Virgin River is almost back for season 7 after ending on a major cliffhanger for Charmaine.
During the season 6 finale, which aired in December 2024, Lauren Hammersley‘s divisive character appeared to go missing when her home was found ransacked. Charmaine and her twin babies were gone, which caused concern among fans about whether they were taken — or if something more sinister took place.
Hammersley, 45, hinted she still didn’t have any answers about what’s to come after sharing a text exchange with Virgin River showrunner Patrick Sean Smith via Instagram in February 2025.
“Am I dead?” she wrote in the screen grabs. “It’s OK if I’m dead I just need to know if I should start putting resumes out at Wendy’s or something.”
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Hammersley also offered a creative way for her character to go out, adding, “So … IF Charmaine dies this year, could you please drown her in the river? I think that would be EPIC.”
Based on the book series written by Robyn Carr, Virgin River centers around the lives of residents living in a small town in Northern California, including Mel (Alexandra Breckenridge) and her love interest, Jack (Martin Henderson). The series also stars Colin Lawrence, Annette O’Toole, Tim Matheson, Benjamin Hollingsworth, Sarah Dugdale, Zibby Allen, Marco Grazzini, Mark Ghanimé and Kai Bradbury.
Before returning on Thursday, March 12, the show left several characters in limbo. Mel and Jack finally got married — but they were thrown for a loop when a teen girl asked them to adopt her baby.
There was also a love triangle involving exes Brie (Allen) and Brady (Hollingsworth), who slept together. Brie broke the infidelity news to her boyfriend Mike (Grazzini) — only for him to propose to her.
Smith, meanwhile, didn’t have much to say when asked about where the show was going — or about Charmaine’s future.
“Charmaine has found herself in the middle of a mess, which is a place where she tends to reside and it pulls our character into it,” he exclusively told Us Weekly in December 2024. “Not just Jack and Mel, but there are some other characters that find themselves pulled into it as well.”
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Smith also weighed in on the chances of more flashbacks after season 6 introduced Everett’s (John Allen Nelson) love story with Mel’s mom, Sarah, who died when she was 11 years old.
“[It would] expand Sarah and Everett’s story more while also expanding and learning more about the history of Virgin River,” Smith told Us. “One reference that was made in the pilot that had never really been explored before was Hope says that the McCrae Cabin is a place that people within 50 miles know all about, which implies there she has a sort of family legacy to this area that we haven’t really gotten to scratch the surface of.”
Smith said that the Sarah and Everett flashbacks are just the beginning of “expanding the Virgin River-verse.”
“When we committed to the idea of introducing Everett, it felt like a great opportunity as somebody who we know has resided in the area but has kind of removed and isolated himself from the community to have this history and have this relationship to this town and to this area,” Smith explained, adding that it “felt like an opportunity that we could introduce a new couple, which the show has done fairly consistently over the course of the seasons, and not inherit another couple that we have to keep servicing in the present.”
Virgin River is currently streaming on Netflix. Season 7 premieres Thursday, March 12.
