‘The Way Home’ Bosses Promise ‘Satisfying’ Ending to Time Travel Drama

It’s the beginning of the end for the Landrys — Alice (Sadie Laflamme-Snow), her grandmother Del (Andie MacDowell) and her mother Kat (Chyler Leigh), above, from left, with Kat’s boyfriend Elliot (Evan Williams) and Alice’s dad Brady (Al Mukadam) — as the fantasy drama series begins its final season. The pond on their family’s property allows them to travel through time, and in the Season 3 finale, Elliot learned his mother, who left him as a baby, jumped in with a Landry.

Following a seven-month time skip in The Way Home Season 4 premiere, “everyone’s at a bit of a crossroads,” says executive producer Alexandra Clarke. Below, she and executive producer Heather Conkie preview the final trip.

What can you say about when the new season picks up in relation to last season’s finale and what’s going on with everyone when it does?

Alexandra Clarke: Because of the weather and when we wrap a season and when we start filming a new one, we always have to do that jump in time. But we certainly do pick up where we left off, and then we do a little bit of a crazy leap forward in time by about seven months. So we wind up picking up the story again at the end of high school, so June.

From a character perspective, everyone is at a bit of a crossroads of when we pick them up after that leap. It’s the end of high school. And I think it’s not just the end of something for Alice, it’s the end of something — what our other two amazing women realize is that it’s a bit of an end of something for them as well. For Kat, it’s seeing Alice go off to college after the last summer together. And what does that mean for her and her relationship with Elliot, and what do next steps look like for her? For Del, it’s very similar, only it’s kind of facing a world that looks a lot like where she was ahead of her daughter and her granddaughter coming to live with her in the first place. It’s her on her own, potentially, at the farm, empty nester, and what that means for her. It’s a moment of, “What do I want to do next for all three of our women?”

Peter Stranks / Hallmark Media

Heather Conkie: And Del’s also dealing with the fact that Jacob [Spencer MacPherson] has left. That’s huge. Once again, she’s literally back where she started in Season 1.

What can you say about where Jacob is?

Clarke: Not a lot. Just that he’s typical Jacob. And I think he always is a character that kind of gets in his own way, I guess, and uses the past as a bit of a foil for the choices he makes in the present and into the future. And how we left him in Season 3 is a perfect example of that. We can’t tell you where he is, only that it’s going to take some getting used to for our characters to feel his absence.

How is Elliot doing with the knowledge that his mom jumped in the pond with a Landry? And then what can you say about when we’ll learn who that Landry is?

Clarke: It’s a typical Way Home peeling of the onion with that one. I think one of the things we love to do is kind of give an answer, but then maybe take it back a little bit and then —

Conkie: Complicate it.

Clarke: — and throw more questions in, and maybe not all is as it seems. And so I think it is going to be a bit of a one step forward, two steps back when it comes to learning the truth about what happened to Elliot’s mom.

Conkie: And it’s his first real adventure. He really has an adventure this season.

What can you say about how he feels about that, though, just having that knowledge?

Clarke: I think when we pick him up seven months later, there’s probably a bit of denial. One of the things he actually does say within this season to Kat, is basically just, “I don’t want to know because I can’t handle having two horrible parents.” And I think that that kind of says it all about where he is off the top of our season. And then of course, Kat is Kat and is a dog with a bone. And there is something within him that still ultimately will want to get answers, I think. But off the top, it’s more just, “I don’t want to know.”

Conkie: And he’s created — like anyone would who never really has actual memories of their mom, no photos, no nothing — something in his mind that she may never live up to, and he’d rather go with that imaginative mom, the one in his head, than find out the truth, and as Alex says, find out that he has two terrible parents.

Is this going to cause any conflict with Kat and Elliot, or are we going to really see them solid and building to a proposal that we know is coming? There’s the ring…

Clarke: Do you know? Do you know?

Well, Kat thinks it’s coming.

Clarke: I think it’s a little bit of both. I think that’s what’s so great about it is there is a struggle within him of knowing and wanting to know and not wanting to know. And of course that’s going to cause conflicts with someone like Kat, who is an award-winning journalist, she always says, and wants to get answers always and always is looking for that next mission. But I think it’s a really lovely season of a balance between that kind of conflict, but also a really lovely partnership at times. And this is the first time that this is about someone else’s family for Kat. So I think that there’s moments of tension and then there’s moments of reward with that.

What can you say about the potential of a proposal this season?

Clarke: We can say not a lot, I don’t think. What can we say?

Conkie: There is a proposal — we’re not going to know who’s proposing.

