The Way Home Cast Reveals There Is Another Big Family Secret That Will Change Everything In Season 2
If you’re not watching The Way Home, you’re missing out on one of the best multigenerational time travel dramas to hit TV screens. It’s clear the writing team has a strong plan as they explore Kat’s struggle to find her brother missing through time and reveal there’s another huge family secret that may change everything. Pop Culture Planet’s Kristen Maldonado spoke with the cast of The Way Home season 2 about time traveling back to the 1800s, guilt and lies, and what they can tease about that new family secret.
Alice, played by Sadie Laflamme-Snow, had a huge transformation in season one when she realized that she can time travel. It gave her a sense of “purpose and responsibility to fix things and heal her family.” But at the end of season one, her mother Kat (Chyler Leigh) tells her that she never goes back to 1999 and that she never sees her again in the past as a teenager. As season two begins, Alice is struggling with the realization that she never goes back to 1999… or does she? “When she is told that she can't go back, it's pretty crushing and she loses a huge part of her life. Then at the beginning of season two, we start seeing that Alice is poking holes in this theory that Kat has that she never goes back and she doesn't quite feel like everyone's telling her the whole truth. That becomes her new sense of purpose while also trying to juggle the responsibility of maintaining her relationships in the present because she is a part of a family unit now in a way that she wasn't before when no one depended on her to be there for them. She starts being more of a reliable granddaughter to Dell and she starts having to support her mom through what she goes through in her search for Jacob.”
While Alice is figuring out her time travel situation, Kat is headed back to the 1800s. “I was actually quite nervous about it initially because we've built such strong and genuine relationships between the cast. I was like, now I have to meet new people?” laughed Chyler Leigh. “But everybody that is part of the 1800s as far as the cast, the look of of it all, it's so beautiful. The people are so wonderful. We had such an incredible time. What a gift for me to be able to take this character into a whole different world and you really get to see the the origins of the Landrys and the Augustines and see how deep that goes, how far back. You realize there's a lot more history than than we anticipated knowing, but I loved it so much. It was such a great opportunity for us to really make it even more raw, even more realistic. We went back to the not like super duper pretty 1800s. We went back to what life is like in a small town when you're homesteaders when you're dealing with people that have to fight for their land. We have some pretty shady characters that are back in that day.”
Evan Williams, who plays Elliot, chimed in: “Hallmark didn't shy away from that. They really went for it. The production value is amazing, so you get to see all the different sides of the characters and how they relate since it's time travel and they're traveling around. You get to see different clues in each period.”
Meanwhile Dell has a new love interest this season, as well as the reveal of more layers to this big family secret. “It's fun for me to be able to play romance and to be vital and they do a really good job with allowing me to do things that you don't see most 65 year olds doing. I'm very appreciative to these writers and to Hallmark for showing a 65 year old woman the way that they do,” shared Andie MacDowell. “There is this dynamic, this uncomfortable dynamic, between me and my daughter and it continues in season 2. There's a big reveal as to what the moment was where she decided she had enough of me and she didn't want anything to do with me anymore.”
This new family secret adds even higher stakes to the show. “With Alice, it’s trying to preserve her idea of what it was, so we’re sort of saving the really dark, deeper [memory] more and what the experience was. We don't want to make things worse for her by knowing really what was behind everything. Kat says it with Elliot. There’s that one moment before we actually know what did happen. I say to you, ‘Does she know? Does she see?’ We know she goes back. Does she see what happened? And he says ‘yes,’ and then it’s a matter of ‘Oh my God, she’s gonna hate me,’” revealed Leigh. “It’s really like, how is this going to impact her if she does actually find out? Then it’s a matter of us really trying to keep her from going so that she doesn’t see it, so that she doesn’t know the reality behind said mystery.”
Williams continued: “Some characters know things on the show that if that information gets out it threatens changing the course of history. There's stakes because when it becomes cloak-and-dagger they might be doing it to try to preserve that person or the relationship, but by keeping that information from them they also imperil the relationship because there's dishonesty happening. It's a really interesting line so many of the characters are running between trying to preserve each other and also misdirecting each other at the same time and it doesn't always go according to plan.
One of the big themes of The Way Home is the guilt that the Landry women feel over things that have happened in the past. “It's interesting that you bring up guilt,” LaFlamme-Snow said to me. “That's something that makes people act in ways that they might not feel proud of afterwards and I think that that's something that has definitely got the Landry women to where they are. We’ll unravel that in a very serious way this season.”
“The question of can you fix the past and can you change the past? I think Kat and Alice at least learned the ultimate lesson in episode 109. From the first season where we try and stop Colton's death and we end up being the cause. That's something really heavy for them to live with and I think we also notice it in the relationships in the present day. How are Dell and Alice or Dell and Kat ever supposed to get really close and honest with each other when one of them's always like somewhere in the pond?” shared LaFlamme-Snow, with MacDowell chiming in: “There’s a lot of deception. There's the secrets, big secrets. It does make you behave oddly because you're keeping secrets.”
LaFlamme-Snow continued: “You have no excuse for what you're doing or you're making kind of a not so great excuse. Dell sees us always running off with such urgency, but no one can tell her what's going on. That's also a pressure we feel in this season of like everyone has to stop running off and people have to come face to face with what's happening in the present day.”
With everything that’s revealed this season, Williams teases that fans should get ready to cry this season. “Something that the show does so beautifully is they can take something that seems idyllic, say like the farmhouse, but then when you take a closer look at it and they investigate it there's all the minutia and all the different cracks that you start to see. The show's really good at investigating those things. Something that might at surface level just seem like a nice pretty picture and with the show we go one step further into it,” said Williams, looking back at the idyllic life Alice got to see at first in 1999. “She was going back and got to meet her mom at 16 years old. Her family was still together and it was all so beautiful. I season two, we take that pretty picture and investigate how they were actually all real people too. We get to go deeper and deeper into the rabbit hole and find out so many juicy details that are going to ultimately be rewarding and I think make a lot of people cry. People are going to cry this year.”
New episodes of The Way Home season 2 air Sundays on Hallmark Channel.
