[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for When Calls the Heart Season 11 Episode 11 “Run to You.”]
The slow burn is over! After tiny steps forward all season, When Calls the Heart finally goes there with Elizabeth (Erin Krakow) and Nathan (Kevin McGarry)—and doesn’t wait for the finale!
It’s an exciting episode for the two, both the events leading up to that moment (Elizabeth’s held hostage!) and the declarations of love and kiss themselves, so of course TV Insider had to bring in Krakow and McGarry to talk about all of that in our weekly aftershow, Heart Beats.
The episode ends with the two of them once again in front of Elizabeth’s house, and she says he’s right about them having bad timing; once he was ready, she wasn’t. She says she’s sorry for hurting him and for letting fear get in the way. If only he knew how her heart lifts when she thinks of him, as she does often. He’s always honest with her and encourages her to be honest with herself. He’s a good man, an impeccable man, a man who looks distractingly good in suspenders. It’s his eye she looks for across a crowded room and his heart that makes her feel brave, she admits. He feels like home to her. She couldn’t say it before but does now: She’s in love with him. He kisses her and tells her he never stopped loving her, not for a second, and they kiss again.
With that coming in the penultimate episode, rather than the finale, “you get a full episode to really enjoy the afterglow,” says Krakow.
Kailey Schwerman / Hallmark Media
“They get their honeymoon phase,” McGarry agrees. “Everybody’s been like, why are they constantly getting interrupted? What’s going on? What’s going on? So finally when it happens, we give the fans [Episode] 12 to get a glimpse of what life is going to be like.”
Elizabeth very much takes the lead, at least at the beginning of the scene. “In episode 11, she has a realization that actually Nathan is maybe still holding on to some fears or feelings that she needs to address. I think there was a part of Elizabeth that thought, ‘Oh, okay, I can just tell Nathan that friends don’t look at friends that way,’” Krakow explains, with McGarry chiming in with, “He’ll get it.”
Krakow agrees. “He’ll take the hint and then be in the driver’s seat again. But all sorts of things got in the way. And she just realized that no, he needs her to make that first real move, at least emotionally. Nathan made the first physical move.”
Adds McGarry, “She also had things to say that were not said yet. She hasn’t told him why she ran away from him in Season 8 and what was going on in her mind.”
They will get to enjoy being a couple in the finale, but McGarry does warn of some potential problems ahead. “They do have a conversation about some things that happened prior. There is room for questions and answers based on things that have happened in prior seasons that we do get to in Episode 12,” he says.
There’s “a simple scene” in the finale, adds Krakow, that she calls “really beautiful and vulnerable. Kevin does such a beautiful job of playing the vulnerability and being open when discussing—well, I guess you’ll have to tune in. I didn’t mean for that to be such a tease!”
Then, “what does become a concern is news they receive at the end” of the finale, teases McGarry. He has to be vague, but looking ahead to Season 12, “you have to understand what the climax is at the end of this season. So tune in because I hope they’re able to deal with bad news and move forward.”
Krakow is just hoping that Elizabeth gets the opportunity to “loosen up a little bit and maybe be a little more silly or free or just maybe get to see a different side of Elizabeth and maybe that will come out of this new love she’s feeling.”
Watch the full video interview above for more from Krakow and McGarry, including about that big moment, the hostage situation, what’s still to come this season for Elizabeth and Nathan, reactions to them being together, and Season 12.
When Calls the Heart, Sundays, 9/8c, Hallmark Channel