[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for The Way Home Season 3 Episode 5 ” Reeling in the Years.”]
Susanna (Watson Rose) marries who?! That’s the reaction at the end of the latest Way Home episode, when Kat (Chyler Leigh) and Jacob (Spencer MacPherson) travel back to the 1800s and see the end of her wedding — to Cyrus (Tim Post)!
“Kat is horrified,” Leigh told TV Insider when she, Evan Williams, and Sadie Laflamme-Snow recently stopped by TV Insider. (Watch the full video interview above.) “Kat does not understand why. But Susanna’s heart is always to protect the people that she loves. So she kind of took one for the team in that sense, where she wanted to make sure that Cyrus’s attention was kept on her by giving him the thing that he wanted the most so that she could, in a sense, sacrifice herself for the safety of Jacob.”
But as we see, they’re not the only ones watching the wedding — Thomas (Kris Holden-Ried) is as well. And this comes just after Kat discovered that Thomas wrote a song about them … as she and boyfriend Elliot (Williams) are facing a complication in his ex-wife’s surprise visit.
“Kat is very conflicted with how she can feel two things in two different times, and one is impossible. It would never go anywhere. And with Kat and Elliot kind of a little bit up and down and questioning where things stand and where we are, it makes things a little bit confusing,” Leigh admitted.
Peter Stranks / Hallmark Media
This episode also sees Elliot overhear Kat tell her ex-husband and Alice’s father Brady (Al Mukadam) that moving in with him is temporary. (Ouch!)
Leigh points out that the Landry house is crowded with Jacob now home, which played into it making sense for Kat to move in with Elliot next door. It’s also about moving their relationship forward, though there are “some doubts … as far as what their relationship is, why she’s feeling the way that she’s feeling. It’s also a matter of trying to reassure Brady at the same time [about their daughter].”
Adds Williams, “Both Kat and Elliot are pretty destabilized at that point in the story. And a lot of assumptions that have been made in the past are being challenged. So when Elliot hears Kat say that, it calls into question the entire forward momentum of their relationship. And especially because ex-wife Emma is around who is so clearly bringing clarity and devotion in her relationship to Elliot. She sees him and at the same time, he’s getting this muddled lack of clarity from Kat. I think that it really sets up a kind of dangerous context that the whole relationship kind of hangs in the balance that moment and we have to see what happens.”
Meanwhile, Alice is traveling back to 1974 via the pond and seeing teen versions of her grandparents, Del (Julia Tomasone) and Colton (Jordan Doww), and getting to know teen Evelyn (Devin Cecchetto), whom people thought would be with Colton!
“Del [Andie MacDowell] has a lot of concerns about Alice seeing the beginnings of their relationship because it was more complicated than we all thought it was. But I think Alice has a lot of grace for the people in her life and she’s seen a lot more of their lives than they could have ever predicted that their teenage child would see, their granddaughter would see, their friend, neighbor, girlfriend’s child would see,” notes Laflamme-Snow.
“It’s complicated, but she manages to really let the people in her life be the versions that she’s known and the versions that she knows now, which I think is really special. And I think that that’s the part that Del is trying to protect Alice from that. But Alice is sort of going head-on into it and she wants to know more and she feels that the more she knows, the more she can help her family. And she’s always felt that way,” she continues.
Leigh points out that Alice is learning things Del didn’t see. That’s because, as Laflamme-Snow points out, Alice can’t have the same relationship with teen Del that she did with teen Kat (Alex Hook).
“In the first season, Alice could just be there for her mom in any way that she wanted to. When she sees that something is difficult for Del and Colton, she has to pull back and she has to kind of lean on that relationship with Evelyn and she has to find everything out through that relationship,” Laflamme-Snow explains. “She can’t go to Del and say, ‘Hi, I’m Alice. Do you want to be best friends?’ It would ruin everything. What happens has always happened, and that didn’t happen. So there’s a sort of new set of rules for this part of her time travel journey that she’s learning to work with.”
Leigh praises the writers and showrunners for keeping track of those. “I’m so confused. We got to the table read for Episodes 9 and 10 and I had to keep leaning over going, ‘What just happened? Who did what? Wait, they’re who?’ I was so confused. But then we read the final script and everybody was just sobbing. I can’t wait to make everybody cry. It’s going to be awesome,” she adds with a laugh.
Watch the full video interview above for more from Leigh, Williams, and Laflamme-Snow as they break down Season 3 Episode 5, talk Thomas’ song, theories about Casey (Vaughan Murrae), that Alice-Del fight, and more.
The Way Home, Fridays, 9/8c, Hallmark Channel
