Andie MacDowell, Cast, EPs on Casey, Del and Colton, More

[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for The Way Home Season 3 Episode 4 “I’ll Have to Say I Love You in a Song.”]

Well, it’s really looking like Alice (Sadie Laflamme-Snow) might be right about Casey (Vaughan Murrae), Kat’s (Chyler Leigh) intern she thinks is from the future. (Her first clue: She saw them wearing Kat’s engagement ring on a necklace.) They said they’re a Goodwin, but Alice meets Max Goodwin in the latest Way Home episode, and he says he doesn’t have a sibling with that name.

“Casey is an enigma wrapped in a mystery…” executive producer Alexandra Clarke jokes to TV Insider. “The ripple effect of their presence or lack thereof is going to be felt this season, for sure. And Alice and her theories is a really exciting road to go down.”

Adds executive producer Heather Conkie, “Everything has been about the past and now all of a sudden the characters are all switching a little bit because Alice is about her future and Del [Andie MacDowell] is about what happened in ‘74 and maybe certain things that she doesn’t love people to know. And now here’s Alice [time-traveling to that year and] witnessing everything that happened from a totally different point of view [with Devin Cecchetto’s Evelyn]. And then we have Kat who thinks her present is the only thing left because all her projects have come to fruition. I guess there’s a little bit of Casey and all of those scenarios.”

Alice definitely does think she’s right about Casey being from the future at this point, confirms Laflamme-Snow. “Right before she meets Max, she’s fine to just wait until her next interaction with Casey. She’s trying to just live in the present and listen to her mom,” she says but cautions, “We don’t know much about Max. We don’t know how trustworthy he is. We don’t know if he’s messing with her, if he has all the context. So in a way, it’s a little bit, ‘What does he know?’”

Peter Stranks / Hallmark Media

She also knows that Alice can be “intense” and “ask too many questions.” And because of who she is, she feels like she just keeps getting confirmation of her theory. “But I don’t know that, if she really picks it apart, her logic holds up,” Laflamme-Snow admits. “That’s interesting for the audience, is that you kind of go through that struggle with Alice because as things are revealed, there’s lots of things that sort of undercut that and say, ‘Okay, we’re back to square one now. Now how do we know if this is real or not?’”

The EPs can’t say much about Alice and Casey’s next interaction. “For Alice, it’s going to be more about the figment of Casey versus the real Casey, for a little while at least,” teases Clarke. “I think that’s even more intimidating and more mysterious than the actual person. In the end, at least in Alice’s mind, they might start to become a bit bigger than they even really are.” Adds Conkie, this mystery is a “bit of an obsession” for her.

Elsewhere in this episode, Del now has to deal with the fact that it’s even harder to deny that her late husband Colton (Jefferson Brown) was time traveling; his sweater from 1999 is found near the pond.

“It’s really hard for her because she felt she knew this person inside and out, that she knew everything about this person. This was her best friend, this was her everything,” says MacDowell. “So I think it is really hard to imagine that he had a life that she didn’t know anything about.”

Conkie teases that “it screws her up a bit.”

Clarke says it’s just one more thing that makes Del realize she’s not okay: “I think she has her son back, which is the thing she’s always wanted. But in having her son back and her daughter continuing to time travel and Alice is continuing to time travel, it’s just going to open up a world that maybe she didn’t want to know about. There is some sort of thing of ignorance is bliss and do you want to be in on everything?”

She continues, “Her journey this year is really about the past and questioning that because all of a sudden now there’s other points of view of memories that she has held very close to her heart about Colton because they’re all she has left of him and now all of a sudden here’s Alice saying, ‘Well, I remember it this way,’ and I think it’s a really tough journey for Del. It’s going to be a lot of reflection and a lot of questioning and a lot of doubt and wondering why the man you thought you could trust, at least for the better part of their marriage, might have actually been lying from the very beginning. It’s a hard reality to face.”

Clarke praises MacDowell’s work on this storyline with that. “Things are going to come to a head, and of course, it’s not going to be an easy road, but hopefully it’s ultimately a redemptive one,” she adds.

Will her arc include wanting to time travel like the other members of her family? Kat’s boyfriend, Elliot (Evan Williams), even has, too. “Del is a very practical woman. I think what’s amazing about her and her character is she doesn’t romanticize a lot. She doesn’t romanticize much except her own relationship with Colton actually. Everything else is very matter-of-fact. And I think, as a result, that’s sort of how she treats the pond, but she’s also a doer. So there is that,” Clarke allows, but she can’t say more.

What’s your theory about Casey? Let us know in the comments section below.

The Way Home, Fridays, 9/8c, Hallmark Channel