The Way Home Season 4 Episode 4 Review: Returning and New Faces Lift “We’ve Got Tonight”

Critic’s Rating: 3.75 / 5.0

3.75

Yes! The Way Home just reinvigorated the show with the jolt of male adrenaline we needed.

Jacob is back (on screen, at least), and he’s carrying memories of Thomas with him, and Nick is finally moving back to Port Haven permanently.

Even more interesting, Nick brought his birth father along with him. So, what did all of these resurfacing (and new) faces bring to the story? Let’s check it out!

You never realize how little time ten episodes is until you recognize that we know far less about Sam than we know. There simply hasn’t been time to figure out who he is.

So, is it any surprise that I don’t care one way or another if he and Del end up together? It also speaks to how much I appreciated Nick’s dad, Julian, shaking things up.

Sparks were flying from the moment he locked eyes with Del, and Del returned the favor.

“And I’m Sam, Delilah’s boyfriend,” Sam said, inserting himself into their introduction. He clearly saw those sparks just like the rest of us.

And really, Nick is such a breath of fresh air. Whether in the 1980s or the present, he’s been an absolute joy of a character. (I sure as hell hope Claire lives up to the hype.) So it’s no surprise he’s got good genes.

“You know what’s funny? Nicky’s first love was named Alice,” Julian remarked. How sweet was that? Not only that Julian remembered that but also that Nick spoke with her during their time together. 

Nick and Julian both admit that things should be weird between them, but they’re not. They’ve got a great relationship.

Another good line from Julian came by way of an offhand compliment that he made without any effort at all. “Oh, you make honey? How fitting.” It’s so easy to see where Nick got so much of what made him special. I appreciate his moms including Julian in Nick’s upbringing.

Have we ever seen Del so bright and airy as she was preparing for the kitchen party? She was dancing. Dancing! Del Landry was dancing without music or her beloved Colton.

It was also Julian who pointed out what is missing between Del and Sam. They went from zero to old hat in no time flat. But it doesn’t mean Sam didn’t love her; in fact, quite the opposite.

Sam has no questions. He wants to spend his life with Del. He’s comfortable, not because he didn’t want her to feel special, but because he thought she knew how special she was to him. But it’s worth wondering why he was so confident in the relationship, don’t you think?

They don’t have the same needs in a relationship, at least not now. But it’s worth wondering why he was so confident in them. Part of that is because Alice keeps her and Colton alive by traveling to the past. How can you move on when you’re not only hanging on to the past but reliving it every day?

It didn’t help at all that Alice sang Colton’s song for Delilah. I understood the sentiment, but the timing was terrible.

But Del’s argument with Sam helped us to understand Sam a bit better. We still don’t know much about him, but his confidence in pursuing Del didn’t seem to have anything to do with any possible connection to the storytelling we’ve been hoping to uncover.

At that moment, at least, he was just a man who had no idea he was making the woman he loved so unhappy by giving her the space to be who she was with who she wanted to.

And if we had any delusions that Del wasn’t messed up between past and present, when she saw a man in jeans and a Carhart jacket walking into the woods near the pond, she called Colton’s name and raced after him, only to be thrown from the horse.

Will she somehow make her way to the pond? Will someone grab her hand and take her through time? What does this mean?

The Way Home (both capitalized and not) is always tricky where time travel is concerned, and nobody knows that better than Kat and Alice. 

But if we were worried about Kat’s short stay in the pokey on The Way Home Season 4 Episode 3, we didn’t need to be. She didn’t spend much time there.

As many sussed out, it was Fern who drugged Kat, and she did it to protect her. Kat reminded her that time apart from her family causes grave concern, but Fern wanted to make sure she could actually get home, and the Auggie boys had other plans.

Should we care about the bootlegging Auggie boys, let alone who they are working for? If we were meant to, we should have gotten to know them a bit better.

Yes, they are Elliot’s ancestors, but they couldn’t be further off the beaten path from their descendant.

The crown on the Goodwin crest could place Grayson in the bootlegging tunnels, but nothing is ever as simple as it seems when it comes to piecing together the past.

