‘The Way Home’ Bosses Answer Finale Burning Questions: Elliot’s Shock, Colton’s Realization & More

[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for The Way Home Season 3 finale “If You Could Read My Mind.”]

Well, it’s a good thing The Way Home has already been renewed, because the Season 3 finale is reveal after reveal after reveal … and leaves us with even more questions!

Some of the big moments include: Elliot (Evan Williams) was the baby in the basket, and his mother jumped into the pond with a Landry; Colton (Jefferson Brown) realized who Alice (Sadie Laflamme-Snow) is after meeting her in 1999 and the two have a conversation as grandfather and granddaughter — and he knew who Kat (Chyler Leigh) was when he died; Del (Andie MacDowell) time traveled with Kat back to her own wedding to Colton; Alice pushed herself in the pond in the premiere; Casey (Vaughan Murrae) is no longer hiding that they’re a time traveler and gave Jacob (Spencer Macpherson) Susanna’s will to help with his legal troubles; Casey isn’t Alice’s kid from the future; Kat and Elliot get back together; and Jacob leaves and Sam (Rob Stewart) stands at the pond as he tells Del it will be okay.

It’s a lot. Below, executive producers (and mother and daughter) Heather Conkie and Alexandra Clarke unpack some of those big moments. (Check out Part 2 for answers to more burning questions, including why we didn’t find out who Casey is, and scoop on Season 4 here.)

The Augustines have always been wrapped up in the Landrys and time travel. Now, you’re adding another layer to it with Elliot’s mother, whom Alice met in 1974, and he’s the baby in the basket. Why have Elliot’s mom — why her specifically from his family — time travel?

Alexandra Clarke: Elliot is a character who’s leaned on the Landrys his entire life and not because of time travel. Even just through his childhood and through teenage [years], they’ve been this sort of safe haven and Del and Colton have always been parents that have welcomed him in with open arms. Colton especially built him that clubhouse to give him his own space, and it’s very clear that they recognize what’s going on at home for Elliot and what’s going on at home is a really rough relationship with his dad in the wake of an absentee mom. The thing that we’re really excited about is going into a Season 4, looking into his family and how his family might have been affected by time travel.

It’s not just the Landry family that’s been affected by time travel. It has this ripple effect through another founding family, but it also shows that — I love that it’s something that Elliot himself didn’t even know. The pond is pervasive. It’s this power that can give and take away. And I think up until this point, he’s been very judgmental of the pond in a weird way, not fully understanding why Kat is drawn to it as much as she is. Yes, he got an incredible gift with his five minutes with Colton at the end of Season 2, but he’s always kept it a bit at arm’s length, being the one watching and figuring out the rules, and at the end of this season, to know and realize that maybe this pond has affected his entire life in a far more personal way, I’m really excited to see what that does to Elliot in Season 4 and his opinion of the pond, his involvement with the pond. It just opens a really fascinating door for him.

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Heather Conkie: It also will solve the mystery what happened to his mom. He’s always felt that she walked out on them. She abandoned him as a young child. This will answer a lot of those questions — and raise more.

Speaking of more questions, what can you say about the identity of that Landry and Elliot’s mother’s relationship with that person?

Clarke: Not too much right now. I think that’s something that we absolutely explore next season. It’s fun because we are a group of writers that doesn’t like things to be too straightforward. So I think everyone should kind of keep that in mind. [Laughs]

This does mean that Elliot has the chance to see his mom again if he time travels using the pond with a Landry. Will he want to do that more?

Clarke: Again, TBD. I think Elliot is going to have a lot of mixed feelings about this revelation and what it means for him, what it means for what he’s always thought about his childhood and his life. Nothing is easy, nothing is straightforward. I think there’s going to be some struggles. There’s going to be some waffling, but it’s all going to feel real and earned.

Conkie: Let’s put it this way: Elliot is a thinker. He will think too much, and this will cause him to think way too much.

I absolutely loved the way you showed what Colton knew and his realization. Talk about deciding how to do that and what you wanted to do with Colton and Alice’s conversation.

Clarke: From the very beginning of our first season room, we knew at some point we’d want to do this. We’d fallen in love with the idea of doing a bit of a forensic study of his last day on Earth, which is what essentially Episode 10 is and why we named it what we did, “If You Could Read My Mind.” We’ve never seen the world through Colton’s eyes, and we start our episode essentially doing that and telling the viewer, this is what we’re doing this episode. The minute he walks into that barn after meeting Alice for the first time, and we see the actual reaction he had and that beautiful Coldplay song, “The Scientist” playing over it, “take me back to the start,” I think should tell the audience, and I hope it does, that this is a very special episode and we’re finally going to see the world through his eyes right from the start.

I was so proud of Jefferson and Sadie for those scenes by the pond that essentially are the culmination of going back and seeing what he knew when and seeing what he did on his final day. We were all blown away by their performances. I think they both gave the best performances they’ve ever given on the show. We were all a mess, including them.

Conkie: I’m still a mess talking about them.

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Clarke: Exactly. Every time I talk about those scenes by the pond where Colton finally sees Alice for who she really is, his granddaughter, and then explaining the secret that he carried that he felt he needed to carry because it would be a burden to everyone else, but realizing he made a mistake… It was just so hard to get through on the day and so hard to watch in the edit. Mom and I were in the edit picking the best takes, and we were just a mess.

Conkie: Picking the best of the best. They were all incredible and almost impossible to get through with falling apart.

