Are you as shocked by that My Life with the Walter Boys Season 2 finale as we are? A slow-burn love confession. An overheard conversation. An ambulance coming out of nowhere … If you’re dying to know what comes next for Cole (Noah LaLonde), Jackie (Nikki Rodriguez), Alex (Ashby Gentry) and the rest of the Walters, well, the actors are too.
The season ends with Jackie finally, truly admitting that she is in love with Cole — after he says it first. “There is such a payoff in getting to say those things out loud,” LaLonde tells Tudum on the Calgary set of the series. “These words only come with frustration because they’ve been kept inside this jar of secrecy for so long.”
But just as he’s going in for a kiss, we see Alex has been listening the whole time — and let’s not forget, he and Jackie were secretly sneaking around this season, and she said she was in love with him after he’d said it (again) only a few episodes ago. “I can’t even imagine their next conversation,” Rodriguez says.
The trio’s climactic moment is rudely — and traumatically — interrupted when the boys’ older brother Will (Johnny Link) comes riding up in an ATV and ambulances start arriving. Something’s happened involving their dad, George (Marc Blucas) — it’s the last thing we learn before the screen cuts to black. “I wanted a big finale, and I was always working towards that scene between Jackie, Cole, and Alex,” creator Melanie Halsall says. “I also always had the idea in my head that the family would have this big crisis, and it would probably be around George.”
Gentry was left wanting a serious showdown, “but hopefully we’ll get that in the future,” he says. “Both Alex and Cole are entitled to an explanation from Jackie. On top of that, Jackie’s entitled to her feelings for both of them. I don’t necessarily think she’s lying about the way that she feels about either of them.”
Look, processing your feelings is complicated, especially when you’re a teenager, and even more so when you’re grieving. “She loves them in different ways,” says Rodriguez, who hopes fans aren’t angry at Jackie. “It took a lot of work for me to be like, ‘OK, well, why would she say these things to both people, and what is she going through?’ ” Halsall thinks viewers should keep in mind that after losing her family, “of course she doesn’t know what she wants romantically, because her heart is completely broken.”
So where do we go from here, in the already-renewed My Life with the Walter Boys Season 3? The actors and Halsall break down everything for Tudum, below.
Halsall and Rodriguez have spoken extensively about this. “The way we see it is she’s in love with Cole, but she still loves Alex,” says Halsall. “It’s only when [Cole] drags it out of her in the final episode that she admits it to herself.”
LaLonde thinks Cole realized he was in love with Jackie when he was faced with the reality of her leaving for New York and not coming back last season. “After their kiss in the Season 1 finale, he agrees to give her space like she asks, and be friends, but deep down both know that they were never, quote-unquote, “friends.” “Heavy on the quotations,” says LaLonde. “Cole sees that as a way to getting back into the relationship that they had, where they could be open and honest with each other. They start to have that while still remaining platonic friends, little does he know that she’s secretly dating his brother again …”
After seeing Jackie with his brother at the end of Episode 9, Cole asks Jackie in the finale why it’s so easy for her to be around Alex but not him. Through gritted teeth, she admits she’s afraid to lose control when she’s with Cole. “She can’t hide with Cole,” says Halsall. “Whereas Alex, lovely, intelligent, great guy that he is, doesn’t unleash the same things in her that Cole does.”
In Season 1, Gentry thinks Alex was enduring “a slow, perpetual heartbreak every time he saw them together,” he says. “My read is that Alex knows that she loves Cole the whole time — but obviously, people have different opinions on that.”
Alex had drunkenly told Jackie he loved her at Will’s wedding in the Season 1 finale, only for her to fly back to New York the next day. He comes back in Season 2 effectively as a “new Alex.” But his resentment fades as he spends more time with her, and they embark on a secret relationship. “Let me tell you, that could never be me,” Gentry says. “That said, I am so pro Alex going back to Jackie over and over again because that’s such a real story that so many people go through.”
Rodriguez speculates that Jackie kept things with Alex on the down-low because she didn’t want to repeat her mistakes of last season — “which she ultimately does anyway. … She’s trying to not hurt anybody, she’s just confused and isn’t ready to fully jump into this.”
Halsall was keen to make Alex feel like a real contender this season. “He has this glow-up, so he’s really cool,” she says. “He’s got the rodeo.” When Jackie admits that she and Cole kissed last season, “Alex is quite mature about it,” Halsall adds. “He wouldn’t have accepted that news in the same way in Season 1.”
For someone like Jackie, who’s lost so much and is fearful of making a wrong step, admitting her feelings is hard. “Her whole thing this season is to be the perfect Walter, to not get caught up in the brothers again,” says Halsall. “She keeps it quiet because she doesn’t want to face that she’s messing up again.”
Not long after they’re back together, Alex tells Jackie that he loves her again, fully sober. Jackie tells Alex she loves him back in a precarious moment for her, after she has a steamy driving lesson with Cole. “She does feel guilty, and as people tend to do, they double down on the relationship they’ve got,” Halsall observes.
Rodriguez thinks Jackie means it when she tells Alex she loves him. “It’s such a different type of love than it is with Cole,” the actor says. “I hope it comes across that Jackie’s not just trying to play both people.”
Halsall says that on paper, Jackie knows Alex is the guy she should be with. She definitely does not want to be with Cole, for all the reasons that come out in Episode 10. “She doesn’t want to mess things up with the family. She doesn’t want to betray Alex. She doesn't want to make the same mistakes she made before. She wants to love him, she wants to love him the way she loves Cole — but ultimately she doesn’t.”
That’s one relationship you didn’t see coming, right? Erin (Alisha Newton) and Danny (Connor Stanhope) had chemistry back in Season 1, so they’re a couple Halsall wanted to kick the season off with right away. “Partly because we slow-burn pretty much everything else!” But Dylan (Kolton Stewart) and Kiley (Mya Lowe) “will blow people’s minds, because I don’t think anyone will expect it.”
Football player Dylan and Alex’s best friend Kiley meet in wood shop class in Season 2, and their romance plays out exactly as Halsall imagined it while filming Season 1. “When I saw those actors onscreen for Season 1, I really wanted to do more with them,” she says. “I woke up at 3 o’clock in the morning, and I had the whole Dylan and Kiley arc in my head.”
Kiley challenges Dylan to be his own person and not just let his dad solve his problems. Dylan helps Kiley enjoy herself. When they finally kiss at the Silver Sparkle in the finale, Alex is not pleased. But he doesn’t know why … yet.
“I’ve spoken to Mya and Ashby about this,” says Halsall. “If Alex said he wanted to be with Kiley today, even the day she kissed Dylan, she would leave Dylan in a heartbeat and be with Alex. But he just keeps telling her he doesn’t want her. And she’s happy for him, because she purely just adores him. I’ve said to Ashby, Alex will wake up when he’s 45 and think, ‘That’s the girl I should have married.’ ”
Gentry thinks Alex’s love for Kiley has just manifested as a friendship so far. “I don’t think he loves her or considers her in that way yet, honestly. I don’t see why he doesn’t, because she’s amazing,” he says. “It’s going to take her being with Dylan for him to realize that that’s even a possibility.”
Relive all the drama of My Life with the Walter Boys Season 2, only on Netflix.
