Please welcome Mr. and Mrs. Sheridan to the dance floor!
In the Virgin River Season 6 finale, everyone’s favorite restaurateur Jack Sheridan (Martin Henderson) and nurse practitioner Melinda Monroe (Alexandra Breckenridge) finally say “I do” at a grand wedding fit for the whole town — and that’s after they say private vows to each other at a secluded spot by the river. Basically, it’s two weddings in one.
It’s only fitting that the couple, who’ve been engaged since Season 4, get such a to-do — after all, we’ve spent six seasons watching them fall deeper in love. But now might be the time for even more of Mel and Jack’s dreams to come true, as a pathway to parenthood potentially reopens thanks to an expectant mother in town.
Also in Season 6, Jack’s lawyer sister, Brie (Zibby Allen), defends Jack’s best friend, Preacher (Colin Lawrence), in court for his role in the disappearance of Paige’s ex. Brie is excellent at her job, and Preacher only helped his friend in self-defense, so he’s finally rid of his legal troubles. Lizzie (Sarah Dugdale) and Denny (Kai Bradbury) continue to prepare for their own baby, while Hope (Annette O’Toole) and Doc (Tim Matheson) learn of a potential new threat to Doc’s practice. Mel bonds more with her birth father, Everett (John Allen Nelson), and we meet younger versions of Mel’s parents, Sarah (Jessica Rothe) and Everett (Callum Kerr), in flashbacks.
Read on to find out more about the drama-filled events of Virgin River Season 6 — including the return of a familiar face! — plus a little more about what’s next for your favorite small-town residents. And if you’re already done Season 6, Season 7 is now streaming on Netflix. Check out the Season 7 ending explainer here.
Yes! “There’s so many feelings about Mel and Jack finally getting married, I don’t even know where to start!” Breckenridge tells Tudum on set. “It’s a huge wedding. I was surprised about that, to be honest with you. I thought it was going to be quite small and intimate by a riverside somewhere.”
The couple actually have two very different experiences on their wedding day: a quiet moment for themselves before the pomp and circumstance of the town wedding. And while we never really doubted Jack and Mel would make it down the aisle, “It wouldn’t be a drama if you didn’t have conflict and anticipation,” Henderson tells Tudum. The couple escape to the woods alone to commit themselves to each other, but “of course, we give the audience what they really want. They return, and the ceremony takes place without a hitch.”
It’s a real possibility. At the end of the finale, one of Mel's patients — a woman who’d planned to place her baby with a local family — tells Mel that the couple has pulled out of the adoption, and she wants to place her baby in Virgin River with Mel and Jack.
“We obviously saw the tragedy with the miscarriage in Season 5, and Mel ultimately deciding that with all the past trauma that she’s experienced around not being able to conceive or losing babies, she’s done,” Henderson says. “It hurts her too much. I think it was really interesting to see the couple have to go through something so dark together and then find a way through that actually made them closer and stronger. Out of that is born this idea that they can still have their dream, [but] it just might look a little different.”
The experience of adoption is close to showrunner Patrick Sean Smith’s heart, because he and his husband adopted. “Looking at alternative forms of becoming parents is important,” he says. “I feel like I’ve always only seen adoption as this very simple transaction of ‘she wants a baby, and you don’t want your baby.’ But it’s much more complex than that. So I want to see a really special journey between Mel and Jack as they come to discover the baby that was meant for only them.”
Smith says, “Currently we call it the love rectangle, with the Lark of it all.”
Last season, Brie began dating Mike (Marco Grazzini) while Brady (Benjamin Hollingsworth) struck up a relationship with Lark (Elise Gatien) that seemed promising — until we found out Lark was also cooking something up with Jimmy (Ian Tracey). This season, though, it’s clear that Lark has real feelings for Brady. Or, given Lark’s hasty exit from town and Brady’s $0 bank balance, maybe she doesn’t.
“I think it was really fun to reveal at the end of Season 5 that Lark might have a hidden agenda that Brady’s not privy to,” Smith says. “I loved seeing Brady’s redemption in Season 5. It felt earned after all the missteps that he had along the way. But for me, once you get a character to a good, solid place, you have to pull the rug out. And Lark is the rug-puller. That always keeps hope alive between Brie and Brady.”
By the end of the season, Brie and Brady’s on-again, off-again romance seems to be on again. There’s something between these two that just won’t die. Brie asks Mike to move in with her, but then she sleeps with Brady and is unsure whether she should commit herself to Mike or break it off with both of them so nobody gets hurt.
But someone’s definitely going to get hurt. The wedding festivities inspire Mike, who suspects something is going on with Brie, to propose to her — and she confesses her transgression. Meanwhile, Brady’s reeling after discovering that Lark and her daughter, Hazel, have skipped town with all of his money.
Thankfully, yes. “It felt novel for them to have a season where they’re not worried about their health,” Smith says. “Because Hope had a heart attack in the third episode of the first season, and then Doc’s macular degeneration, and then her traumatic brain injury. I was like, what if they’re just healthy?”
