After “The Way Home” was canceled, fans have been left wondering what would have happened if the story had continued. Now, one of the stars of the Hallmark show and the executive producers behind the series have revealed that viewers could have witnessed a major cliffhanger.
FYI: SPOILERS AHEAD!
‘The Most Pressing Matter at the Top of the Finale’
Hallmark“‘The Way Home’ is saying goodbye after four seasons, but the series finale had major questions to answer before the show could depart Hallmark’s airwaves,” Variety noted while talking to both the show’s stars and executive producers.
Variety also pointed out that “[t]he most pressing matter at the top of the finale was: Did Elliot (Evan Williams) survive the bombing at Lingermore after being shot in the penultimate episode?”
“Spoiler alert: He does, thanks to Kat dragging him to the pond just in time for Alice (Sadie LaFlamme Snow) and Jacob (Spencer MacPherson) to arrive and take him the rest of the way home,” Variety informs those who might not know. “It’s Cliff (Dan Jeanotte) who doesn’t make it out of the Goodwin estate, leaving Fern alone on the farm to raise their unborn baby, who will grow up to be Kat’s grandfather.”
So, where does the potential cliffhanger come in? Well…
Elliot’s Story Could Have Been Different
HallmarkWhen it comes to how a cliffhanger could have captivated the show’s fans, it relates to Elliot’s situation.
Williams, who portrayed the popular character, told Variety, “My suspicion is that if there had been a Season 5, they would have ended Season 4 with the audience thinking that Elliot was dead in the past.”
Indeed, while talking to the show’s mother-daughter executive producers, Heather Conkie and Alexandra Clarke, TV Insider noted, “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?”
“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,” Clarke said in response. “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.”
HallmarkTV Insider also asked, “Did you ever seriously consider killing Elliot off?”
“No. I mean, I think even 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,” Clarke explained. “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.”
