#fern landry

[thewayhomehallmark]

[flythesail]

"If you ever feel lost, there will always be a road that will lead you home to family."

— The Way Home: 4x01

[twinsand]

Landry Women are cursed when it comes to love.

[purplesigebert]

Omg guys, when we meet Kat in 1999 she introduces herself to Alice by saying, "I'm Katherine Landry, but everyone calls me Kat."

Colton tells Fern that his daughter is named Katherine. And she immediately calls her Kitty Kat cause she realizes this is her friend from 1925.

What if the reason "everyone" calls her Kat is because of Grandma Fern???

[soup-or-who-lock]

a man who indulges Landry women in their time traveling nonsense (lets 40 year old Nick steal his clothes/letting Kat out of jail/etc.)? Yeah that's Kat's great grandfather for sure

[scarletslippers]

The Landry Women and Pond Lore

Maybe less of a theory than an exploration of some show themes but I’ve got one week before my ideas (potentially) get blown wide open so let’s get into it. 

Fern explains to Kat in 1974 that she thought Colton was “the one…if not his father or his brother.” 

This suggests that there’s Landry family lore surrounding time travel/the pond, and a Landry male. It’s possible that the story originates in family history from Jacob time traveling. His story is ripped from the family Almanac, and he leaves (travels back to the present) at a relatively young age, so it could be that it’s his story that’s been passed down. 

Does Fern merely mean that family history dictates that a current/future Landry boy is destined to be sent to the past? Or is there some other ‘chosen one’ prophecy we’ve not yet heard?

It’s interesting to note that Colton seems to demonstrate similar protectiveness over Jacob, by warning him to stay away from the pond, in the way that Fern warned Colton to stay away from the pond. Except Fern warns Colton to stay away until it’s time, while Colton warns Jacob to stay away forever. Perhaps after traveling himself as a teen, Colton places more stock in Grandma Fern’s warnings and remembers her stories of a ‘chosen one’, and thinks it may mean Jacob. We never see or hear of any similar warning from Colton to Kat, which could be because Kat isn’t particularly interested in the pond, while Jacob is, or because the family history specifies a boy. 

The pond does seem to call to the Landry men in particular—Colton remains interested in it throughout his youth and travels as a teen, Jacob spends much time in and around the pond as a child, and we can speculate that Colton’s other brother traveled when he “took off”, potentially with Elliot’s mom. The pond seems to lure them in. Only Landrys can travel, and they carry the family name and thus the ‘line’ so perhaps that’s a reason. 

The Landry men also seem particularly doomed—perhaps the ‘curse’ Grandma Fern warns about? Fern says that her son died, and her daughter-in-law “raised two boys” and “kept the farm going all on her own.” Of those two boys, Colton’s brother is gone (back in time?) and Colton dies suddenly, leaving Del, another Landry daughter-in-law, to raise her family and keep the farm going all on her own. Jacob similarly “dies” when he travels back in time. It seems when the pond takes collateral, the men are who pay the price. They seem to be pawns in the game. 

The Landry women are seemingly not similarly lured. The pond doesn’t ‘call’ to Alice, she falls in, and Kat only jumps to figure out what Alice was doing. While I have theories that Fern is also a traveler, we don’t know enough to confirm that. Perhaps she’s simply a historian of the pond and her family. Kat and Alice are only ‘pulled’ to the pond after they’ve jumped, and it’s the people and the history they found on the other side that keep them coming back. 

Instead, it’s the Landry women that are enacting history—Kat helping save Jacob from Cyrus’ prison, encouraging Susanna to become a writer, Alice encouraging Colton to try again with Del, being a friend to teen Kat at a time when she desperately needed one. Kat and Alice each save Colton at one time—from the pond and from Rick’s car accident respectively—only to then be the cause of his death later. The women are the ones moving the pieces on the chessboard. 

The show is written by a mother-daughter team and intentionally focuses on the inter-generational relationships between mothers and daughters, so it’s no surprise that the Landry women have the agency and action in the story. 

But it still begs the question, was a Landry boy destined to be the ‘chosen one’, or was he only a ‘chosen one’ because the Landry women made it so? 

[youruinedmylifebynotbeingreal]

So the one thing giving me hope that Elliot lives is 70s Fern saying something like “oh, so that hasn’t happened yet” when they ask about NYE. So surely she wouldn’t be unsure about that if Elliot didn’t survive. Right.

[dearlittlefandom-stalker]

Fern is The Character of all time by the way. (Well, her and Elliot but this post is about her)

We first meet her as an old woman speaking in rhyme in the 70s, she acts and sounds crazy and also mildly alarming at all times. You don't know if she's telling the truth about what she knows or how much she knows at all, and she isn't telling. She tells off Colton for breaking the rules.

Then you see young Fern who is a modern woman and so vibrant and full of life! She can act! She can sing! She can dance! She is a riot to be around, an absolute whirlwind of personality, the only light in this crooked town-

And yet she is running. She has lost her brother, her parents, she lived alone and left the farm, gave the past nary a glance, and tried to run from fate and straight into Cliff.

She fell in love, true love, and she fell hard. She wanted them to grow old together. She was pregnant!! THEY WERE GONNA KISS AT MIDNIGHT SHE WAS GOING TO TELL HIM--agshfjkdkdk

Cliff dies. And she has to live alone, again, except she's not alone this time because she's a Mom and she has her son and she is SO STRONG and the only way out is through and she was always a good actor anyway but her sweetest note is a little off, a little broken like her

And she carries that with her her whole life! It explains so much! BUT!! She gets to sing to her great-granddaughter and know that it is her Kitty-Kat, and she meets her great-great-granddaughter and knows that it's Alice like Alice in Wonderland and she gets to be her cheshire cat and my heart-!