My Life With the Walter Boys Boss on Those Season 3 Cliffhangers: ‘We Like to Blow Things Up’

[Warning: The following contains spoilers from Season 3 of My Life With the Walter Boys.]

A violent car crash. A shocking kiss. An unrequited love confession. Netflix’s coming-of-age drama, My Life With the Walter Boys, left a trail of bombshells in its wake to close out Season 3. It’s become a signature of the teen drama, adapted from Ali Novak’s 2014 Wattpad novel. “We do like to blow things up at the end of our season,” executive producer and showrunner Melanie Halsall tells TV Guide. “That’s kind of what we do.” And blow things up they did.

It didn’t take long for Jackie (Nikki Rodriguez) and Cole (Noah LaLonde) to jump into a romance after they professed their love to each other in the sophomore finale — with Alex (Ashby Gentry), Jackie’s boyfriend and Cole’s brother, overhearing their mutual confession. But getting together was just the tip of the iceberg for the couple in Season 3. They endured the growing pains of a new relationship. Was Jackie, who became more of a rule-breaker this season, about to be Princeton-bound? Did Cole finally find purpose in racecar driving? The tension reached a boiling point when Eliot (Naveen Paddock) — a blast from Jackie’s Manhattan past — entered the picture in Silver Falls, forcing Jackie and Cole to confront their insecurities. Unfortunately, their bond wasn’t strong enough; Cole concluded he wasn’t a good influence on Jackie, officially breaking things off.

Devastated by the breakup, Jackie threw herself into her passion project: the new teen annex. Mishaps threatened to push back the opening, but Cole secretly pulled strings to get it ready for the 1920s gala at the center of the Season 3 finale. It was Alex who told Jackie that Cole was the one who made it all happen. A quick text message from Jackie thanking Cole for his help — just as he was moments away from taking part in a qualifying race that could kickstart his racing career — was enough for him to skip out on the opportunity altogether, pissing off his opponent. Cole was now tunnel-visioned in rekindling a romance with Jackie. But Cole’s nemesis had other plans, blaming him for taking money off the table and jeopardizing his future. Pushed to the brink, they raced down a dangerous stretch until Cole’s car was pushed off the road, flipping over several times and violently crashing.

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All while this was happening, Jackie was celebrating the teen annex’s successful opening. Unaware that Cole was in a near-fatal accident, she and Eliot — who she had warmed up to over the course of the season — shared a kiss in the middle of the dance floor. 

Meanwhile, Alex was going through his own ordeal. After focusing on saddle bronc riding and regretfully getting a tattoo to show for it, he cut ties with the rodeo crew after he realized he wasn’t cut out for the dark side of the industry. He began spending more time with Kiley (Mya Lowe), eventually acknowledging his feelings for his best friend despite her being in a relationship with Dylan (Kolton Stewart). After a frantic search for Kiley’s missing grandmother in the penultimate episode, they shared their first kiss. But Alex immediately downplayed the significance of their intimate moment, saying the kiss was “a stupid mistake.” In the finale, Alex showed up on Kiley’s doorstep desperate to make things right, admitting that calling their kiss “a stupid mistake” was itself a mistake — only to be rejected by Kiley and seeing Dylan stand by her side. Silver Falls may be the messiest small town ever.

Speaking with TV Guide, Halsall broke down the explosive Season 3 finale cliffhangers, why they decided to end the Jackie-Cole-Alex love triangle (for now), and what fans can look forward to in Season 4.

Going into Season 3, what was your mission creatively that you were looking to accomplish?
Melanie Halsall: One of the biggest missions that we were thinking about was the idea of elevation and sophistication, and really trying to make this season a proper coming-of-age story — showing Jackie’s progression and growth after everything that’s happened to her. We really wanted to see [our characters] develop and change and grow, and not repeat the things they’ve done before and the things that we’ve done before [as a show]. Our characters are maturing and our audience is maturing. We really wanted to elevate the whole show.

What was the overall theme that you were going for?
Halsall: I think growth was our overall theme — the idea that all our characters are learning more and more about themselves.

The second season ended on a big cliffhanger with Jackie and Cole confessing their love to each other and Alex overhearing it. But that love triangle resolves itself pretty quickly when Jackie and Cole decide to give their relationship a shot in the first episode of Season 3. What was the decision behind doing that and what was your thought process?
Halsall: We really wanted to subvert expectations. And like I said before, it was wrapped up in that idea that we didn’t want to repeat ourselves or do the same thing again. So, getting Jackie and Cole together quite early on was definitely a decision that we [made] really, really decisively. It was something we definitely wanted to do. It also was a way to give the audience what they’ve been craving for such a long time and allow those characters to live in their bliss for a little while, which I thought was really important. And yeah, we didn’t want to retread old ground, so it felt like we got the characters to a place where we had to go down that road and we didn’t want to keep them apart for any longer. The theme of the season is growth. It’s a lot of growth for Jackie to make that decision so decisively and so proactively and so early on. It felt like we were really putting a stake in the ground and saying, “This season’s going to be a bit different.”

