There is a scene near the end of Heartland’s Season 17 opener where the Fleming sisters are cloud-watching near a pond in the fields of Alberta.
For the most part, CBC’s Sunday-night favourite has been seen as a family-friendly enterprise known for its horses, wholesome humour, romance, beautiful scenery and the odd flash of gentle drama. Nevertheless, characters will inevitably go through quite a bit of life-altering tumult over 17 years, no matter how idyllic the backdrop. For Amy Fleming (Amber Marshall) and older sister Lou (Michelle Morgan), that has included everything from mourning the death of their mother and enduring youthful romantic complications as the series began through divorce, motherhood, various professional setbacks and, most dramatically, the sudden death of Amy’s husband and fan favourite Ty (Graham Wardle) in later years.
So this moving scene between sisters in the show’s 250th episode offers a nice throwback to where it all began.
The sequence is hardly inconsequential in terms of plot. To avoid spoilers, however, we’ll just say the two are contemplating certain aspects of Amy’s future. But it’s also a nice refresher of the relationship between the Fleming sisters and the actors who play them, which was a large part of the appeal back when CBC first aired the Calgary-shot rural drama in 2007.
“The truth is, for Amber and I, luckily our relationship has flourished over the years and we get along better than ever,” says Morgan, who will be joining her castmates for a Calgary International Film Festival screening and Q&A on Sept. 28 at the Jubilee Auditorium. “With some shows, people get really sick of each other and don’t get along anymore but we have a great relationship and when we do scenes like that, it’s not super often. So we appreciate it. It’s like ‘This is nice, this is great.’ We get to do this scene as sisters. We get to be in the beautiful place by the pond. We love doing stuff like that because it’s not typical, we’re not often doing scenes like that. We were talking about it, behind the scenes, how great it was to do it.”