Maybe Kat and Nick (Nick??) will find answers. They have just jumped in to see if they can find Tessa and bring her home. 

First of all, I need to gush all over Nick again for a moment. He’s just so damn fun. I love how he keeps walking in on conversations and demanding to know what’s going on. 

And, really, who would refuse him? He’s just such a happy guy and ready for just about anything. He’ll be one of the characters I miss most when all is said and done.

But, anyway, back to Tessa.

I’ll start with a bit of a confession. I don’t like her. I don’t like the idea or the embodiment of her. Whether that will change when we meet the elder version remains to be seen, but she always seems a bit off. 

Even how excited she was before going into the kitchen party at Colton and Del’s felt weird. Not to mention that we got another bird’s eye view of Vic’s devotion to her, which calls everything we thought we knew about him into question.

And I especially don’t like how she’s stepping into Alice’s place in the group, particularly with Evelyn.

I feel so protective of Evelyn and her friendship with Alice. If I were Alice, it would break my heart to to give it up, especially since she can’t reach out to Evelyn as an adult.

And then Tessa snooped, finding the Almanac, and then we saw how deep things went between Fern and Tessa with Grandma Fern’s reaction to seeing Tessa standing in her kitchen. 

Fern hasn’t been telling the truth about Tessa, of that we are certain now. Tessa is so intertwined with the Landrys that she has written multiple entries in the family Almanac. 

She didn’t jump to 1925. She jumped to the late 1800s and never left. Even more interesting, she was close enough to the Landry family to be making entries. She had to have been there before 1882, which was the first entry that Kat and Alice noticed.

Not just any old somebody writes in a family almanac! You have to have a reason. By the time Fern was born in 1906, she would have been as good as family herself, I would guess. But whatever she did, it didn’t sit well with Tessa in the long term.

And that’s an interesting distinction to make because in 1926, Fern just pretends she doesn’t know Tessa. But by the time Del and Colton are married, she abors her. Something changed.

Will Kat and Nick find and retrieve Tessa? And to what end? Because the idea Alice and Kat came up with is that Griffin returned to the present and left Tessa behind, since she can’t jump on her own. 

Yet that feeling I have when I see her and listen to her say things like she has always been trying to find her place makes me wonder if she wasn’t left behind but chose to stay there.

That’s not what Elliot will want to hear and definitely not what drives Kat back to “rescue” her, but I have a feeling all is not what it seems at first glance.

And then there’s Jacob.

If anybody was going to get Jacob to reconnect with his family, you’d think it would be Thomas. He tried, and Jacob reached out to Del, but he backed out as soon as he heard how happy they were without him.

If he doesn’t know by now that their lives will go on without him, even if they miss him every day, he’ll never know that.

His sister and niece traversed time to find him, but some silly insecurities pushed him away.

It took Elliot taking the next step for Jacob to finally make the move. But did it seem to anyone else that some important scenes may have been left on the cutting room floor? One second, Del had her head on Elliot’s shoulder, and the next, he was standing in front of Jacob.

But while Jacob didn’t rush home after Elliot arrived, maybe the combination of his actions and Thomas’s pushy apparition will get the job done.

Other things to ponder:

• If The Herald was a revered Port Haven institution, and Kat is running it now, why doesn’t she devote herself to making it what it once was?
• Del was pregnant before she had Kat. It’s shocking that she carried that secret all those years. To what end?
• Was there any significance to Jacob and the woman on a blind date sharing a passion for old-fashioned spirits?
• Grayson won’t be part of the family. He marries someone else! I still say Cliff’s genes look closer to the Landrys we know. I assume he and his wife are Max’s ancestors. Good news! Alice and Max probably aren’t related!
• Will Sam and Del go the distance, or will she reserve her heart for another? 
• Here’s an off-the-cuff thought. What if Elliot is “the one” Fern keeps waiting for, and he hasn’t asked Kat to marry because they never do? Was I completely wrong in my review of The Way Home Season 4 Episode 1? What if he goes back and gets stuck in time like his mom?

But what about you?

Was this the push The Way Home Season 4 needed to get its groove back?

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