While writing the series finale of Hallmark Channel’s “The Way Home,” co-showrunner Alexandra Clarke compiled a list of all the unanswered questions she needed to address in the last episode, but here’s one query you won’t find on her list: What are the origins of the Landrys’ time-traveling pond?
For four seasons, viewers watched Kat, Alice, and the rest of the Landry (and Landry adjacent) clan jump back and forth through time, uncovering new secrets about their family’s complicated history with each journey. It’s understood that the pond takes each diver where they need to go, and words like “magic” have been loosely thrown around on occasion, but the show never actually explained how this big, wet time machine actually works. And it was never going to.
“It takes away from the magic,” co-showrunner Heather Conkie tells TVLine. “It makes it too sci-fi to know the origins of the pond. It feels more special if it remains a mystery itself. I think that’s not our show.”
Clarke echoes her mother’s sentiment, adding, “I think our show is unique in that it’s a very traditional, multi-generational family drama — but it also has this pond. It’s there as a tool for healing, a tool to gain different perspectives perhaps of a shared tragedy, or gain perspective on another era of your family and what they went through in order to come back and bring your own family back together. That’s the purpose of the pond for us. It was never about why is the pond is the way it is. It was more about how the pond can help this family. If we’d gone the route of dissecting why the pond is the way it is, as mom just said, it would have skewed a bit too sci-fi. It also would have felt like the magician revealing their tricks.”
The Way Home pond played an ‘important’ role in the series’ final scene
Here’s another question we shouldn’t expect to have answered any time soon: Where, or rather when, do Alice and Kat jump to at the end of the series finale?
“We have our idea of where they wound up for sure, but that scene was always going to be the way our show was going to end, with the idea that they’re going to go on another adventure,” co-showrunner Alexandra Clarke tells TVLine. “They’re going to go on another jump, we just don’t get to go with them this time. We wanted to leave it open-ended in that way. This was never going to be a show that ended by saying, ‘Well, that’s it for the pond. Thanks, we got what we needed.’
According to Clarke, “it was important” to show that the family’s time traveling would continue, especially after “they’ve made such beautiful relationships in all these different eras.” Their jump also doubles down on the finale’s message, “an ending is just another beginning.”
What did you think of “The Way Home” series finale, and do you wish the origins of the pond had been revealed? Grade it below, then drop a comment with more of your thoughts.