“When Calls The Heart” Returns And Hope Is In The Air

At the conclusion of the first season of When Calls the Heart, heroic schoolteacher Elizabeth Thatcher (Erin Krakow) shared a kiss with hunky Constable Jack (Dan Lissing). In many fairy tales, a kiss signifies “happily ever after,” but for Elizabeth and Jack, or “Jackabeth” as their fans have dubbed them, nothing is ever that easy. “It would be nice if I could say that they go on lots of dates and they ride off into the sunset,” says Krakow, but “we might make them work for it.” Not long after the start of their romance, Elizabeth receives a telegram begging for her return to her hometown. And in the two-hour season premiere of Hallmark’s beautiful series (airing Saturday), Elizabeth’s departure from Coal Valley is only the first of this season’s big changes.

Elizabeth, accompanied by chivalrous Jack, returns to her family home in the city of Hamilton and we see her in the upper-crust world she left behind when she moved to Coal Valley. The disconnect between Elizabeth’s lifestyle and his own working-class roots becomes almost too much for Jack to bear. “They come from very different worlds, and that hasn’t been in their faces as much in Coal Valley,” says Krakow. “It’s not that they don’t accept and deeply care for each other; it’s that they’re seeing each other in a new light.”

And it isn’t that her character has changed, says Krakow; it’s . . .