[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for The Way Home Season 3 premiere, “You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet.”]
For two seasons, Del (Andie MacDowell) was kept in the dark about the time traveling her daughter Kat (Chyler Leigh) and granddaughter Alice (Sadie Laflamme-Snow) have been doing using the pond on the family’s property. In The Way Home Season 3 premiere, that changes, because her son Jacob (Spencer MacPherson), who fell into the pond as a child and grew up in the 1800s, returns home. The only way to explain his reappearance is with the truth.
For MacDowell, it was about playing the “shock” of that moment, after Del believed Jacob was dead, as well as the confusion. “I look to see the way he’s dressed,” she points out. “It’s a lot to take in. It’s a lot to digest. And then to feel like a fierce mama bear to want to protect him, that would be a natural reaction for a mother who gets her child back, who’s disappeared to want to protect him to be his mother, but yet he’s a man.”
To have Del learn the truth as she does is “really overwhelming” and “bittersweet,” adds Leigh. “There is a line that I really appreciate that Kat ends up saying to Del afterwards. It’s like, ‘Wow, I am sorry we just unleashed all of that on you at once, but there’s no simple way of saying it.’ So you just got to go, ‘Here’s the paper, read it, and then let’s discuss. And you tell me your questions after.’”
She points out that Elliot (Evan Williams) “becomes kind of like a touchstone for Del once she starts to understand that we’re going back in time, we’re doing all this traveling that she had no idea about. I think Elliot’s kind of a nice, grounded way of saying to her, ‘It is what it is. What happens will always happen.’ You see the moments of her going, how can you just sit here while all of this is happening? And then Elliot kind of gets to have that moment of just going, we just got to wait and see. So it’s an interesting patience that he has to teach a rather impatient woman.”
But Del learning the truth is just the beginning of the wild revelations of the Season 3 premiere. Below, the cast and executive producers Alexandra Clarke and Heather Conkie break down the rest of the major moments and tease what’s ahead.
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Who pushed Alice into the pond?
At the end of the premiere, right after Alice discovers signs that someone else has been using the pond, she’s pushed into it from behind! When she lands and who did that will be answered in subsequent episodes.
“I always get excited when there’s a new way to use the pond,” says Laflamme-Snow. “We saw Thomas [Kris Holden-Ried] challenge Kat out to the edge of the pond, and she was trying to prove her point and so she falls in. We’ve seen people trying to get away from certain situations. But we’d never seen an unknown figure using the pond against someone like that. And so I had chills.”
There will be clues in upcoming episodes for the season-long mystery, and the reveal is “down the road,” says Clarke.
“There’s a place where you think it’s kind of solved and what we love to do is peel the onion of that mystery a little bit more throughout the season,” she continues. “I remember us being in the room talking about this season, things we’ve never seen with the pond, and we all sat there, well, we’ve never seen someone get intentionally pushed. We all just looked at each other and went, well, there’s your Episode 1 end.”
But who was that person? Laflamme-Snow thinks Alice thinks it’s Casey (Vaughan Murrae), since she thinks they’re a time traveler after seeing them with her mother’s engagement ring.
Who’s sending Del threatening notes?
To explain Jacob’s reappearance, the family lies and says Jacob was found on a shore with no memory of who he was or what happened and taken in by a family living off the grid, who only told him the truth on their deathbeds. But Del receives a note reading, “Your lie is known. Time will tell.” She keeps it from the others.
Related‘The Way Home’ Stars Tease What’s Next in Kat and Elliot’s Relationship
“I don’t think she wants to upset anyone,” explains MacDowell. Part of it is also fear as well as “not wanting to burst the bubble of having things somewhat normal again. She doesn’t want her son to be scared and to worry him that something could go wrong. He already has so much he has to deal with.”
As Clarke points out, the family’s story about Jacob — which the writers envisioned as Kat saying, from her point of view as a journalist, that the best lines stick close to the truth — “has holes. What was important to us was to establish that you can’t tie this up with a bow. There’s just no way.”
And so there’s someone who is picking apart that story. “Over the season, we have a few red herrings [about], who is this person?” admits Conkie. “That’s something that might even be revealed much later.”Clarke’s looking forward to seeing the theories from fans. “Absolutely there’s more than one suspect,” she notes.
How will Kat cope with knowing her father time-traveled?
The end of Season 2 revealed that Colton (Jefferson Brown) used the pond, and now, in the present, Kat is picking up on clues about this aspect of her father she knew nothing about, including the lyrics of one of his songs from the 1970s — and Alice’s voice is on the record with him! Leigh says it’s “disheartening” for Kat to learn about it this way.
“It’s similar to the situation where Del says, the fact that I didn’t know this was happening, I should have been there for you. I should have known that you guys were going back and forth and whatnot and trying to save Jacob and bring him back,” explains Leigh. “It’s similar in that sense where it’s like, God, if he had spoken about it, maybe something else could have happened or we could have changed the future. We could have changed circumstances.”
However, she continues, “We do always come back to what happens will always happen, but it sure adds a lot of great twists and turns for the season. You get to see the layers peel off, and it’s just a matter of how can they come to terms and come to grips with him having known and having to lie about certain things. It’s definitely a challenge. So it feels like there’s a bit of a betrayal, but then also at the same time, we’re just trying to dig deeper and understand more and more as to how burdened he must have been by it as well.”
Williams points out that this is just like other aspects of The Way Home: “The solution, when it’s presented, creates more problems. And so even something that’s seemingly linear like Jacob coming home, it seems like, wow, it is going to solve everything, but that’s not how life works. And it’s certainly not how time travel works. And so I don’t think audiences are going to be ready for some of the twists and turns.”
Peter Stranks / Hallmark Media
How will Jacob adjust to being home?
To Kat’s surprise, she learns (after traveling via the pond back to 1814) that Jacob didn’t choose to return home; he had to in order to escape jail or worse. “Why not” add that wrinkle, laughs Conkie. It’s part of showing that “Jacob isn’t an open book. In his life in 1814, the 1800s, he had to have a few wiles, had to learn how to survive in a big way. So it’s not surprising that he lies at times or covers up or makes up a story that sounds better than the real one. It just adds that extra layer of oh my God, he didn’t want to come home. He had no choice.”
This also plays into showing that just became Jacob came home doesn’t mean there’s a happy ending.
“That is never the case. Any happily ever after that exists, there’s always the after and there’s a new story there and what is that new story? One of the real joys of this season for us was really breaking down how Jacob thrives or exists or doesn’t thrive within this modern world and ultimately finds himself in,” says Clarke. “Because it’s not easy and it’s not just able to be tied up [in a bow]. That’s life. If you actually look at the reality of him and his life, how could being thrust back into a 2025 world be just a happy skip down the road?”
It’s turning something “outlandish” into something “very real in how he copes and thinking he’s okay and then reliving some traumas based off of a little trigger that comes out of nowhere,” the EP shares. “That’s how people cope with grief, with trauma, with the hand that has been dealt to them, is I think people initially kind of gloss it over as, I’m fine, everything’s fine. And then something will come out of nowhere and slap you across the face and you realize you’re not entirely fine, you haven’t dealt with it yet, you’re compartmentalizing. That was something that really intrigued us about the Jacob story this year and certainly intrigued Spencer as well. He took it very seriously.”
It’s also about how these around him deal with his return, which we will see going forward. “It has a ricochet,” says Conkie.
What did you think of the Season 3 premiere? Who do you think pushed Alice into the pond? Who’s sending those letters? Let us know your theories in the comments section below.
The Way Home, Fridays, 9/8c, Hallmark Channel
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