“The Way Home” bosses break down series finale, what would’ve happened in season 5

Key Points

• The Landry family took one last dip in the pond during The Way Home‘s series finale on Sunday.

• Showrunners Alexandra Clarke and Heather Conkie break down all the details of their bittersweet finale, including the importance of Kat and Alice’s final leap.

• The cast included Andie MacDowell, Chyler Leigh, Sadie Laflamme-Snow, and Evan Williams.

Warning: This article contains spoilers for The Way Home series finale.

The Landry family bid viewers farewell on Sunday night, with the season 4 finale of The Way Home serving as the definite conclusion to Hallmark’s multigenerational, century spanning drama.

While the episode did its best to tie up loose endings before that final leap into the pond, the finale likely left its audience with more questions than answers thanks to its open-ended conclusion — which showrunners Alexandra Clarke and Heather Conkie realize was inevitable when tackling the ending of their series.

“I think everything we really knew was important we accomplished,” Conkie told TV Insider of their approach to wrapping up the show’s significant storylines. “Everything that we didn’t do, you put it out of your mind because it takes you down the wrong path, and you can get stuck in it. And that’s some of the hardest parts.”

Clarke shared a few storylines that they thought of approaching, such as seeing Rita in the ’80s, but admitted that those ideas “went away” in the writers’ room, “knowing that time was of the essence.”

Instead, the final episode focused on wrapping up the biggest mysteries, such as whether Elliot (Evan Williams) survives the bombing at Lingermore after being shot by his mother (Megan Follows) during the penultimate episode.

Spoiler alert: He does! The finale sees Alice (Sadie Laflamme-Snow), Jacob (Spencer MacPherson), and Kat (Chyler Leigh) help Elliot into the pond to head home to the safety of modern medicine. The only problem is, the pond doesn’t send Kat back with him.

But once both he and Kat are home in the present — after the latter shares tearful a goodbye with Fern — Elliot proposes and she says yes.

Meanwhile, Alice takes another jump and visits Evelyn in her final days, while Evie (Devin Cecchetto) shares that she felt completely iced out when she realized her friends were time-travelers. The pair reminisce about their beautiful, lifelong friendship, even though Alice never really aged throughout it, and she edits the Coyle’s reel to protect the Landry family secret.

Alice makes plans to go to New York and “choose me for a bit,” even as she finally admits to her feelings for Max Goodwin (Dale Whibley) and shares a very intimate moment with adult Nick (Kerry James), who finally convinces Del to sell him Colton’s (Jefferson Brown) boat.

Del (Andie MacDowell) gets a bit more time with Colton, thanks to KC (Vaughan Murrae) and the pond, spending some of his last days in 1999 together when they are finally able to say everything that had been left unsaid since his death.

When she returns, Del is finally ready to move forward with Sam (Rob Stewart).

In the last few minutes of the episode, Elliot has the revelation that his mom may still be alive. Meanwhile, Alice gives Jacob “a family ring” that she owned — and had seen KC wear — finally proving that KC is Jacob and Abby’s child. This leads to Abby and Jacob’s wedding at the pond surrounded by figments of KC and friends from the past: Elijah, Susannah (Watson Rose) and Thomas (Kris Holden-Ried), Fern and Cliff, Evelyn, and Colton.

And it’s after all that, in the very final moments of the finale, that Kat and Alice meet at the entrance to the pond and reflect on the various happy endings of their loved ones. Taking Alice’s hand, Kat says, “You know what they say, ‘Every ending is a new beginning,'” and into the pond they jump.

“It’s not just Kat saying those lines, it’s Chyler. And it’s not just Alice saying those lines, it’s Sadie,” Clarke told Entertainment Weekly‘s sister outlet PEOPLE. “We always loved the idea of seeing the two women who started it all hold hands and take a leap together, only this time we’re just not allowed to go with them. That was what we always wanted for the end, that they’re going to keep going and having adventures and meeting new people and reuniting with the ones they’ve already met and have come to love. We just don’t get to go with them now.”

Conkie added: “The wedding and the figments and that last beautiful holding hands and jumping between Kat and Alice. We always knew, that was going to be the ending.”

Of course, the duo didn’t expect that ending to come in their fourth season. While chatting with TV Insider, Clarke and Conkie acknowledged that they had initially planned for a fifth season, which Clarke said would’ve “been it.”

“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,” she pointed out. “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.”

Conkie chimed in, saying she would have liked to have “spent more time with the Jacob love story,” if the show had gone on for another installment.

“And I would have loved to have spent a little more time with the Max Alice love story, and, of course, the Elliot Kat story,” Conkie added. “And I would have loved to have seen the Del and Sam relationship move forward now that she knows she can and wants to. It would have been lovely.”

Clarke shared that she would have liked to see more of “the Griffin [Charles Vandervaart] and Tessa [Kelsey Falconer] of it all, leading up to the jump a little more as well as what life looked like for them when they landed, and seeing the Landry family in that era, which is — Susanna [Watson Rose] is gone by then, so it’s the next generation and seeing Tessa be taken into the homestead.”

“We see a little sampling of it in episode 8, but it would have been very cool to basically see why Tessa became Tessa,” she noted.

Conkie credited the “rich world” with leaving so much potential for them to play in if there had been another season for the show. “It’s such a beautiful world, and there’s so many lovely eras. Yeah, it would have been great,” she told the outlet. “But I think for the time that we had and the direction we wanted to take this year, I’m really proud of what we were able to show.”

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As for any questions fans had left after the series finale, Clarke told PEOPLE that the fun is in the mystery.

“I think the questions that we leave unanswered, the questions that we raise in the finale, are fun ones,” she added. “We’re trying to encourage the fans to write the next chapter themselves. Imagine where Kat and Alice jump to. Imagine why Thomas knows the house is blue. Imagine what Nick meant by that last little piece of saying, ‘Oh, I think you’ll meet her one day.’ Those are fun questions to leave dangling because we know everyone has theories, and we love their theories, and we’re so appreciative of those theories.”

She added, “We wanted to give the fans a moment to encourage them to be Kat and write their story of what might happen next. I hope that the questions that we did answer are the ones that fundamentally needed to be answered.”

And to any fans who do decide to write out their ideas of what happens next, Clarke and Conkie both admit they’ll be ready to read them.

“I don’t think we could have done the show without them,” Conkie said of their supporters. “Their instant response right from the get-go was a huge surprise because we went up until that first time it went on the air, I kept even asking my husband, ‘Do you think it’s okay?’ … I think that they need to know how much they mean to us and how much they possibly changed. Who knew if we’d get four seasons? It was four wonderful seasons, and I’m not sure we would’ve gotten that without them.”

Clarke shared a similar sentiment in her message to fans, saying, “I hope we’ve done them justice in this finale. They were certainly first and foremost in our minds as we were trying to end this show. It’s been such a gift to read all their messages that they send me of what the show means to them, especially in the last couple of weeks as we’ve been wrapping up, I’ve been getting a lot of really lovely DMs just talking about how the show has helped them, whether they were going through depression or had lost their own family member or were disconnected from their family or just feeling alone and the show becoming a bit of a haven for them. It’s just meant the world to hear those stories.”

“We read them all, and I’m so glad that the show has done that for people because it certainly did that for us as well, she added. “I mean, you’re running a show, but life is also happening. Mom and I have had our own ups and downs in our personal lives as this show has been on the air, and the show has become a haven for us as well. And I’m just so proud and grateful that it has for a lot of the people watching as well. That’s all we could have asked for.”

Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly