'When Calls The Heart' Season 6 Could Bring Major Trouble For Your Faves

When Calls The Heart has spent five seasons exploring the lives of the frontier town of Hope Valley, proving that people's smalltown struggles haven't changed that much in the past century. The Season 5 finale of WCTH will be airing on April 22, 2018, but fans don't need to worry about this episode being the end of Elizabeth Thornton neé Thatcher, because When Calls The Heart Season 6 will premiere soon, having been renewed for another go-around, per Deadline. This means that the frontier drama of Hope Valley will continue — but the show could end up looking much different.

Depending on how things go in the Season 5 finale, WCTH could return missing one of its two lead performers. In the episode before the Season 5 finale, fans of the series were heartbroken to learn that the romance that they had spent five seasons and three holiday specials following was about to be cut short by tragedy. The love story of Jack Thornton and Elizabeth Thatcher held the series and, in some ways, the town of Hope Valley together through years of strife and conflict. However, at the end of the episode "In My Dreams," a Mountie arrives at Hope Valley to inform Elizabeth that something has gone wrong. When Elizabeth asks if Jack — who was away training other Mounties — is OK, the visiting Mountie can only hang his head in sadness while Elizabeth fell to her knees and began to cry. If Jack is dead, When Calls The Heart will have its first post-Jack season when it returns for Season 6.

2018 seems to be a very popular year for characters named Jack dying, but it may be too early to count Jack Thornton out. For starters, at no point did any character in WCTH say that Jack is dead. The Mountie hanging his head could have had another type of bad news, and Elizabeth may have just jumped to the worst possible conclusion.

But, assuming that the Mountie is genuinely delivering the news that Jack is dead, where did they come from? Who are they? Is there a chance that they could have been mistaking Jack Thornton for another Jack? Jack's off-screen death may seem disappointing and anticlimactic, but the way the news was delivered captured how news like this was communicated in the frontier, and that lack of closure could inform the rest of the series.

When Season 6 returns, Elizabeth may have to start considering a life without Jack — while holding onto the hope that there was some kind of mistake. It's a truly heartbreaking prospect for a character that spent so much time learning how to be in love with someone for them to suddenly have to learn how to grieve — while barely getting to enjoy being a married couple. It all sounds rather depressing, and that indicates When Calls The Heart may be a much more somber show when it returns for Season 6. Or, it could turn out that Jack was alive and that nothing much is different in the show's sixth season.

Now that fans know that the When Calls The Heart will return for Season 6, they have to wait until the Season 5 finale to discover what kind of season it may be. Six seasons is a long time for any show to run without switching things up, and Jack's death may be the shake-up that the show needs to keep itself from becoming stale in the way that many long-running shows do. Whatever ends up happening in the Season 5 finale, however, at least fans can rest comfortably knowing that this there is still plenty of more time to be spent in Hope Valley when Season 6 airs likely in February of 2019 as past seasons have usually begun the second month of the new year.