Dropping on The Hallmark Channel and Hallmark+ from August 2, 2025, Providence Falls is a new three-part film series following Cora (Katie Stevens) and Liam (Lachlan Quarmby), two cops paired up to try and solve a theft case. As theft becomes much more sinister, Cora doesn’t know Liam isn’t a cop at all, but a lover from a past life sent forward in time to try and get her to fall in love with her “destiny” in co-worker Finn (Evan Roderick).
Sound familiar? Well, the time-travel element should at least. While the core romance could be plucked straight from any one of Hallmark’s hall of fames, there’s another series on the platform that can instantly transport you to another historical timeline: The Way Home. Starring Andie MacDowell and Chyler Leigh, the show tells the story of the Landry family, who find they can travel back in time to different points in their shared history by jumping in the pond at the end of their garden (as you do). Season 4 is expected to air in early 2026, and boy do we have some questions that need answering.
Ponderers (who are the fanbase of the show, obviously), will know a key feature of The Way Home time travel involves emerging from a body of water sopping wet, having to go and deal with whatever historical disasters await you while completely drenched. Blink and you’ll miss it, but there’s a very similar circumstance in one installment of Providence Falls, and the cast admits that the coincidental Easter egg was the most “challenging” scene of the bunch.
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Providence Falls’ most ‘challenging’ scene is an accidental The Way Home Easter egg, and I’m living for it
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Spoilers for Providence Falls ahead.
“There’s a scene that had an involvement with a lake in and we were shooting in Vancouver, and it was February, so you can imagine how freezing the water was, and there were some stunts to go along with it,” Stevens tells me about the scene. “So, that was really, really challenging. Although we had the wet suit and things under our costume, it was still freezing. So that was probably the most difficult, just for that. The scene is actually one of my favorite scenes in the whole series, but it was definitely not as glamorous to film.”
You’ll find the scene in question at the end of part 2 of Providence Falls, as Cora tries to get away from Marcus once she realises he’s really working with the wrong side. Marcus gives chase and pulls a gun on Cora, leading to a waterside fight that ends with Cora falling into the lake. Luckily, Finn and Liam arrive just in time, with Liam heroically diving in to save Cora as she loses consciousness.
If this was an episode of The Way Home, Cora would have surfaced from the water back in her Irish 1800s timeline, aware that she is time-traveling between two points in history. Instead, Providence Falls chooses to overlap both timelines in a montage, with Cora convinced she is dreaming when she thinks of herself in the past. The act of travelling through time might be snappier in the new miniseries, but I can’t help but draw obvious parallels from how fantasy is blended with reality.
There’s another similarity between Providence Falls and The Way Home
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This isn’t the only Easter egg from The Way Home that I’ve seen in Providence Falls, though. The opening scene looks almost identical to the woodland where the Landry pond is set, with 1800s Cora and Liam even venturing briefly into the water as Kat and Alice (Sadie Laflamme-Snow) might in The Way Home. However, this one is merely a coincidence, with all of Providence Falls’ Irish scenes being filmed in… well, Ireland.
“We filmed the first film, and then we went to Ireland, shot all of the Irish footage for all three films together, and then went and did movies two and three,” Stevens adds. “So, Ireland almost felt like its own movie.I think the benefit of how we shot is that our characters are trying to kind of figure each other out, and Cora is having these dreams, but can’t really make sense of them yet. In real life, we got to look back on our time in Ireland, so we know now what our characters are thinking of the things that they’re remembering, and we actually shot those things so they were real memories for us.
“We shot in Dublin and Kilruddery Castle, which is where Cora’s house is. And then we shot at the castle where the Beckhams got married, which was really cool.”
