Warning! SPOILERS ahead for the Virgin River Season 4 finale! Go sit with your sewing circle and come back one you’ve caught up!
It’s been an exciting few days for fans of the hit romantic drama, Virgin River, as Season 4 finally debuted last week as part of the 2022 Netflix TV schedule. While the Virgin River Season 3 ending left viewers with several cliffhangers to think about, one big one involved central couple Mel and Jack, and who was the father of her baby. Now, Mel’s portrayer, Alexandra Breckenridge, has opened up about why there’s a big baby reveal in the Virgin River Season 4 finale that’s great for Mel, but not so great for Jack.
What Did Virgin River’s Alexandra Breckenridge Say About Season 4's Baby Reveals?
So, as we all know, Mel did a rather impulsive thing in Virgin River Season 3, after she and Jack broke up, by going to Los Angeles and having herself implanted with one of the embryos she and her husband, Mark, had frozen before his death. The ending of that season saw Mel have to tell an attempting-to-propose Jack that she was pregnant and that the kid might not be his.
Well, in the Season 4 finale, they get confirmation that Jack is, in fact, Mel’s baby daddy, and Alexandra Breckenridge recently told TV Line how she felt about that storyline and how it impacted her thoughts on Jack’s other big baby plot:
[Mel] really doesn’t want to have Mark’s baby. She’s moving forward and needs to leave that part of her life behind her. I was gunning for that storyline. I was adamant that it shouldn’t be Mark’s baby…I was also like, ‘I think Charmaine having [Jack’s] kids is absolutely bananas as well. I got my wishes at the end of the season, because that wasn’t really the plan for a minute. I think they were planning to have them go the other direction. I was like, ‘You’re all insane!'
Breckenridge makes two really good points here, right? Part of the reason that Mel and Jack broke up in Season 3 is because Mel really wanted to try again to have a baby, despite the past trouble she’d had getting pregnant and carrying a pregnancy to term with Mark. But, of course, Jack was already stressed from trying to deal with having twins with an increasingly problematic Charmaine, and he told Mel he simply wasn’t ready to be a dad many times over by two different women at the same time. Which, you know, was a totally fair feeling for Jack to have.
One of the things I was very excited to see in Virgin River Season 4 was Charmaine losing her complete and total mind when she found out that Mel was pregnant. While that didn’t happen, we do get Charmaine at peak freak out when she begins to deliver her twins, Mel and Jack arrive to help her, and she finally cops to the fact that Jack is not the father of her babies! And, while it seems like this would be a giant win for both Mel and Jack (considering how incredibly difficult Charmaine had been), Breckenridge points out that it’s likely not going to be so simple for Jack:
Being betrayed on such a massive scale has to come with anger and hurt. He invested himself emotionally and mentally and financially in having these babies. He was really committed. It’s going to be hard, I think, for Jack to let that go.
Hard, indeed! Luckily, Virgin River has already been renewed for Season 5, and should show up on Netflix next year, meaning that we’ll probably get to see the fallout that that emotional baby reveal had on Jack when the show returns.
