This post contains spoilers about the season three finale of Netflix‘s Virgin River. Virgin River ended its third season with a double dose of drama. After a brief yet painful breakup, Jack (Martin Henderson) decides to take it to the next level with Mel (Alexandra Breckenridge) and asks her to marry him. However, instead of saying yes, Mel drops a major bomb: she’s pregnant and she doesn’t know if Jack is the father or if it’s one of the fertilized embryos from her dead husband Mark (Daniel Gillies).
This major twist threw fans for a loop, but Virgin River‘s stars were blown away as well when they read the finale. “I’m trying to think about how Jack would feel about this — it’s obviously such a giant bombshell,” Henderson told TVLine, explaining that “Dude!” was his gut reaction. “Because it was at the end of the episode and the season, we didn’t really get a chance for the characters to explore what that information will do to them. We’ll save that for a potential Season 4, but it’s a very effective cliffhanger. It’s nice and juicy, but it’s a big pill to swallow. She left town for, like, a day or two, so it was rather unexpected, to say the least. But just like Jack getting shot, it’s one more big question mark hanging over these characters.”
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Breckenridge also expressed some reservations about Mel’s secret insemination. “When we were filming and I was reading the scripts, I was skeptical about that storyline at first,” Breckenridge told TVLine. “If Mel is willing to go through with that, she must really believe that there’s no hope for her and Jack at this point. It’s a huge thing for a person to do, and it shows just how much she wants to become a mother. When you’re under emotional duress, you act in ways you wouldn’t normally.”
However, Breckenridge eventually came around to this dramatic development. “It ties itself together, and it makes more sense to me at the end,” she concluded. “While I was going through it, I was like, ‘What is Mel doing? This is a crazy thing to do!’ That goes to show that, as an actor, you have to trust in the process and in the writers to take you on the journey. That was what I learned.” Between the paternity question and the persistent mystery of who shot Jack, Netflix had better hurry up and renew Virgin River for Season 4.
