What To Know
The Way Home ended its four-season run with an episode that did leave a bit left up in the air.
Executive producers Alexandra Clarke and Heather Conkie reveal how the finale would’ve been different if there had been a Season 5 and what they imagine is next for the characters.
As mother and daughter executive producers Heather Conkie and Alexandra Clarke told TV Insider ahead of the season, The Way Home series finale did leave us with some questions. To get those answers, TV Insider spoke with them about what could’ve happened next, if there had been a Season 5. Warning: Spoilers for The Way Home series finale ahead!
As the finale revealed, Elliot (Evan Williams) survived being shot in 1926 and once both he and Kat (Chyler Leigh) were home in the present, he proposed and said yes; Alice (Sadie Laflamme-Snow) is looking ahead to the future, one that could include Max (Dale Whibley); Del (Andie MacDowell), after getting a bit more time with Colton (Jefferson Brown) thanks to the pond is ready to move forward with Sam (Rob Stewart); and Jacob (Spencer MacPherson) married Abby (Holly Deveaux), and KC (Vaughan Murrae) is their child from the future. Plus, Kat and Alice end the series jumping into the pond, but when they end up remains a mystery.
Below, Clarke and Conkie answer some of our finale burning questions and reveal what would’ve happened in Season 5. (Read the rest of our interview with the executive producers about the series’ ending here.)
Did you ever seriously consider killing Elliot off?
Alexandra Clarke: No. I mean, I think even if we’d had a Season 5 — I think if we’d had a Season 5, we would have ended Season 4 on is he alive or is he dead versus what we had to do. But no, that journey, the arc of those two characters, especially if we’d only gotten to Season 5 and he’d been dead, and it was one season of Kat grieving and then bye. No, we would never.
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Why the mystery around Nick’s (Kerry James) Claire and Alice meeting her?
Clarke: [Laughs]
Heather Conkie: That’s us being cheeky because there are some who actually think that Alice is Claire and vice versa. We left that open.
Clarke: We leave it open because you never know. There’s never say never, as we say, never say never. And we were just being very cheeky.
You could easily continue telling more stories in this world, like with these characters, with that ending or picking up with other Landrys. So what can you say about that possibility? Have there been any discussions, and what would you want to explore with the characters if you revisited them?
Clarke: We always talk about it, of course we do, and especially our cast, they’re all asking —
Conkie: And they all have their own ideas.
Clarke: Yeah, exactly. Yes, you’re right. I think there is plenty of room for more story, and yeah, we did have a Season 5 that we thought of initially as sort of part of the plan. So, yeah, I guess I keep wanting to say never say never, but look, I’m just so flattered that people have become so invested that that’s something they’re asking about.
Conkie: Yeah, it’s amazing. It tells us a lot about how people feel about the show. They take it very, very personally. I think this show has given a lot of people an insight into their own lives and I think that it’s a universal truth that they are facing because of the show and that five more minutes, who wouldn’t want that? We want five more minutes.
Clarke: I will say it’s been really amazing recently, I think in these last couple of episodes, people have reached out, and I read them all, and they’re all so beautiful about how the show touched them, whether it was because they were suffering from depression or lost a family member or were feeling really alone in a new town. Honestly, they’re all just such beautiful stories of how this show kind of took them and kept them company in really dark moments. And it’s amazing. And I think we can say the same about it. I mean, life is life, and there have been moments with Mom and I where personally we’ve been going through rough stuff as the show is being made, and it’s been a lifeline for us as well. It’s so touching to know that it’s been a lifeline for others.
So, what would Season 5 have looked like?
[Both laugh]
Conkie: You’re not going to let that go, are you?
Well, you brought it up.
Conkie: I would have loved to have spent more time with the Jacob love story, see it grow a little more. And I would have loved to have spent a little more time with the Max Alice love story, and, of course, the Elliot Kat story. And I would have loved to have seen the Del and Sam relationship move forward now that she knows she can and wants to. It would have been lovely.
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Clarke: I would have loved to have seen the Griffin [Charles Vandervaart] and Tessa [Kelsey Falconer] of it all, leading up to the jump a little more as well as what life looked like for them when they landed, and seeing the Landry family in that era, which is — Susanna [Watson Rose] is gone by then, so it’s the next generation and seeing Tessa be taken into the homestead. We see a little sampling of it in Episode 8, but it would have been very cool to basically see why Tessa became Tessa.