And while they do squabble before the wedding, that only makes them more charming. “It’s fun to see them fight!” Smith says. “It was how the series started, and there was something so delightful in how they would bump up against each other and how that looked, and it was charged. Annette and Tim are so good at it that — it was fun to see a glimmer of that again.”
If Kaia (Kandyse McClure) hadn’t made it clear she wanted to be with Preacher when she got hired as the new Virgin River fire chief, she definitely proved it when she stood by him through a complicated criminal trial. But the romance in the air around Mel and Jack made her realize she’s still processing the failure of her first marriage and isn’t sure she wants to make such a commitment again. Preacher makes it clear he wants to be with Kaia in whatever way works for them, and they end the season understanding that while marriage isn’t off the table, it isn’t currently on it, either. In fact, they’re probably not even near the table anyway.
While Doc and Hope get a respite this season, Muriel dives headfirst into cancer treatments. “As people get to a certain age, there are health issues that present themselves,” Smith says. “It felt like there were opportunities to bond people through somebody going through something potentially life-threatening [like a cancer diagnosis]. And especially with the sewing circle, the aspirational idea of having that group of friends that show up for one another in a crisis like this felt like a great opportunity.”
The other bright side? Muriel’s sunny attitude. “To have a character like Muriel go through something like this, we wanted to show a positive outlook through it as opposed to it being dark and heavy and melodramatic and doom and gloom,” Smith adds.
While Lizzie and Denny are happily expecting their first child together, Lizzie’s first Virgin River boyfriend returns to town for a quick visit before shipping out to the Marines. Not only does this allow exes Lizzie and Ricky to find peace, but it also allows Jack to flex his mentor muscles as Ricky confesses how scared he is of heading into conflict.
“I was excited to bring Ricky back,” says Smith. “Just as Lizzie’s dealing with adult issues, Ricky’s dealing with real adult issues, and they were able to come back into each other’s lives and support each other in a way that wasn’t too fraught, given their previous relationship. I was excited about getting an opportunity to see what Ricky and Lizzie can mean [to] each other moving forward as special people in each other’s lives that don’t have to be romantic.”
Part of Jack’s evolving Virgin River storyline has been his struggle to confront his PTSD after combat. By giving advice to Ricky, Jack is able to continue to deal with his own complicated feelings.
“Rather than say, ‘Ah, just harden up, you got to be a soldier,’ Jack admits his own fears that he had — that I think anybody would have with the idea of bullets being shot at you,” Henderson says. “They bond over that, and Jack sends him on his way but with a bit of a heavy heart. He feels quite responsible for that decision, knowing how much his military experience cost him emotionally, and [it] continues to haunt him today.
“I think he’s divided — not only about Ricky’s fate but also, it starts to recontextualize his own relationship with his military experience. And that informs how he then approaches his wedding, and ultimately he makes the decision to embrace it fully in order to move on into his future with Mel in a way that he feels more whole, rather than completely conflicted about his past.”
“It felt like another way to look at the town, but on a totally different level and getting to see its origins as well,” Smith says. “Getting to look at a different romantic relationship but still in the world of Virgin River is exciting. I think with Mel and Jack, they’ve gone through so much, and to get to see another couple in the same universe dealing with the ups and downs of a love story just feels like a fresh opportunity. And I think the time period is sexy. Virgin River is beautiful, [whether it’s] in the ’70s or today.”
After some drama about who will walk Mel down the aisle and later a health scare, Everett makes it to the ceremony and performs the song he wrote about her mother. Not only is Mel able to learn more about a part of her past, but she’s also able to explore the strength of the new relationships she’s formed in Virgin River.
“The biggest test of that I always saw is Joey [Mel’s sister, played by Jenny Cooper], where it’s only natural that Joey would start to feel that she’s losing her sister to this town,” Smith says. “She’s losing this sister to Brie, who’s going to be Mel’s sister-in-law, and Mel’s now embracing this stranger-to-Joey as her father. At the end of the day, bringing in Everett was always a way to deepen and to challenge Mel and Doc’s relationship, to see how special their relationship is.”
It took six seasons for Mel and Jack to tie the knot, and there’s no reason to think that married life will be boring for them. “We’ve only just begun to see Mel and Jack function as a married couple, which is exciting,” Smith says. Season 7 will “explore the honeymoon phase for them as they’re building their lives on the farm, which can come with its own obstacles. Mel came to Virgin River expecting the cabin to be farmhouse chic, and now she’s living in a farmhouse. What does that mean for her character? She continues to be a fish out of water and [is] constantly taking herself out of her comfort zone.” And then, of course, there’s “taking Mel and Jack’s parenthood journey to the next level of exploring adoption.”
And don’t forget Denny and Lizzie, who are expecting their first child. “As we get into Season 7, the baby will be born, and then they’re dealing with a newborn in the same house with Hope and Doc, which has its own host of other problems.”
Season 6 of Virgin River is streaming on Netflix.
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