Clarke: I think that scene is such a crucial scene and everything that kind of comes after it for our three women to get closure finally on the Colton of it all. Over the course of these three seasons, not only does Alice get five more minutes with her grandfather as her grandfather, it also allows Kat through this to know that he knew her the night that he died and that he loved her and Del to understand why he kept this secret from her and that he was going to tell her. These are clouds that have been hanging over our women for all three seasons, and it’s so nice. It’s one of the reasons I’m so thrilled we do have the honor of having a Season 4 because it will be a Season 4 with this cloud gone. They’re finally free in a new way. And yeah, I’m really excited by that prospect and seeing who they are when they come out from under that storm cloud.

Del time travels! Why have it happen now? Was it always going to be to her and Colton’s wedding or did you consider any other moments in their past?

Clarke: It was always going to be the wedding.

Conkie: This has been a season of mounting doubts in Del’s mind, especially with Alice seeing it from her perspective, and Del’s fear that, did she really have that relationship? What else did she miss that Alice seems to be seeing? It’s been one of those things that made her doubt the validity and the trueness of it all. And then just by seeing the two of them at that age. The wedding, again, we couldn’t get through that very often in the edit there. [Episode] 10 was rough. I think we all need therapy.

Clarke: Happy tears.

Conkie: So many tears.

Clarke: I think it always had to be the wedding that was going to be the affirming thing for her, that their love story was as pure and true as she always remembered it being. I love that moment where she says to Kat, “It’s exactly how I remembered it,” because I think in just those few words, we’re realizing she needed that in order to continue on. She needed that affirmation that her own memories really are hers and that this love story was exactly as she remembered it. The wedding in and of itself is such a perfect moment for her to see because it’s the end of one aspect of their love story. It’s the happily ever after moment of their love story. But it’s also the launching pad into what we know as the audience of them being a family, starting that family, becoming the people we love them as in the ’90s. So it was a perfect moment for her to witness in so many ways.

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Why 'The Way Home' Didn't Reveal Casey's Identity in Season 3 Finale

Kat and Elliot are now again giving things a try, and a proposal is in their future. Why might they be able to walk this time?

Conkie: Because they’re finally shedding all the past and starting with a clean slate. And I think that’s what they needed to do all along because they’re still back in the ’90s, Elliot put it as he says, “I put you on a pedestal.” And he did. He fell in love with teen Kat and he’s still trying to make adult Kat into her. And I think in her own way, [for] Kat, he was the guy who was always there for her. If she needed him, he was there. All her life, she’s taken him for granted without really understanding the way it could be if they just loved each other for who they are now. And I think a lot of relationships are like that. I think you get used to the way it was when you know that there’s changes to be made.

Clarke: And to that point, I think they both showed their capacity this season for growth and maturity, but also their capacity to make dumb mistakes. They both made dumb mistakes this season, no question, but that’s because they’re human and the way they reacted to each other’s mistakes, I would argue, was actually quite mature this season versus how we’ve seen them before. We’ve seen them in all out fights where it gets to a heated moment where they say things they don’t mean and they storm out on each other, and they didn’t do that this season. What they did do was talk about things calmly in a way that admitted that they’d be hypocrites if they said, “How dare you make that mistake?” Because they’re very capable of making mistakes as well and understanding that as a result they’re at a bit of an impasse versus other seasons where they’re so quick to blame.

This season was a lot more about looking inward versus outward at what needed to be fixed if they wanted to fix their relationship, and I think that last moment is sort of the culmination of that. The fact that the very first thing Elliot says is, “I’m messed up.” And Kat then says, “Well, I am, too.” And I love that they are now in a place where they’re willing to admit their own flaws versus picking at the other person’s flaws and saying, “Well, you change the way you are because that’s what’s going to work.” Instead it’s, “I’m going to change the way I am.” Very similarly to how we’re feeling about seeing Kat, Del, and Alice be after the storm cloud of all the Colton questions has kind of cleared, I’m very excited to see where Elliot and Kat are capable of going now that this sort of thunder cloud of the past has cleared for them because I think it’s a very intriguing thing to say, well, it’s all well and good to travel to the past, but we can’t live in the past with our own relationship, and let’s see how that goes for them. I think it’s the best place they’ve ever been in to try again.

Alice pushed herself into the pond. Had you wanted someone to push a version of themselves into the pond from the beginning?

Clarke: No, that came around at the beginning of the Season 3 writers’ room. It was Marly [Reed], the creator of the show, Mom, and I in this mini room ahead of the big official room, and we were kind of mulling about what’s a cool way for them to go in the pond. We’ve seen Kat get shot. We’ve seen Alice and Kat separated under the water. We’ve seen Kat do that epic backwards, leap out. We’ve seen a lot of cool jumps in that pond. What’s an even cooler one? We started talking about, well, what if someone gets pushed and they don’t mean to go? And because we’re crazy, we then said, well, we’re a time travel show, what if the person pushing is themselves? It’s the only time you could ever kind of consider that as even an option. We just fell in love with the idea of it. And then it was a lot of whiteboards trying to figure out how we could actually make that work. A lot of explaining —

Conkie: Especially to me.

Clarke: No, it was a lot of like, “Okay, so Episode 1 Alice goes down to the pond, but Episode 10 Alice is…” It was a brain breaker, but a lot of things are on our show, but I am so glad it worked out. I hope people are surprised by it and also impressed.

Colton’s sweater — as soon as he put it on Alice, I was like, oh, I think I know where this is going…

Clarke: Oh, good. Yay. That’s awesome. That’s fabulous. That was what we wanted.

The Way Home, Season 4, 2026, Hallmark Channel