Heartland Season 20: Amy Has Already Lost the Two People She Loved Most

Amy was fifteen the night we first met her, and the night she lost her mother.

It happens in the first episode of Heartland, "Coming Home." Amy and her mother, Marion, are bringing an abused horse named Spartan home through a storm when their truck and trailer go off the road. Amy wakes up in the hospital. Marion does not.

That was October 2007. Twenty seasons later, Nathan Pryce has asked Amy to marry him, and to leave Heartland for Salt Spring Island, in British Columbia. The Season 19 finale, "Forgiveness," ends before she answers. In Season 20, she is still living with that question.

Fans often talk about the choice as a love story. For Amy Fleming, it is also a grief story. She has already lost the two people she loved most at that ranch: her mother, in the premiere, and her husband, Ty Borden, in Season 14. Heartland is the place where they still feel close. That is what leaving would cost her.

The Mother Who Taught Her the Work

Marion was the one who taught Amy how to gentle a horse. By the time we met her at fifteen, Amy had already been doing that work beside her mother. The accident did not introduce her to the barn. It took away the person who had stood in it with her.

When Amy woke in the hospital, her older sister, Lou, came home from New York to help. Their grandfather, Jack, refused to have Spartan put down and brought the horse back to the ranch, hoping Amy could reach him. A new hired hand showed up too, a teenager on probation named Ty. Marion had hired him before she died.

Amy blamed herself for the drive that night. She had to learn, slowly, that the ranch could still hold her mother's work, even though it could not bring her mother back.

Then She Lost Ty

Ty was not a guest arc. He arrived in that same first episode, and he was still there more than a decade later. He cleaned up his life, became a vet, married Amy, and became a father to their daughter, Lyndy. We have already told the long story of the men who have loved her. His chapter is the one that still shapes all the others.

In the Season 13 finale, "The Passing of the Torch," a poacher trespassing on Heartland land shot him. He looked like he was going to be all right. Then, in the first minutes of the Season 14 premiere, "Keep Me in Your Heart," which aired on CBC on January 10, 2021, he collapsed. A blood clot, a complication from the gunshot, and he was gone.

The show jumped forward a year. Amy was still a mother, still the person the ranch leaned on, and still unable to finish the house she and Ty had started to build. She put off a memorial until a late talk with Jack, who had lost a wife of his own, helped her face it.

That grief did not wrap up in one season. Amy learned how to raise Lyndy without him. She learned how to keep the horses and the family going when she was the one who needed holding. Jack is still there. So are Lou, Georgie, and Lyndy. Her father, Tim, has left and come back more than once. She is not alone. But the two people she loved most, the mother who taught her and the husband who grew up beside her, are gone.

What Nathan Is Asking

We have already written about Nathan's proposal, and about the impossible choice Season 20 puts in front of her. This is the part that sits underneath both.

At the end of Season 19, after his sister Gracie was exposed for working with rustlers who stole Heartland cattle, Nathan decided to sell his ranch and start over on Salt Spring Island. In the finale, "Forgiveness," he takes Amy and Lyndy to a clearing of fireflies, a place from his own childhood, and asks her to build a life with him there. Then the episode fades out.

Amber Marshall, who has played Amy since the beginning, has said the character was shell-shocked, "because she never really saw herself getting married again." The proposal was only half of it. "Not only is he proposing, he's asking Amy to uproot everything she's ever known and to move across the country with him."

Marshall's read of Amy is the heart of it. "If it had just been Amy on her own, without her past, without a child, I feel she would have jumped at the opportunity and said, 'Yes, let's go.'" What holds her is Lyndy, the business, and a life already rooted at the ranch.

The Season 20 premiere, "Renewal," which aired October 4 on CBC and CBC Gem, does not give her answer. Officially, the season is about Amy grappling with a difficult decision about her future with Nathan, and how that will affect her life at Heartland. For American viewers, Season 20 starts November 19 on UP Faith & Family.

The Place That Still Holds Them

Heartland is not only a ranch. It is the place where Marion's work still lives, and where Ty's life still leaves a shape. Every fence post has a memory. Every corner of that barn has a ghost.

So when Nathan asks her to go to Salt Spring Island, he is asking her to leave the place where her mother and Ty still feel close.

People who have never lost anyone think it is a love story.

People who have lost someone know it is a grief story.