When Calls the Heart Season 12 Episode 1: The Mountie Way

Superintendent Hargraves finds Nathan and Elizabeth in the street and tells Elizabeth he has news about her late husband. A road crew excavating where Jack is believed to have passed has found Jack's Commissioner's medal, and Hargraves wanted her to have it. Nathan notes that it is the highest Mountie honor; Hargraves says Jack is not one that is easily replaced. Before he rides off, Hargraves tells Nathan that a recruit is being sent his way in a couple of days — bottom of his class — and asks whether Nathan was supposed to be leading the mission on which Jack passed.

Off a knowing look, Hargraves tells Nathan to take care of Elizabeth.

Elizabeth tells Nathan to ignore Hargraves, and shows Bill the medal when he asks what the superintendent wanted. Bill asks whether the two of them are finally “a thing,” and Nathan says they march to their own drum. At home, Elizabeth shows Little Jack the medal and explains that it was given for courage and bravery; they put it on the framed picture of Jack, and she says it is like he is right there with them. Rosemary tells Elizabeth that she and Nathan are the talk of the town.

When Little Jack brings up his father's medal, Nathan tells him that some people say his dad was the bravest Mountie of all.

At the saloon, Lucas asks Lee to come to Capital City for a few weeks to get the park project going. Rosemary and Lee refuse to sacrifice their family life and watching Goldie grow up for Lucas's political rehabilitation after last year's resort scandal. Lee wonders whether they are being inflexible; Rosemary says she and Goldie and the town need Lee in Hope Valley, and that Lucas is still a wildcard. At the café, Minnie and Joseph talk Angela through her options after graduation — she has raised the Schwartzman School in Hamilton, where there are other students who are blind like her.

Meanwhile Lee tells Henry and Lucas that Rosemary cannot be persuaded, and Lucas proposes Lee going back and forth with Rosemary and Goldie visiting. Henry says there is one more thing that could change her mind.

On the first day of school, the older girls tell Elizabeth that Lilly will not come in; Lilly is frightened of being surrounded by the bigger children. Little Jack whispers into his mother's ear and then gives Lilly his father's medal so that she can be brave. Faith pins it on her and the two children go inside together. Faith collects Lilly at the end of the day — Lilly says school was great — and Elizabeth notes that Jack let her wear the medal all day in recognition of extreme bravery.

Nathan arrives to take Little Jack for his riding lesson, and when Little Jack asks to keep the medal on, Elizabeth agrees and Nathan promises to keep it safe. As they leave, Nathan's smile falls.

Lee tells Rosemary that Lucas and Henry have offered to name the national park after Goldie, and Rosemary likes the sound of it. She agrees that Lee can spend the week in Capital City and come home that Friday, declining Lucas's dinner in the Capital so he can be home. On the train, Lucas tells Lee they are equal partners and that he cannot do this without him; Edwin Mitchell sees them on board and offers his services to the project. At Elizabeth's house that evening, Nathan gives her a medal display box he made for Little Jack.

She tells him that if Little Jack ever wants to know more about his dad, they will tell him together. Nathan asks whether she knew it is a full moon, and they step outside to look at it together.

The episode closes quietly rather than on a cliffhanger. Its two running threads are both left in an unresolved, workable state. Lee leaves for Capital City with Lucas, having secured a weekly arrangement that brings him home on Fridays, and Edwin Mitchell — who boarded the same train — has offered his services to the parks project. Nathan, meanwhile, has told Rosemary plainly that he is not trying to replace Jack and that what he worries about is Little Jack growing up angry with him; Rosemary's answer is that no one knows what the future holds.

The final scene is Nathan giving Elizabeth a medal display box he made for Little Jack, and Elizabeth telling him that if Little Jack ever wants to know more about his father, they will tell him together. They step outside to look at a full moon.

What the episode leaves open: the cadet question. Nathan tells Bill that something about Oliver Garrett does not add up — a cadet that dedicated should not have finished at the bottom of his class — and the episode ends without any explanation of why. Edwin's motives in joining the parks project are likewise not established within the episode, and Rosemary's stated distrust of Lucas is not resolved. The episode does not confirm or name a cause for any of these.