If the crowd in the Virgin River Season 7 Founder’s Day soirée seemed extra cheerful, that’s because the finale event, which took place during the final week of filming in Vancouver, served as a real-life celebration of the season for the cast and crew. Dozens of extras — including some crew members — gathered on a farm in British Columbia for a joyous, sunny day featuring wood carving, gold panning, horses, covered wagons, period costumes, and barbecue.
Filming each season’s town-wide event is an occasion that Colin Lawrence, who plays Preacher, looks forward to. It’s what he calls “the diamond of the season” — not in a Bridgerton sense, but in the sense that, as Lawrence puts it, “you actually feel like you’re going to an event that happens every year. That’s what’s so amazing about our set decorators and the directing and the writing and how they put it all together. It’s a lot of fun. I love doing these moments.”
On screen, it’s at Founder’s Day that bar owner Jack Sheridan (Martin Henderson) and chef Preacher sign the papers to dissolve their professional partnership, so Preacher can start a restaurant of his own. And it’s there that Doc (Tim Matheson) — after finally being absolved of wrongdoing in a past case that was under investigation — decides that partnering with Grace Valley’s well-funded hospital to open a local clinic in Virgin River might offer residents better quality healthcare than his own rural practice can provide.
Season 7 also saw Lizzie (Sarah Dugdale) and Denny (Kai Bradbury) welcome their daughter, Koko; Brie (Zibby Allen) and Mike (Marco Grazzini) break up as a couple but team up to find Charmaine (Lauren Hammersley) after she’s kidnapped; Doc and Hope (Annette O’Toole) experience their own relationship issues; and Brie and Brady (Benjamin Hollingsworth) get back together.
And of course, newlyweds Mel (Alexandra Breckenridge) and Jack work to get their new farm up and running — and find time to go on a romantic Mexican honeymoon before finally becoming the adoptive parents to a son born with a heart condition requiring specialized treatment and plenty of time in the NICU. “Most of Mel’s life in Season 7 is chewed up by building a house [and wondering], ‘Am I going to have this baby or not?’ It’s what she’s been wanting for so many years of her life,” Breckenridge tells Tudum. “She really does an excellent job at rolling with the punches through the season.”
Read on to find out more about exactly how those punches landed for our favorite small-town residents in Season 7 of Virgin River, and learn more about Season 8 here.
Yes, Marley (Rachel Drance) becomes the birth mother for Mel and Jack’s son. In Season 6, Mel began treating the young mother-to-be, who had planned to place the child for adoption. But the couple who was originally slated to raise the baby backed out. Then, Marley’s ex-boyfriend showed up begging to be let back into her life. By the end of the season, the young couple had decided the best decision for everyone would be to place the baby with Mel and Jack — so he could still grow up in Virgin River. As Marley tells Mel and Jack, “It was clearly meant to be.”
But the back-and-forth waffling is “very true to the process, because the baby isn’t yours until all is said and done,” showrunner Patrick Sean Smith tells Tudum. “For Mel and Jack, who’ve both experienced trauma in their respective lives — and as a couple, with a miscarriage — everything is more fraught for them. It’s scarier to get emotionally invested in things when you’ve experienced disappointment and loss before. By the end of the season, it’s a celebration of their resilience and their spirit, both as individuals and as a couple.”
Marley begins experiencing alarming symptoms at the Founder’s Day celebration, requiring specialized medical care only available via the high-tech Grace Valley clinic. Doctors discover that the baby has a heart issue, and there’s a specialist for that very condition in Mel’s old hometown of Los Angeles. Once Marley and the parents-to-be arrive at the hospital in LA, they learn the specialist in question is actually Mel’s former coworker and ex-boyfriend, Eli (Austin Nichols).
At the very end of the finale, Mel coaches Marley through delivery before baby, mom, and dad hop in an ambulance to the NICU under Eli’s care. “I’m hoping that at some point they get to some kind of normalcy, but I am excited to see Mel as a mother,” Breckenridge tells Tudum. “I think we’ve anticipated that moment for far too long.”
The young couple had to grow up fast — “before we were just dealing with love triangles and relationships and more teenager, young adult stuff,” Dugdale says — but Season 7 sees them facing difficult conversations and even more adult problems.
While Denny’s Huntington’s diagnosis has caused the duo to face some serious discussions about the future, the birth of their daughter, Koko, dug up more issues — like Lizzie’s very serious postpartum anxiety. Says Bradbury, “Last season was Denny needing the support from Lizzie, and then we have the tables turning, and we get to see the other side of that.”
Virgin River Season 7 saw two births, but it also the death of a vital character in the opening 5 minutes: Calvin (David Cubitt/Josh Blacker). Charmaine was the prime suspect, but Brie knew that radio silence from her meant something was very wrong. Together with Mike, they discovered that Charmaine’s old boss had held a torch for his ex-employee and he was the one who shot Calvin — before kidnapping Charmaine and locking her in his house.
