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Warning: This story contains spoilers from the season 3 finale of The Way Home.
What. The. Pond?!
The season 3 finale of Hallmark Channel’s The Way Home was not messing around when it came to packing an emotional punch and setting up even more mystery for the next season (coming next year!).
“It was a river of tears, for sure,” co-showrunner Heather Conkie admits to PEOPLE.
Over the course of the episode, Del (Andie MacDowell) time-traveled for the first time and witnessed her wedding to Colton in the 1970s, Kat (Chyler Leigh) and Elliot (Evan Williams) chose each other in a whole new way, K.C. (Vaughan Murrae) revealed that Susanna (Watson Rose) left Lingermore to the Landrys, Jacob (Spencer Macpherson) disappeared again, and Alice (Sadie Laflamme-Snow) and adult Colton (Jefferson Brown) had an honest heart-to-heart that turned into one doozy of a tearjerker.
And then there was that whopper of a cliffhanger that saw a mysterious couple jumping into the pond in the 1970s and Sam (Rob Stewart) mirroring Elliot from the show’s pilot in the present day.
Here, showrunners (and mother-daughter duo) Conkie and Alexandra Clarke graciously help PEOPLE break down some of the key moments of the finale and answer some of the most pressing questions about the season’s final moments.
PEOPLE: I don’t think I’ve fully rehydrated since watching the scene between Alice and adult Colton. Was filming it as emotional as watching it?
ALEXANDRA CLARKE: Honestly, I don’t think I can even talk about that day without bursting into tears. The first time everyone read the script was the cast read-through. … We had about 10 boxes of Kleenex amongst us, and I remember seeing Sadie and Jefferson kind of look at each other, and I realized that they knew what we were all in for. And then to be there on the day, by the pond. Our director on this one, Grant Harvey, has seen us through this entire series. He and I really did want to carve out the time for those scenes because we knew it was going to be intense. And these guys came to play.
Being there behind the monitor with Grant — I’m going to start crying right now — it was incredible. It was incredible to see them acknowledge each other for who they really were as characters. You really are so invested in these people by now. To hear Colton acknowledge Alice as his granddaughter was unforgettable.
Truly. And I’m just going to say it: That was perhaps Sadie’s best work to date.
CLARKE: It was incredible. We are so proud of them because as you just said, I really do believe it was Sadie’s best performance. We’ve seen her grow as an actor over these last three seasons. And to see her do this in the moment, well, I was so proud as well as so emotional about it. It was, I think for both Sadie and Jefferson, it was an incredible, incredible performance. Their best across the board, both of them.
HEATHER CONKIE: The first time I watched the footage, it was like an explosion of emotion, but having to sit through the edit together and watching it over and over and picking the best of the best performances — because they were all just exemplary and real and true — we were just a mess. The editor was a mess, everyone. And when we went from there to the mix with the music added, everyone was a mess again. I think we kept the Kleenex business running.
Del time-traveled for the first time! Why was seeing her wedding the perfect first jump?
CLARKE: We decided that Del’s story this season was going to be a bit of a personal attack on her memories. Because now all of a sudden Alice is going back to the ’70s and seeing them from another perspective and seeing them from arguably Evelyn’s lens and coming back to the present and informing her grandmother about, “Well, that’s not the way I saw it, grandma. Actually, it was this way,” and feeling that kind of invasion. The fight that Alice and Del have in episode 5 of, “Stay out of my memories” is exactly how Del felt through the entire season.
But then it wasn’t just Alice attacking those memories. It was all of these things they were discovering about Colton and the secrets he kept and the fact that he was a time traveler and knew about the pond. And she just spirals a bit, asking herself, “Are my memories real the way I remembered it, which is this perfect, pure love story up until our son disappeared? Is that actually what it was?” She starts questioning her own choices and Colton’s choices. She thinks maybe she made him give up a music career, and maybe the reason he kept these secrets about the pond was because he resented her in some way. Everything has been thrown into question for her about her love story with Colton and how she remembers it.
So in order to give her this massive redemptive moment, she had to go back and see what is arguably the start of a chapter of their love story, but also the happily ever after moment of their teenage love story, which is this wedding. To know that her memories are hers, to know that she wasn’t wrong, she shouldn’t have doubt their love. It was exactly as she remembered it.
Kat and Elliot had a bumpy season together but ultimately chose each other for who they are in the present, rather than allowing history to define them as a couple. Was that always the journey you intended for them this season?
CLARKE: The thing that was really important for Kat and Elliot this season was to acknowledge that they have burdened each other with past expectations and perspectives on the other. They needed to clean the slate if they were going to try and move forward. From Elliot’s perspective, he had to acknowledge that he’s always put Kat on this perfect pedestal so when she does make mistakes — and we all know Kat is very capable of making mistakes because she leads with her heart and not always with her mind — Elliot, who overthinks everything and over-analyzes before he even acts, holds it against her. And he had to acknowledge that that’s on him. That’s not on her.
Conversely, Kat had to acknowledge that she’s always seen him as her best friend who’s always going to be there no matter what mistake she makes. She needed to acknowledge that she had to stop taking him for granted. To clear the air in that way was really important for whatever step comes next. They needed to put the past behind them, literally. Maybe not necessarily from a time travel perspective, but I love that idea of we can go to the past, but let’s not live in our past.
Let’s get into this bonkers cliffhanger. Elliot receives the note his mother wrote, and then we see a note slipped into baby Elliot’s basket. To confirm, are those notes one and the same?
CLARKE: Yes, it is the same note. Whether or not it’s the whole note is the question.
Because Colton’s mysterious brother is out there somewhere — more on that in a sec — can we confirm that the baby is definitely the child of Vic Augustine and the woman who jumps in the pond?
CLARKE: Well, Elliot is definitely not a Landry is what we can say. I think the best part about this show is that nothing is straightforward. Everything is an answer begets a question. I’m so intrigued to hear people’s theories about what they think happened in that final millisecond of the show.
CONKIE: It’s similar in a way to the end of our previous season with Colton watching the fireworks. So it’s a very similar type of ending, which begs questions, which we love.
WATCH: Andie MacDowell, Chyler Leigh, Evan Williams, Sadie Laflamme-Snow and Spencer MacPherson discuss season 3 of The Way Home
I’m sure you won’t be able to fully answer this, but who the heck is Sam? Could he be Colton’s brother?
CLARKE: I’m hoping everyone is asking that by the end of this season! And I hope people recognize that we went to the trouble of posing him exactly as Elliot posed at the pond at the end of our pilot episode. And he says the exact same words. At the end of our very first episode, it was Kat on the phone with Elliot saying, “I don’t know where Alice is. What if she doesn’t come home?” And Elliot saying, “Don’t worry, she will.” And she says, “Well, how do you know that Elliot? How do you know that?” And he says, “I just do.” And then we reveal him at the pond. We were very determined to have history repeat itself. We love these moments of the past echoing in the present and the cyclical thing that we do where the past is never gone. Maybe that in and of itself could tell people something about Sam.
You guys are breaking my brain.
CONKIE: The story room breaks everybody’s brain. So tell people that.
The Way Home is available to stream on Hallmark+.
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