The Way Home Season 4 already has one big continuity problem

When The Way Home Season 4 returns in 2026, we’re going to have a lot of questions. If you’ve been paying attention across the last three seasons, one of them involves character continuity.

It almost doesn’t matter if your Season 3 finale predictions weren’t right or you don’t really know what to expect next, as The Way Home will turn our lives upside down when it returns next year.

We’ve been left with the revelation that Elliot was the baby left by the pond, with his mom time traveling with an unknown Landry man. We don’t know who Sam or Casey really are, and Del’s used the pond for the first time in her life.

Alongside the legitimate questions, the reintroduction of one character in the Season 3 finale is causing some concerns. They seem completely different, but are they really?

Is Fern senile or not in The Way Home Season 4?

In Season 3 Episode 10, Grandma Fern is revealed to have attended Colton and Del’s wedding in 1975. She’s completely different – note, mentally competent – from how we originally met her in Episode 3, so which version of Fern do we believe is the accurate one?

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Let’s go over what we know. In Episode 3, Kat meets her great-grandma Fern in the woods. The song she sings? “25 first arrived, 25 never tried. 65 thought they died, 65 still alive.” Kat asks Fern if she is lost to which Fern replies, “Don’t tease, I know my way home, Kitty Cat.”

Kat then asks Fern if she knows a Colton Landry, and Fern confirms he’s her grandson. This is basically how we learn Fern is a Landry, and therefore at the top of the present-day family tree.

Fast-forward to Episode 10. Del and Kat travel to the 1975 wedding, with Fern appearing out of the blue. She Kat liked the nickname Kitty “before.” Confused, Fern says, “If you don’t know when we met before, then it hasn’t happened yet… something to look forward to, I think.” Fern leaves, singing a version of the same ’65 riddle we heard in Episode 3.

Obviously, the ’65 riddle is its own issue that isn’t going away (or likely getting any solid answers) any time soon. But the changes in how we see Fern in such a short space of time have rightly raised fans’ eyebrows.

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One fan posted on Facebook, “It’s funny that when Kat saw Fern in 1974 she seemed confused and almost senile, but when Kat saw her a year later at Colton’s and Del’s wedding, she seemed to have a clear mind. Called her Kitty, etc. (I realize dementia brings moments of lucidity but it still seems surreal).”

“Maybe at Del and Colton’s wedding she was younger than when Cat had seen her in her more eccentric form?” another weighed in. “Yet, it is perplexing when there was a point Kat liked being called Kitty Kat. Mind boggling! Fern has got to be a time traveler, too.”

As others point out, we’ve currently got no idea when Fern died, either. It’s likely she was around 70 at the time Colton and Del got married, having died before we pick up with events in 1999.

The Way Home Season 4 will air on The Hallmark Channel in 2026. Catch up with what theories have already been ruled out, why Colton couldn’t be brought back to life, as well as the best Hallmark movies and best Hallmark TV shows of all time.