“What [Charmaine] has gone through in seven seasons and six months of story time is remarkable,” says showrunner Smith. “The show always had a crime element to it. We wanted to move away from the stuff we’d seen before with the pot camps and fentanyl and all of that, and tried to lean into the more personal stories, but still have that threat and those physical stakes. That found its way into Season 7 through Charmaine and Brie and Mike.”
Luckily, when Charmaine was kidnapped both Brie and Mike knew that something was amiss, and they didn’t give up trying to find her. Eventually, she and the twins were rescued from being held captive at her old boss’s house.
Yes, despite working more closely together than ever in Season 7, Mike and Brie part ways. The breakup comes even as Mike ended Season 6 by proposing to Brie despite knowing she’d cheated on him with Brady, which was “Mike’s way of expressing his capacity for forgiveness, given how strongly he feels for her,” explains Smith. “But at the end of the day, it was more about getting together than really accepting Brie for who she is and where she was in her life at that time, which ultimately led to their undoing. When they’re forced to work together, it then forces them to confront the real issues in their relationship outside of the infidelity.”
Yes, by the end of Season 7, Brie and Brady reunite. But they’ve been apart long enough to be able to bring new perspectives to their relationship, says Smith. “The thing that felt interesting was Brie’s capacity to grow, to not try to return to the woman she was before her assault. Accept herself for the woman that she is right now, because that’s who Brady wants, and she’s learning to accept him for who he is.”
Just because Jack bought out Preacher’s share in the bar doesn’t mean they’ll no longer be best friends. “Anyone that’s familiar with Preacher’s journey from Seasons 1 to 6, he’s always put everyone’s needs ahead of his own,” Lawrence tells Tudum. “For this season, he’s had this moment where he’s like, ‘You know what? Preacher first.’ Preacher has goals, growth, desire that he wants to achieve, and this is something that he wants to entertain.”
Smith says that Preacher’s journey fits in with the show’s alternate title. “It’s not called Virgin River everywhere, because the title didn’t translate. In some countries, it’s called A Place to Dream. This season really focuses on a lot of the dreams of some of our characters. For Jack, it’s the farm; with Preacher, he’s starting to dream a little bit bigger than we’ve seen him do before.”
And even more importantly, Preacher’s girlfriend, Kaia (Kandyse McClure), has decided she’s ready to live in Virgin River permanently. “It’s a cool way to dig in deeper into her character as well as their relationship,” Smith says.
No, Doc doesn’t close his clinic or lose his license — but he has to figure out how to operate it in a new way. Rural medicine is difficult at the best of times, but when complicated medical situations arise, treating patients with rigor is challenging. So when the medical board investigates Doc and Grace Valley Hospital attempts to open their own clinic in Virgin River, he worries about the future of his practice.
In recent seasons, Virgin River has explored “what it means to be a doctor in a small town, and what integrity that takes,” says Smith. “When that’s questioned — especially for Doc, who prides himself on being a doctor who cares about his patients first and foremost, who sometimes doesn’t ask for payment, will take a pie instead — he’s up against what corporate medicine is starting to take away from the medical experience.”
But by the end of the season, Doc sees the benefit of partnering with Grace Valley. As Doc’s top employee, Mel isn’t necessarily threatened by the new leadership but rather incensed that they’re messing with a good thing. “I think she’s more angry at them for trying to take over than anything,” Breckenridge says.
Much to Hope’s chagrin, the Founder’s Day celebration takes place on her ex-husband Roland’s (John Ralston) farm. But by the time the event comes around, Hope has spent a great deal of time with Roland working through lingering feelings about her father’s death. The former couple had a falling out, but in Season 7 they both attempt to put those old emotions behind them.
“This season we introduced for Hope this animosity that she has toward her father,” Smith says. “We’ve always established that the McCrea Cabin is known for 50 miles, and begged the question of why. Who was the McCrea family? So we build out more of Hope’s backstory and her personal history in the county, as well as her relationship with Roland, which unfortunately threatens her marriage with Doc.”
Hope and Doc end the season with a blowout fight that they’ll continue to work through in Season 8. “It’s not good. Doc is relegated to returning back to the clinic, which is where he was living at the beginning of the series. Hope has found herself back at Roland’s ranch, where she learns all of this interesting backstory about her father. There’s definitely a huge rift between Doc and Hope, and I think a big question in Season 8 is, ‘Will they find their way back to each other?’”
The final moments of Season 7 deliver a classic Virgin River cliffhanger as we cut between Mel and Jack’s joy (and terror) as their long-awaited son is born and swiftly whisked away to the NICU, and Brady is involved in a serious and potentially devastating motorcycle accident. Unfortunately, you’re going to have to wait to find out more about the outcome of both major events. “That will also play out in Season 8, whether he survived the accident or not,” confirms Smith.
