Virgin River boss reveals who will survive season 7 and what horror will happen next to the doctor’s clinic

[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for Virgin River Season 6.]

What happened to Charmaine (Lauren Hammersley)?! That’s one of the cliffhangers that Virgin River left us with at the end of Season 6, now streaming on Netflix.

A lot happened in the final episode of the season, including Mike (Marco Grazzini) shockingly proposing to Brie (Zibby Allen) even though he knows about her hookup 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 so Jack headed over to her house to see what was going on, only to find the door open, signs of a struggle, and something that 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 concerned 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 messy, and Charmaine’s at the center of it, which is where she tends to typically find herself, in the middle of a mess, right?”

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

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

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

That cliffhanger, with Jack looking at something that the audience doesn’t see, was always the plan to end of Season 6—and Henderson, too, is in the dark.

“I saw one take where he did it perfectly, and then he broke and looked at the camera, and he was like, ‘Why didn’t they write what’s on the other side of this door?’” shared Smith. “For all that he had to play in his face in not having the specifics 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 right back up in that moment and keep running,” Smith revealed. “I love having that momentum going from one season to the next.”

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

“One thing that I think that’s a really special opportunity for our show is, while we’re not a traditional medical procedural, we still have that medical perspective that we hold 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 major hospitals, it feels like there’s a fresh opportunity for us to look at the current state of medicine a little bit and how that can influence these smaller practices,” explained Smith. “There’s sort of an overarching theme of Season 7 of the outside invading this little slice of heaven, and that’s some of the tension there.”

Someone who certainly needed medical help 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 just 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 off Everett, Smith revealed, because “I feel like it would have been sort of pointless to introduce him to kill him, almost cruel, but we didn’t originally intend for him to have the health scare that he had later.” Instead, it was in crafting the “last speed bumps” ahead of the wedding that it “just felt perfect for Mel at that point to go on this emotional journey with her biological father and then have this confluence of events that results in her tapping back into the fear that she holds of the loss that she once had, and trying to celebrate her wedding day just felt like kind of a perfect way to bring it all together.”

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

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