Conkie: There’s so many possibilities, too. I would have loved to have seen younger Fern with Cassandra and their friendship and how that grew —
Clarke: A little Grayson and a little Cassandra.
Conkie: A little power-hungry Grayson.
Clarke: I mean, but that’s the thing, it’s so rich. It’s such a beautiful world, and there’s so many lovely eras. Yeah, it would have been great. But I think for the time that we had and the direction we wanted to take this year, I’m really proud of what we were able to show.
Once you knew this was the last season, you realized, OK, we need to build to the end, did you scrap anything that you had planned for Season 4 or is anything over the years that you had scrapped that you can talk about, significant storylines?
Conkie: I think everything we really knew was important we accomplished. Everything that we didn’t do, you put it out of your mind because it takes you down the wrong path, and you can get stuck in it. And that’s some of the hardest parts.
Clarke: I know one that we knew we couldn’t end up doing, which was seeing Rita in the ‘80s. Del sort of briefly mentions it at the lunch with everyone in Episode 8 that she met this new girl Rita at art school and she’s a hoot and everything. We would’ve loved to have seen Rita join those kitchen parties and see the young version of Rita. That would’ve been really fun.
Conkie: That would’ve been hard to cast.
Clarke: But that went away for sure in the writer’s room, knowing that time was of the essence.
You had said that if there had been a Season 5, Season 4 could have had the cliffhanger of is Elliot alive or dead? So would you just have stretched out the existing storylines in Season 4 and not added another one in to get to that 10 episodes?
Clarke: Yeah. I mean, I think we were really aware if we’d gotten that Season 5 that that in all likelihood would’ve been it. And so our plan would have been to not introduce a new era. But our model has always been you introduce an era, and then the next season, it takes the B story. And so we introduced the ‘20s in Season 4. We would’ve done B story of the ‘20s in Season 5, but not delved into another era necessarily. Maybe hinted at things, but really kind of just do a fuller look at the era as we already know.
Say this is it, and we don’t get to revisit the characters. What do you imagine is next for Kat, Elliot, Alice, Del, and Jacob?
Conkie: I think Alice will become a star. She’ll take off —
Clarke: “Already Home”‘s going to go to the top of the charts.
Conkie: Beautiful. And I think that Sam and Del would maybe not get married, but certainly be together in a much more modern relationship as opposed to tying the knot. Elliot and Kat would definitely have gotten married. I would’ve liked to have seen her get pregnant again because he brought it up at some point and she said, “It’s still something we can discuss. It’s up for discussion.” Let’s do it. I would’ve loved to have seen that. I would’ve loved to have seen more detail on Jacob as a dad and what happened to K.C.’s mom.
Clarke: In my perfect mind, what are they doing right now? I think they’re doing exactly what we would expect them to be doing, which is when Alice isn’t off chasing her dreams in New York and really fully realizing her potential there and when Jacob isn’t running that farm with Danny [Peyson Rock] and coming home to Abby at the end of the day in the Landry Farm and Kat and Elliot are over at Elliot’s house living their best life, I think they’re going down to that pond. I just don’t think that will ever go away. But in our mind, Del and Sam are traveling. I think Del deserves a little time off. Del deserves a vacation. I can picture them on a river cruise. I don’t know why, but that’s very Del and Sam.
I think what I like about the way that you’re in the series is there’s more of a joy and a lightness to the way that they can use the pond going forward, that they’re not weighed down by the past now. It’s kind of just like they can enjoy what’s coming up for them when they jump in there.
Clarke: And you raise a good point because the lore of the one has been completed. They know who the one is. That’s not a scary thing anymore. It happened, and now they understand who it happened to and why. And so I think that the weight of that is lifted for sure — until they jump and come across their next life-threatening adventure, and then it’ll probably get scary again. But no, I think one of the other things that I could imagine will happen and I’d like to imagine happen is Kat kind of take on the role of a Susanna in writing the history of her family and bringing the knowledge of the pond back to the forefront and have it be a dialogue within the home, not so many secrets. And clearly that’s what happens because K.C. knows about the pond and is very vocal about it. And they also say, “In my time, you Landrys talk about these days like your golden…” It’s very clear that that dialogue is very open in their time. And so I think Kat is kind of the linchpin and the reason for why. And when we see her start to write that book, I think that book, whether it becomes something that she veils as fiction and publishes worldwide, or whether it’s just something just very similar to the almanac and Elijah’s [Stuart Hughes] beautiful story of the miracle boy that he wrote in the almanac and it’s kept solely for family, I think she’s the reason why there are no more secrets.