The Way Home Cast Talks How The Time Travel Works And That Surprise Season 1 Finale Twist
The Way Home Season 2 is about to hit the winter TV premiere schedule. We’ve already seen the gorgeous trailer for the time travel and family show’s next season, but ahead of the premiere cast members Chyler Leigh, Sadie LaFlamme-Snow and Evan Williams sat down to talk about time travel and the surprise Season 1 finale twist. Some spoilers for last season can be found in this article if you aren’t fully caught up yet.
Evan Williams’ Elliot has been the key person really keeping tabs on the science fiction-adjacent aspects of the story, having learned that Alice time traveled to the ‘90s when he was still a young man. He’s that guy in the story who’d explain how time travel in Back to the Future or how time travel in Avengers: Endgame works. As the bridge between the show’s past and present storylines, he knows a lot, but he was operating off of the theory the past cannot be changed.
However, we know from the Season 1 finale that the past only ended up happening the way it did because Alice and, in particular, her mom Kat were trying to make changes. In a total Catch-22 Kat walked home with her brother to try to avoid his disappearance, and he disappeared because he specifically followed Kat back to the pond and presumably traveled himself. Kat didn’t want her dad to die but ultimately ended up being the catalyst for her dad dying. It’s all been murky. As Williams noted to Pop Culture Planet:
Elliot is the one trying to make sense of it all and has been trying to do it for 20 years. [He] has been all through the first season saying, ‘What happens will always happen. You can’t go back and change anything.’ But now that we know their trying to change things is what resulted in things always having been the same, it ties it all into this Gordian knot. I think we’re going to do more investigation in the coming season. Things are starting to spiral.
While the cast knows The Way Home is unlike other programs on Hallmark, by far the biggest twist in the season was the twist that Kat was on the scene and responsible for her father’s death. And it came late in the game for the show:
Sadie LaFlamme-Snow: It’s a huge thing to share and reveal so late in the season. That this thing that so much of the plot has been centered around, hinges on our two characters. It was exciting, but we also, shooting it, had no idea. So it was exciting to shoot because we knew how much of a reveal it was going to be and also like, ‘OK where are we going after this happens?’ Nothing could be the same after that.
The emotionally heart-wrenching moment was a question mark when the show was filming, with Evan Williams and others on set wondering “are audiences going to follow it?” In fact, it wasn't clear people would be on board with the heart-rending twist before the finale aired, but Chyler Leigh said she felt confident people would want to follow the direction the show was heading in ahead of Season 2.
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It was a very real, raw, guttural several hours in that time. It was exhausting in the most wonderful ways because we knew what the payoff was going to be. That in and of itself was such a gift. Jefferson Brown, who plays Colton, is one of the coolest, loveliest, goofiest people on the planet.
The twists and turns have been seemingly endless for the series and there’s so much to explore in terms of Kat being a wreck after the realization of her dad’s death, what happened to Jacob and what all grandmother Del knows. (And we’re not even getting into the potential romances people.)
Leigh noted that no matter “what the audience or the demographic” is, those viewers are seeing themselves in the characters and finding ways to resonate both emotionally (and via fan theories). CinemaBlend’s own Mack Rawden spoke about being a 36-year-old who loves The Way Home despite not typically being a Hallmark viewer. Doubtless the show will continue finding new audiences when it hits the schedule on January 21st.
