Season 5 Part 1 of Virgin River featured more heartbreak for Mel (Alexandra Breckenridge)

as she suffered a miscarriage while expecting her first child with Jack (Martin Henderson)

having previously lost her baby with her late husband Mark in a stillbirth. The plot development,

which happened in Episode 5 — the first in a two-episode arc about a massive wildfire threatening Virgin River that also featured Brie’s rape trial — has divided fans.

Due to the SAG-AFTRA strike, Breckenridge had not had a chance to weigh in on the polarizing storyline — and Season 5 as a whole. In an interview with Deadline, she reveals that Mel originally was not supposed to lose her baby, which changed when Patrick Sean Smith came in as Virgin River‘s new showrunner for Season 5. Breckenridge and Smith both explain why they think having Mel miscarry was the right decision for the character, and Breckenridge speaks about the painful personal experience of coming close to losing her own child that helped her bring authenticity to her portrayal. She also brings up previous storyline and scene changes that she had helped bring about.

Additionally, Breckenridge shares insights into Mel and Jack’s fateful hike where they have one last post-miscarriage fight in the rain before she accepts his vision of a family that does not have to be biological.

Breckeridge and Smith also address the big Part 1 cliffhanger that Mel’s biological father is a man from Virgin River, whom her mother had had an affair, and she also teases Mel’s search for him in the upcoming Christmas episodes, coming out Nov. 30. After you watch the holiday special, check back for Deadline’s coverage, which includes Smith dissecting the finale’s biggest shockers and dropping Season 6 teasers as well as more insight from Breckenridge.

What was Breckenridge’s reaction when she heard the storyline of Mel’s pregnancy ending in a miscarriage?

ALEXANDRA BRECKENRIDGE: Our new showrunner Sean and I talked at length about it before they started writing, and he and I felt that it may come as a shock to a lot of fans who are not happy with the outcome but we both felt that telling the story of a woman who had the miracle baby is very… I feel like we go there a lot in television, especially in shows that are based in the format of escapism, and that’s what our show is to some extent.

But we felt like we were doing a disservice to the women who have had trouble conceiving and have fertility issues — which are so many women — and this storyline felt very real and very powerful for those women. So we both agreed that it was the right direction to go in for the character and to be able to tell that story.

I know that there are a lot of fans who are not happy, and I sympathize and I get it, I really get it. But I felt a responsibility to women who experience infertility especially, to be as grounded as humanly possible.

I hope that we told the story in an appropriate way, and I hope that those people that experienced it came with us and hopefully stayed for the rest of the storyline.

This was the second miscarriage on Virgin River within the span of just two seasons after Brie suffered one in Season 3. Why did new showrunner Smith and his writing team decide to put Mel and Jack through the traumatic experience?

PATRICK SEAN SMITH: I think for me, it just felt like the natural direction for it to go. I wanted to ground the show a little bit more, I think, this season more than the previous seasons. It had been such a part of her character’s experience that it was interesting to me for Jack to then experience it in the way that in Season 4 when he was dealing with his self medicating and alcohol that that was his way to cope with his trauma.

I thought that this would be a season that Jack would get a sense of what Mel had gone through so they could go through it together. And it felt like there was also an opportunity to show a couple going through a miscarriage differently than we had seen before.

Was successful pregnancy for Mel considered?

BRECKENRIDGE: We changed showrunners, and we have a lot of new writers. I think the original plan with our previous showrunner was to keep the pregnancy. But things in television change constantly. We did consider it, i think we all just felt that it was an important place to take [Mel and Jack]. I think that they’re going to start a family in the future in a different way. I think that that speaks to a lot of families, and I think that’s really heartwarming and beautiful, to understand that family is what you what you create around you, your family are your friends and adoptive family and it’s much bigger than biological. So I think that’s a powerful story point.

This is not the first time the storyline involving Mel’s pregnancy had been changed.

BRECKENRIDGE: In Season 4 originally the writers were going to have it be Mark’s baby. I was pretty upset about that. I was like, this is terrible, you can’t have Jack having twins with Charmaine and then Mel is having Mark’s baby. I was very vocal about it, I said if it is his, she should probably have a miscarriage.

And then by the end of the season, they changed it to Jack’s baby. This was still at a point where we didn’t think she was going to end up having a miscarriage. So the idea was that she would continue with the pregnancy, and that it would be the miracle baby, and I said, you can’t have her miracle baby be with her dead husband, I just can’t, sorry, I can’t.

I’m very opinionated, and, over the years, I’ve helped to reshape themes, Martin and I have worked on rewriting scenes together. That scene where I tell him that I love him was very different when I first got that draft. I started talking about Mark in the middle of it. And I was like, I can’t talk about my dead husband when I’m telling this man I love him. It doesn’t make sense, you’re going backwards. So, we worked on that a lot, it was stressful but I felt like the final product was sweet and endearing.

There’s been a lot of that over the years. Luckily we have a team of writers that are really honing in on trying to make things cohesive and smooth and more realistic, which I appreciate, so I feel like I’m doing a lot less of that now than I was.

In a Deadline interview, Martin Wood, director of Episode 5, which features Mel’s miscarriage, spoke of Breckenridge’s performance, praising her delivering a “beautifully emotional moment” with a reaction that was “so contained.” How did the subtle reaction come about, how did Breckenridge approach the scene and how did she prepare for it?

BRECKENRIDGE: I think it was just human instinct and empathy. I approached it as sort of a shock, I think she was in a little bit in shock. And I guess that’s where the subtlety came from, she doesn’t want to believe it. But she knows and then she goes into the office and uses the ultrasound to confirm it.

I’ve had personal experience; one of my children was very, very sick when he was young and could have died so I have a personal connection and understanding of the emotional loss of a child. When you’re a parent and you come so close to that edge of not having them anymore, I already experienced that in a different way, so I came into that scene reliving that experience. That’s how I approached it, because that’s what I know.

And that was the most real to me, just let myself go back to that emotional point, and how that felt, and being there with it. But then, having to pick yourself up and do something which is also kind of weirdly within the circumstances of what I had to go through at the time. I haven’t talked about that yet publicly, I will eventually. Yeah, I didn’t have to do a lot of quote unquote, acting, so to speak. In that moment, it was all just very real to me.

SMITH: I thought Alex played it beautifully, she and Martin both, I was so proud of their performances. I’ve received a lot of comments from women on social media who have been grateful for it; the representation of it is something that they’ve gone through, and it felt very real.

Mel kept the miscarriage a secret through the wildfire crisis until her scene with Jack after the danger had passed where she finally got to share the burden with him. Here is Breckenridge’s take on the emotional scene.

BRECKENRIDGE: The part of the character that I love is when she goes into work mode and she is able to put her own emotions aside in such a brilliant manner. I’ve known doctors, and I’ve known nurses, and I know that that is their operating basis. We’ve always given Mel that strength, so carrying that on through this episode was really important even though she had undergone such a trauma in the middle of all of this trauma.

But that moment when she sees Jack is the moment when she releases her emotions because that’s her best friend. She feels like she let him down, and she feels so guilty for it because she knew that, having a high risk pregnancy, her chances of carrying were not that high and she knows how much he wanted a family and how much he was invested in it. And she just crumbled into him.

But also in that moment, she knows that, however devastated he’s going to be, he also is going to be there for her to pick her up. and I think that speaks to how strong their relationship is.