Season 6 Finale Ending, Charmaine, Doc’s Clinic, Explained (Exclusive)

(Warning: The following contains MAJOR spoilers for Virgin River Season 6.)

What happened to Charmaine (Lauren Hammersley)?! It’s one of those cliffhangers that Virgin River left us at the end of season 6, which is now streaming on Netflix.

A lot happened in the last episode of the season, including shocking Mike (Marco Grazzini). free to Brie (Zibby Allen), even though he knows about her connection with Brady (Benjamin Hollingsworth). But what had Mel (Alexandra Breckenridge) and Jack’s (Martin Henderson) attention the day after their wedding was the fact that Charmaine was MIA from the ceremony. And then Jack went over to her house to see what was going on, only to find the door open, signs of a struggle, and something it shocked him in the nursery. The good news? What showrunner Patrick Sean Smith told TV Insider about that cliffhanger.

“I would say the twins are safe. I would be worried about Charmaine,” he admitted. “I feel like after Season 5 with the miscarriage, I want to promise that no babies will be harmed in the production of this show in the future, but the circumstances are messed up, and Charmaine is at the center of it, which is where she usually finds herself, in the middle of a mess, right?”

As Hollingsworth pointed out to us, “She’s a focal point of that whole crime element.”

The father of Charmaine’s twins is local gang leader Calvin (David Cubitt), against whom she sought a restraining order in Season 6. Hollingsworth doesn’t know what happened to Charmaine, but his money is that Calvin is involved somehow.

Netflix

“I feel like Brady probably has a bone to pick with Calvin as well, so it would be fun to see him join the search party. I always like missions that he can go on with Jack and Preacher (Colin Lawrence).” added Hollingsworth. “I think it would be really fun for them to get their marines on and go and do some, I don’t know, damage.”

The cliffhanger where Jack looks at something the audience doesn’t see was always the plan to end Season 6 — and Henderson is in the dark, too.

“I saw a take where he did it perfectly, and then he broke and looked at the camera and he said, ‘Why didn’t they write what’s on the other side of this door?'” Smith recounted. “For all that he had to play in his face because he didn’t have the details of what was happening on the other side of it, he was a pro.”

The good news? We’ll get answers as soon as Season 7 begins. “When we pick up in Season 7, there’s a time jump of maybe two hours, so we pick up again at that moment and keep running,” Smith revealed. “I love having that momentum from one season to the next.”

Another question that Season 7 will have to answer is what will happen to Doc’s (Tim Matheson) license and clinic. His actions were questioned during a house call and his driver’s license has been suspended pending an investigation. But as Hope (Annette O’Toole) revealed, a woman on Grace Valley Hospital’s board shared plans to bring their network into Virgin River. (That woman thought she was just talking to the mayor, not Doc’s wife.) They want the clinic.

“One thing that I think is a really special opportunity for our show is, even though we’re not a traditional medical procedural, we still have the medical perspective that we have through the series and getting to run that through the lens of a small town practice compared to Grey’s Anatomy and all the other shows that are about big hospitals, it feels like there’s a new opportunity for us to kind of look at the current state of medicine and how it might affect these smaller practices,” Smith explained. “There’s kind of an overarching theme in Season 7 where the outside is invading this little slice of heaven, and that’s some of the tension there.”

One person who definitely needed medical attention this season was Mel’s biological father, Everett (John Allen Nelson). The two worked on their relationship all season – and then he had a heart attack right before her wedding. He still managed to make it to the ceremony for a special performance of a song he finished for her.

There were no discussions about killing Everett, Smith revealed, because “I feel like it would have been kind of pointless to introduce him to kill him, almost cruel, but we didn’t originally intend for him to have the health scare that as he had later.” Instead, making the “final speed bumps” ahead of the wedding, it “just felt perfect for Mel at the time to go on this emotional journey with her biological father and then have this confluence of events that result in she tapped back into the fear she has of the loss she once had, and trying to celebrate her wedding day just felt like kind of the perfect way to bring it all together.”

Other loose ends ahead: Lizzie’s (Sarah Dugdale) pregnancy and some MIA character this season. The good news? Don’t expect Lizzie to be as pregnant as Charmaine was. Rather, Smith “expects” she’ll give birth in Season 7. And even though the season began with Preacher on trial for his role in what happened to Paige’s (Lexa Doig) abusive ex, she didn’t show up. And there are “no plans” to see her again, the showrunner said.

What did you think of this season’s twists? What do you think happened to Charmaine? Let us know in the comments section below.

Virgin RiverSeasons 1-6, Streaming Now, Netflix (Season 7, TBA)

— Reporting by Avery Thompson