviously the pond makes choices about when and where to send people back in time, but is it a thing that can punish or reward travelers for their behavior in the past?
Clarke: That was Colton’s explanation to Alice and his logic for why he kept it to himself, why he was ashamed, and why he thought it didn’t work for his family. These are all lessons in communication. Colton didn’t know the full story about the pond. I think the pond teaches lessons, but it is all about reflection. It takes you where you need to go. I think it’s a passive entity versus an aggressive one. Colton tells Alice he made a terrible mistake, and he did. We are all capable of making terrible mistakes, even an incredible character like Colton. That’s why this show resonates with people because even the characters with the best intentions that are nothing but pure good are also capable of falling down and getting it wrong. And that’s okay. I think that’s a very powerful message.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
