What would somebody like Charmaine be doing with Calvin? And have we ever seen Calvin and Charmaine exist onscreen together at the same time?
It was hinted that Charmaine had some awareness of an area or a bar that Calvin was known to frequent. So it tied her to that area incidentally, but it also felt like, “Well, that's a seed. It's not too far out of left field.” Just the circumstances of the fact that she was upset with Jack at the time and he was starting to see Mel…. It did not seem outside the realm of possibility that Charmaine would find his mortal enemy and have revenge sex.
Will we see this in flashbacks?
I don't plan to, but it's not to say we couldn't.
Why did Charmaine bother telling him he was the father of her twins, given his past and the fact that he’s so evil? Will we get answers to that?
Yeah, and [you'll begin to] understand more what was going on with the Todd situation. It's really fun to find a method to the madness of the character that you don't know if there was clear intent before, but when you can find a way to explain it, I think it's worth it.
It was just such a bananas reveal, because after the first episode, Charmaine disappears for a bit, and we still didn’t have a clue who the father was. So I was just waiting for that story to come back around. As soon as she showed up at the carnival in the finale, I was like, Okay, here we go!
Game on! I love that you caught that.
She’s not there just for kicks and giggles. Something’s going to go down, and boy did it.
It's so fun. I was like, “We need to hint [it's him] with the burned hand and hear the clicking of his cane on the asphalt.” So it was just fun.
Let’s move on to the mystery of Mel’s father. One of the letters that Joey found is signed “Champ.” Should that be a clue for us?
It's a clue in the holiday episodes, and it's the only thing that Mel really has to go off of.
How much of that storyline will be explored in the holiday episodes?
The holiday episodes are a little bit lighter, and we wanted to play a little more comedy after the weight of this season. It felt like, if we're going to give a holiday gift to the audience, let's make it a fun one. So part of what Mel and Jack are going through in those two episodes is like the scavenger hunt through Virgin River trying to track down the man who is her biological father. They're going from clue to clue.
Did we always know then that Mel and Joey are half sisters?
No, it was an idea that I had where it just felt like a good opportunity to connect Mel more to the history of the town because your main character can only be a fish out of water for so long. Getting into hinting at how Mel came to Virgin River, was there some preexisting knowledge that she wasn't aware of when she was young that planted the name of this place?
