SPOILER ALERT: The story includes details about Season 7 of Netflix‘s Virgin River.
If someone expected unbridled happiness and marital bliss for newlyweds Mel (Alexandra Breckenridge) and Jack (Martin Henderson), they probably have not watched a lot of Virgin River. The cozy small-town Netflix drama sent the married couple on an emotional parenthood rollercoaster. After brief soul-searching, they agreed to adopt Mel’s patient Marley’s baby and went full steam ahead with preparations only for the expectant mother to start having second thoughts when the baby’s father Eamon tracked her down.
Eventually, the young parents-to-be decided to proceed with the adoption but Mel and Jack had little time to celebrate because scans revealed that the fetus had a life-threatening heart defect. The season ended with Mel delivering Marley’s baby and the little one being rushed for surgery. Performing the surgery was Eli, a hunky pediatric cardiothoracic surgeon whom Mel had had a crush on years ago while she worked alongside him in Nurses Without Borders.
Mike’s (Marco Grazzini) marriage proposal to Brie (Zibby Allen) in the Season 6 finale was a no-go. Brady’s (Ben Hollingsworth) pull on Brie proved too strong and the star-crossed lovers found their way back to each other only for Brady to get in a horrific crash while driving his bike at the end of the finale, with his fate unknown.
Meanwhile, Brie and Mike played friendly exes as they partnered to solve the mystery of the missing Charmaine and her twins mystery from the Season 6 finale.
Season 7 chronicled the investigation into Doc and the attempt by a hospital chain to take over his clinic. In the end, he was exonerated but Doc ultimately opted to partner with the hospital to the benefit of his patients, which enraged Hope, sending her into the hands of her ex Roland and setting up a potential love triangle that had been brewing all season.
In other developments, Lizzie (Sarah Dugdale) and Denny (Kai Bradbury) had their baby, and Lizzie dealt with serious postpartum anxiety while Muriel (Teryl Rothery) underwent cancer treatment with the support of the close-knit friends circle.
In an interview with Deadline, showrunner Sean Patrick Smith unpacked some of the biggest developments in Season 7. Check out the rest of our Virgin River Season 7 coverage, including reports on the two longtime cast members leaving ahead of Season 8 and who is returning, on the status of the Everett & Sarah prequel and on Season 8’s theme and surprising new couple (Hint: the pairing could make Muriel a stepmom to Mel).
Jack & Mel (& Eli?)
DEADLINE: Poor Jack and Mel don’t seem to be able to catch a break. I’m sure you’re trying to keep things real, that adopting is not always a fairytale, but you really put them through the ringer this season with the birth mom changing her mind and the baby having a serious health issue.
SMITH: I was really excited to show adoption in a way that was really personal for me. My ex-husband and I adopted, our son is going to be 13 in a month. I was in the room when he was born, I cut the cord. There was a lot of the nuance and subtext of Marley and Eamon being in the room with Mel and Jack as it was happening, and there are complexities.
When you are wanting to adopt, you’re managing your investment. You want this to be an incredible thing, but there’s so many outside circumstances that can change the situation. It wasn’t Marley changing her mind on her own but having the biological father come back into the picture, which sometimes can extend even past the biological father, a grandparent could come in and say, we’ll raise the baby, and then, you’re onto the next birth mom.
So many people want to think adoption is just transactional — this is a woman who doesn’t want her baby, this is a woman who wants her baby, so just swap them out. But there’s so much emotion going on in that, and I was excited about exploring Mel and Marley’s relationship in that as well.
But even before that, when we talked about Mel and Jack’s baby, with her being a nurse and Jack being such a strong, good hero, I really liked the idea of a baby coming into their lives with certain challenges that certain parents couldn’t show up for and that I knew that Mel and Jack answer the call on something that they know is going to be hard.
DEADLINE: In terms of what awaits, is it going to be a long medical journey for the baby, and are Marley and Eamon out of the picture?
SMITH: They’re out for now. Another thing that I thought that was really interesting with our birth mom, she said, I’m gonna need some time. So when we left the delivery room with our son, we didn’t see her for another year or two until she was emotionally ready to introduce that back into her life. I wanted to show that honestly and thoughtfully and that Mel and Jack had to give her that space, so I don’t think we’ll see her back in Season 8. We’ll start with a four month-time jump and then reveal what happened with the baby’s surgery.
DEADLINE: The character of Eli and the potential ramifications for Mel and Jack. Are you building a love triangle? We’ve had one on Jack’s side with Charmaine but not on Mel’s.
SMITH: No, and that’s what was interesting about introducing this character as somebody who, I think the only love interest that we ever knew for Mel was her husband who passed so there was no physical presence for anyone. So we got excited about the idea of growing out her romantic love life in the past tense, and seeing somebody else come back in. I can’t say it’s a love triangle as much, I didn’t want to do the traditional thing that we’ve seen before, but Eli will be back in season 8 [as recurring].
