The Way Home is a major hit for Hallmark, and everyone wants to know what’s next in this family saga. Alice can travel back into the past, and she’s slowly learning more about her family’s complicated history. HollywoodLife spoke EXCLUSIVELY with Sadie Laflamme-Snow about what’s next for Alice and her travels back to the past.
Sadie explained that Alice’s time-traveling to the past will allow her to “understand” her mother in a way she hasn’t been able to before. However, she hinted that there will be “consequences for things that happened in the past.” She also promised that viewers will get answers about Jacob’s disappearance as she lives through this “pivotal year” in her family’s life. Read our full Q&A below:
With Alice traveling back in time, how do you think those travels back to the past and interacting with her mom in her teens will bring her closer to her mom in the present day?
Sadie Laflamme-Snow: I think on some level it’s going to give her more understanding about why her mom is the way she is and make her realize that moms are people, too. But also, I think it makes her really long for the girl that she knew when her mom was 15. That kind of like happy, free-spirited, uninhibited… she’s kind of the boss of Alice and Kat. She takes the lead and really brings Alice under her wing and stuff as the new girl. I think the more she falls in love with the life she has in the past, the more she wishes she could have that in the present. So even though she’s learning to understand her mom, I think there’s also that feeling of, what happened? Why are we like this?
Do you think Alice would ever get to a point where she wouldn’t want to return home to the present day?
Sadie Laflamme-Snow: For sure. I think there’s moments where the last thing she wants is to go back to 2023 and be in that house with her family that’s arguing and deal with her parents’ divorce. Her life in the past is keeping her so distracted from putting any roots down in the present, so it’s hard for her to make friends, develop a relationship with Del, and all these different things. So I think she really sometimes wishes that she could stay, and the only person that’s kind of keeping her in check is Elliot. He is kind of making sure like, hey, like if you stay too long you’re gonna raise an alarm bell. You can’t scare your mom like that. Alice doesn’t know the impact that her disappearing for periods of time has on her mom and her grandmother and how hard that is for them. They’ve been through something like that before, and she doesn’t understand that. Elliot really keeps her on track.
There are so many questions about Jacob and what happened to him. By the end of the season, will we get definitive answers about Jacob?
Sadie Laflamme-Snow: Audiences will learn at the pace that Alice learns about the family history. There’s nothing that Alice knows that we’re keeping from people. She’s living through this really pivotal year in her family’s life with them, and with that, we’ll come answers about what happened to Jacob. Where is he? Why did it happen? And when you time travel, what can you do to interfere with the disappearance or not interfere with the disappearance of someone in your family who, when it happened, broke your family into a million pieces? So that’s what I’ll say about the disappearance.
Is Alice going to put on her detective hat a little bit and try and ask questions herself about what happened to Jacob?
Sadie Laflamme-Snow: Yeah, absolutely. I think when she arrives in Port Haven, she knows that her mom hasn’t talked to her grandmother in 20 years. She’s pretty hard on her mom. She’s like, what’s wrong with you? Why are you bringing me here? This sucks. She starts to realize that there’s more to it than that and her family has been through some really challenging times, but not really sure why no one will talk about it. Why when something terrible happened to their family did they break apart? Why didn’t they come together and take care of each other and lean on each other for support? She wants answers to that because she wants everyone to come together and care about each other again. She also just wants to find out answers about the time travel piece. Can she interfere? Can she do anything to stop it? Does she even want to? Would she even exist? Would people still know each other? Would the world still exist in the same way if she interferes or doesn’t? Can she? Can she not? So those are all things that we’ll explore in the season.
From the movies and TV shows I’ve watched, when you mess with the past, it can still affect the future. Is there any danger involved in her travels back to the past? When you mess with timelines, it can get messy.
Sadie Laflamme-Snow: Yes. I will say there’s absolutely consequences for things that happened in the past as it relates to Alice’s time travel journey. Living with those consequences can be really hard. That definitely comes up for Alice. At the same time, because she has Elliot to bounce all these ideas off of and to kind of theorize about the time travel, he thinks really deeply about this stuff. He is protecting her and trying to help her navigate the time travel without completely destroying the family, destroying how things ended up, and also just helping her work through what she’s involved in and what she isn’t.
Elliot is the only person Alice can really bounce things off of, especially everything that’s going on in her life. She’s getting to know both the past and present versions of him. What does their relationship look like going forward? It seems like he’s more of a mentor to her, but she’s also discovering his feelings for her mom, which makes things complicated.
Sadie Laflamme-Snow: Alice really gets to know him as a teenager as a friend. When she realizes who he is in the present day, it’s like they kind of pick up where they left off. They have this friendship relationship in the present day that’s completely separate from the relationship that Kat and Elliot have as childhood friends and then into adulthood. You kind of get a sense that Elliot’s been hoping that Kat would come back to Port Haven and remember him. I won’t spoil what happens between the two of them. It’s not my place. But I will say that I think it would be hard for anyone, like any teenager, to imagine their parent with a new love interest.
On top of that, for that love interest to be someone that the teenager has their own friendship relationship with. I think that that could be a bit challenging for Alice. We all know what happened when the news about Rachel came through. She’s working on it, but she really wishes her parents could be together. I think it would be hard on her, especially with how much she just depends on her friendship relationship with Elliot.