Jackie and Cole spend much of the season going through the highs and lows of a relationship. Alex’s romantic focus goes to his childhood best friend, Kiley. Is the love triangle between Jackie, Cole, and Alex truly over or will elements of it always be there?
Halsall: It is always there — absolutely, completely. The story has always been a love triangle and I think we will always have that, but that love triangle will evolve and change over time and develop over time. We spent a lot of Season 1 and Season 2 with Jackie and Alex together. I don’t think by getting her and Cole together, it necessarily means we haven’t got a love triangle or that we won’t revisit that in future. Who knows? But she definitely is with Cole at the beginning of Season 3, as you see. That’s definitely a decision she’s [made].

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We see different sides to Jackie and Cole through them dating. What was interesting for you to uncover or unravel as different layers to these characters were being peeled back?
Halsall: The reason we can peel those layers back is because they got together. They say it a couple of times in the show: They change each other and they help each other grow and they help each other develop in a way that Jackie hasn’t done in the past. But obviously everything that we’ve got to in Season 3 is because of all her experiences in Season 1 and Season 2, so when she was with Alex. And all her experiences with other characters and friendships as well as romances have helped her get to where she is. But it’s this shedding of the artifice. Being with Cole allows her to expose herself and allows her to not keep everything hidden. The Jackie of Seasons 1 and 2 was tightly wound, kept herself under wraps, and this season we peel back those layers. She relaxes. She opens herself up and that’s because of Cole.

Cole’s trauma and the big incident that we don’t see in the show informs everything for Cole. He’s finally with Jackie. He’s finally able to again uncover himself a little bit. Cole’s the way he is because he’s actually genuine underneath. He’s a very honorable character, but also very afraid of being hurt. So, he’s created this shell around himself — a little bit like Jackie has too — to protect himself. And it’s being with Jackie that allows him to open up and become vulnerable again, which is why, as the season goes on, his vulnerability is exploited.

Jackie is definitely much more of a rule-breaker this season. And when Eliot comes into the picture, he represents Jackie’s old life in Manhattan and she’s really faced with a fork in the road on which path she’s supposed to take.
Halsall: Eliot does represent her past and the world she left behind to come to Silver Falls. If she hadn’t left that world behind — and obviously she left that world behind because of a tragedy — but if that hadn’t happened, she would be in that world with Eliot or with the Eliots or someone like Eliot. That’s [the type of person] she grew up with and he knows her better than anyone in a way, even though Cole knows her better than anyone. Eliot would have been someone who has been in her orbit since she was a child, so having that reminder of her past and that reminder of the path that she’s no longer on, really allows us to give her the decision to continue to pursue her life in Silver Falls and embrace Silver Falls the way she does. Eliot is a really good foil to what her life is now because it reminds us of what her life used to be.

The season ends on several huge cliffhangers. After Cole skips out on a qualifying race to get back to Jackie, his opponent drives his car off the road, flipping it several times and violently crashing. Moments before the accident, Jackie finds out that Cole is the one responsible for making the teen annex open on time. Then Eliot kisses Jackie at the party. What is the fallout from this?
Halsall: We do like to blow things up at the end of our season. That’s kind of a thing. That’s kind of what we do. So that was a lot of fun. I can’t tell you what’s going to happen, obviously, but yes, there will be a lot of fallout from those moments, and we’ll have to spend quite some time coming back from that. That’s not going to be easy to come back from. But as you say, at the end of Season 3, we really do leave all our characters in a state of uncertainty.

Alex and Kiley got closer this season and they even shared a kiss. In the finale, Alex shows up to Kiley’s doorstep and admits their kiss was a mistake was itself a mistake, only for Kiley to reject him. Why dig into their romantic feelings more directly this season? And where do they go from here?
Halsall: Kiley’s always been in love with Alex. We make that clear in Season 1 and they’ve always had this incredibly close relationship as friends. It’s a very interesting situation where the person you’ve always taken for granted, the person that’s always been around, the person you knew had a bit of a crush on you but were also really good friends, suddenly is no longer so available to you. Suddenly, they have other people take interest in them. That’s a really interesting thing to explore. Relatable. And I love the idea of Kiley discovering herself in that way — of her being seen — especially by someone like Dylan, a popular kid in school. And I love Dylan’s journey in Season 3. So Alex seeing that and Alex realizing what Kiley may have meant to him all these years, it’s very relatable and it’s a fascinating thing to watch. Alex falls in love quite easily and doesn’t make the best choices all the time, which is very relatable. Him seeing Kiley with Dylan makes him realize the choices he’s made and how he’s got to where he’s gotten. He’s starting to understand who he is and what he wants and seeing what he’s lost.

You’re in the middle of filming Season 4. What can you share about where the upcoming season might pick up or entail?
Halsall: All I can really say is that we have put our characters in certain predicaments at the end of Season 3 and they’re really interesting places to be. We’ve got a lot more intrigue and a lot more romance, and definitely more character stuff to come. The characters are going to have to really work to come back from the fallout from Episode 10 of Season 3 — all of them, including Alex, Kiley, and Dylan. All our characters are going to have to do some work to come back from where we left them.

Season 3 of My Life With the Walter Boys is streaming on Netflix.