Brie & Brody (& That Crash):
DEADLINE: For years now, Brie and Brody have been Virgin River‘s star-crossed lovers. Talk about them finding their way back to each other to get five minutes of happiness before it was all blown up by this accident.
SMITH: It was more than five minutes, it was a whole episode that they had happiness and joy. I love seeing them back together. Ben and Zibby are so good, and their chemistry is so incredible. When I came in in Season 5, they broke up early on in that season, so I haven’t been with them together as a couple for quite a while — or at all, really. I think there’s a lot to explore still in how Brie has changed as a person over time and looking at their relationship as different because they’re different people.
DEADLINE: Should we read into the exploration of their relationship as you indicating that Brody is expected to survive?
SMITH: There could be survival, but there could be unsurvival on the other side.
DEADLINE: Brie did not give Mike an answer to his proposal in the Season 6 finale but you didn’t drag this on in Season 7, with her rejecting him pretty quickly. Why didn’t you try to milk it for longer?
SMITH: What I was excited about was the opportunity to spend time in an active relationship and really start to see what wasn’t working, as opposed to it just being a breakup and her feelings and all of that. So putting them on this path of Charmaine was just a way to force them together physically, to then force them to confront what was wrong with everything.
Lizzie & Denny (& Postpartum)
DEADLINE: How did you come up with the idea to portray postpartum anxiety with Lizzie, and what happened with Denny‘s MCAT test?
SMITH: He gets his MCAT scores, I think we find him going through the application process and interviews. And for Lizzie, it was interesting. We focused so much on Denny’s physical health [his Huntington’s disease], that we hadn’t really explored anything in mental health, especially with her.
I had a family member who was dealing with postpartum anxiety, which I’d never heard of before. I knew of postpartum depression, and I’d seen that, but it seems much more difficult to manage, especially when you’re a new mom, you’re a young mom, you’re isolated, you’re having all these thoughts and you don’t know what’s normal and what’s not normal.
I thought Sarah played it very powerfully, I was really proud of how that turned out, especially the scene with Hope and Mel and Lizzie sitting on the floor of the women’s bathroom in the bar: you have a woman who is desperately trying to have a baby, a woman who never had a baby, and a woman with a baby who’s struggling with it all. It was really special.
Doc & Hope (& Roland?)
DEADLINE: You reintroduced friction between Doc and Hope and a possible love triangle with her ex Roland. It seemed a little artificial to me because Hope is a reasonable person, so her outburst was a little out of character. Why did you decide to split the beloved couple up over the clinic and Doc wanting to work with the hospital?
SMITH: The idea for me was Hope being resistant to change in the town and finding herself on the opposite side, where Doc is worried about his patients and she’s worried about protecting the town, which they each have their own fiefdom, and I think they’re both strong and looking out for it. I’m trying to avoid straight-up, obvious love triangles.
So I think with Roland, it’s going to be much more complicated in Season 8, but I think it was interesting to see — and I love Hope and Doc as well — but I want to deepen them a little bit more in this conflict to show there are personal issues to grow back to each other.
Bridging Local & Corporate Medicine
DEADLINE: You mentioned last season that you’d experienced what happens when a small town hospital was taken over by a network. After Doc and Hope spent the season fighting to save the clinic, why did you go for this utopian idea that small town clinics and corporate medicine can work hand in hand for the benefit of the patients?
SMITH: That’s what I was interested in as an experiment to really see how it could work, how it couldn’t work, and on which side, what we want to say with that. I think Hope says it in her fight, where she’s like, ‘You can’t care about people and money at the same time’. And that’s where I think she was also standing with Doc in their conflict.
Hannah (& LGBTQ Representation)
DEADLINE: Hannah has been on the show since Season 3 and yet we have barely seen her. She had one notable scene in Season 7 when she went on a date with visiting chef Jamie. Will her role be finally expanded? And are you ready to finally introduce a gay couple on Virgin River in a meaningful way?
SMITH: Hannah, it’s great that she’s a character that has been around for as long as she has. I think it would be interesting to explore more of her character. We have so many characters right now, and I think I want to do it for the right reasons, and not just do it to do it. As far as Hannah’s romantic life, what we saw with Jamie was the most we’ve seen outside of just reference and dialog. I think it would be great to continue to grow that out.
Season 7 Takeaway
DEADLINE: What would you want viewers to take away from this season?
SMITH: Understanding the complexities of adoption on both sides of it. And I’m really proud of the resilience we got to show in Mel and Jack, I think it’s really inspiring, or at least that’s my intent, for it to be inspiring. There’s so much going on in the world right now that resilience keeps you going, and I think they are characters that do that beautifully.
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