"The Way Home"-Jacob's disappearance and the Stable Time Loop Theory

     Hello. First, allow me to introduce myself. My name is Wesley Eversole. I have been an avid watcher of Hallmark Channel for about four years now and have watched almost all of their series, including their most recent series, "The Way Home", which premiered on January 15. If you are not familiar with the series, let me give you a basic rundown on the premise.

    The series basically revolves around the main character, Alice Dhawan (played by Sadie Laflamme-Snow) discovering that she has the ability to travel through time and jumping into a pond out in the woods behind her maternal grandmother, Del Landry's (Andie McDowell) family farm. She travels back to 1999, where she meets her mother, Kat (Alex Hook) as a teenager. 

    "The Way Home" has several mysteries but by far the most prominent is the disappearance of Kat's younger brother Jacob (Remy Smith) during a Fall Festival in 1999. In the series' most recent episode, "Building A Mystery", which premiered on February 26, 2023 on Hallmark Channel, adult Kat (Chyler Leigh) travels back to the day of Jacob's disappearance in an attempt to prevent it from happening. She manages to find Jacob and even walks him back home but when she returns to the present, she discovers that Jacob is still missing and presumed dead.

    This is where my theory comes in and it actually ties in with another piece of time travel media. In the 2002 film "The Time Machine" (based on the 1895 novel of the same name by H.G. Wells), the main character, Dr. Alexander Hartdagen (Guy Pearce) is inspired to invent the titular time machine after his fiancé Emma (Sienna Guillory) is killed by a mugger (Max Baker). Although Alexander manages to go back in time and prevent the mugging, he is still unable to prevent Emma's death. In fact,  every attempt to prevent Emma's death ultimately proves unsuccessful.

    Eventually, Alexander travels 800,000 years into the future, when ere two species known as the Eloi and Morlocks are at war with each other. While in the future, he learns from the Uber-Morlock (Jeremy Irons) that the reason he was never able to save Emma is because her death is what caused him to build the Time Machine in the first place. No death, no time machine. It is at this point that Alexander finally decides to accept Emma's fate and chooses to stay in the future rather than go back to his own time.

So how does this tie in with Kat's failed attempt to rescue Jacob? Basically, the same premise applies. If Kat goes back in time to rescue Jacob before he disappears, the catalyst for Kat going back in time disappears as well, meaning she can't go back in time to rescue Jacob, thus creating a paradox. This unfortunately means that much like Alexander's failed attempts to prevent Emma's death in "The Time Machine", any attempt by Kat to prevent Jacob's disappearance in 1999 is likely doomed to fail as well.

At least, that's my theory anyway. We only have four episodes remaining this season so hopefully, we will get a definitive answer to Jacob's disappearance soon.