Peter Stranks / Hallmark Media

Then there’s Alice graduating and what that means for Kat. But also, how is Alice dealing with the fact that life could be taking her away from the pond?

Clarke: I think that’s a huge thing for Alice to face. She’s come so far, and we actually do, in our first episode of the season, really remind the audience of how far she’s come. Even within the first act of our episode, we sort of take people back to the mother and daughter first drive into town when Alice was this moody, rebellious, angry kid. And within the four years that we’ve gotten to know her, she’s grown so much. And so now faced with the idea of actually leaving Port Haven and leaving the pond, she’s done a full 180 from where we saw her off the top of our show, which was not wanting to be there, not wanting to move, not wanting to be anywhere, “I’m not a farmer,” all that sort of stuff. I think this is a really weird time for her, the idea of leaving the farm behind, leaving family behind, but also leaving that kind of adventure behind.

Conkie: Leaving the magic.

Clarke: But I think she’s ready in a lot of ways — or at least she thinks she is — to take that next step. But I think throughout this season, she’ll ask a lot of questions about what she really, really wants to do and when she wants to do it, which is something that a lot of high school grads question. So we definitely see her through that plight.

The pond is taking them to 1925 this season. What can you preview about why and what’s going on back then?

Clarke: Oh, we can’t say a lot about why they go there, but we certainly can say it is so much fun.

Conkie: It’s the best.

Clarke: It looks beautiful. And we are so thrilled to have a new roster of characters in that era that we’re going to come to meet, namely Bianca Melchior, who plays Fern in that era. She is amazing, and I can’t wait for everyone to meet her.

Conkie: She’s spectacular.

Clarke: At least off the top of the season, what we loved about it was that it’s fun. The 1800s for us had so much weight to it because not only was it, oh, maybe Jacob’s here, maybe we can find him, but also 1814, 1816, those were dark, heavy times. People were struggling, and we wanted to show that realness versus a fairytale version of the 1800s. But I think with the 1920s and 1925, you can have … Yeah, sure, there’s going to be darkness, there’s going to be grit, there’s going to be all those things, but at least initially, it kind of looks like a bit of a fairytale and it’s glamorous and it’s Bright Young Things and it’s the Gatsbys. And we had fun.

Conkie: Everybody had fun with it. Costumes was just so fun to go and watch them design everything so beautifully and so like the period. You will swear that you’re in the period.

Clarke: Yeah, our wardrobe department, they’re amazing and have been amazing all throughout our show. But in the ‘20s, our head of wardrobe, Trysha [Bakker], basically said she didn’t want to do any kind of recreation dresses. So what you see on screen, particularly with Fern, it’s all vintage and it’s all of that era. And it’s either of that era or we’ve made it in-house ourselves with patterns from that era. So, as a result, it all feels really, really authentic and lovely.

Conkie: The music this season is pretty … We always have music every season, but this was dipping our toe, so to speak, in a whole different era where the music was … The radio was king and people just loved swing and it’s just joyful.

Looking at mysteries involving the pond, there are all these questions still about who Casey (Vaughan Murrae) is. What are we going to see about them? And then also this mystery of Sam (Rob Bishop) at the pond at the end of last season. So what can you say about those two mysteries?

Clarke: We definitely dive deeper into both. I promise we won’t pretend like it didn’t happen.

Conkie: All shall be revealed.

Clarke: Yes, absolutely, when it comes to both of them.

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Is there anything else you can specifically preview about the premiere?

Clarke: I think our Episode 1 does what any good Episode 1 from our show does, which is it sets up a really intriguing launching pad into our season. You’re left with a lot of questions, a lot of cliffhangers at the end of it. We have a couple of really incredible eerie moments that will basically motivate and move our characters forward and into this season.

Conkie: For the entire season.

Clarke: But as I was writing it, one of the things that I really did want to do, because we knew this was our last season, we really wanted it to be a bit of an homage to Episode 1s of seasons past.

What can you say about how the series ends? Does it wrap up everything? Is the door open for a revival of some sort?

Clarke: Well, the door is never closed.

Conkie: There will always be questions in our show, even near the end. So it’s always nice to leave people going, “Well, I wonder if … ”

Clarke: But that being said, I think, again, one of the things that our show does is even when we do provide answers, there’s always a question mark at the end of those answers. Those answers beget questions. And I don’t think our finale will be any different, but there certainly will be answers, and hopefully satisfying ones. That’s the whole point.

The Way Home, Season 4 Premiere, Sunday, April 19, 9/8c, Hallmark Channel

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