The Way Home Season 2 Premiere: Time Travel and Other Family Problems
The Season 2 premiere of The Way Home raises many more questions than it answers. [Spoiler Alert: I will be mentioning several plot points in the episode] We start the season with Jacob Landry (Remy Smith) alive and well, with an older lady who tells him that the pond will always take him where he needs to go but she won’t let him leave yet. They are clearly in a different time. The scene ends with the camera pulling away, not allowing us to hear anything else.
Staying with the Jacob theme, Kat (Chyler Leigh) realizes Jacob followed Finn to the pond and jumped in after him (we get a convenient flashback). Del (Andie MacDowell) is a bit less angry this season and has connected very well with Alice (Sadie Laflamme-Snow), but things are changing in Port Haven. Elliott (Evan Williams) has gone on a travel journey of self-discovery. This upsets Kat and makes Alice feel abandoned. Kat has become the Editor-in-Chief of the local paper. Everyone seems to be moving forward until Kat receives a phone call that the town matriarch has died and has left the newspaper boxes of historical documents. When Kat goes to the family home, Lingermore, to collect the boxes, she discovers a painting of herself from the 1800s. This gives us hope that the pond will provide a time-traveling portal again because it was not very cooperative earlier in the show.
While there were many flashbacks from last season when Alice visited the family, it is clear this family is now female-centric. The only man who shows up after his travels is Elliott, and he gets a lukewarm welcome from Kat and downright hostility from Alice. The missing men theme is taken a step further when Del’s neighbor, who has rented her land for 20 years, informs her that he’s selling his house and leaving. She has been abandoned by every male in her life, one way or another.
Alice, who was so eager to spend time with her father last season, is dreading going away to Minneapolis over the summer. She wants to stay on the farm. Finally, Kat and Elliott share quite an intense kiss, but he’s waffling all over the place. The entire mood of this episode was teeming with ambivalence.
One symbolic moment is when Del, Kat, and Alice are in the kitchen on the morning Alice is supposed to leave. A song comes on from Kat’s teen years (which are also partially Alice’s), “Steal My Sunshine,” and all three women start singing and dancing. It is a happy moment, which is rare in this show, interrupted by the phone ringing. The mood abruptly changes, and the damper returns into their lives with Brady’s (Al Mukadam) well-meaning intrusion. However, it illustrates the trouble the men and their leaving caused in the Landry household. Colton’s (Jefferson Brown) death isn’t intentional abandonment; however, it is a type of abandonment nonetheless.
It seems that if the women are not behaving the way the men like in this show, they are punished on some level. Later, after Kat has promised Elliott she won’t return to the pond, he spies her and Alice running to the pond laughing. He had just been writing a text to say he should have kept kissing her the night before, but as soon as he saw where they were headed, he deleted it. It makes one wonder what the price will be if the Landry women continue to follow their path and goals without always taking the male’s feelings into account.
The relationship between Kat and Elliott has its issues, and the way things are headed, the tension between Kat and Elliott cannot improve much this season, especially when we see the painting in Lingermore. At the bottom of the artwork, we see the words “My Katherine.” These words, indicating the ownership of a relationship, mean that Kat will have another romantic relationship with someone other than Elliott (unless it is a previous incarnation of Elliott, but it still isn’t the present Elliott).
I’m looking forward to this season.