Virgin River Season 5: Does Lizzie Get Pregnant In The Books?
Lizzie (Sarah Dugdale) is a teenager on the go, and her last few years in "Virgin River" have been memorable. While her puppy love romance with Ricky (Grayson Maxwell Gurnsey) has ended in light of his enlistment in the military, Lizzie has moved on. She's landed a position as Hope's (Annette O'Toole) new assistant, and she's taken up a romance with Doc's (Tim Matheson) newfound son from a previous relationship, Denny Cutler (Kai Bradbury). A fresh wrinkle has recently made her life even more interesting; Lizzie is now happily pregnant with Denny's child.
It's something that Lizzie goes through in Robyn Carr's "Virgin River" series of books — but things come out quite differently for the character in that version of events. In the book series, Ricky is the father of Lizzie's baby; they're both years younger than their series counterparts — and Lizzie eventually suffers a miscarriage. The jury's still out on whether or not Lizzie will carry her child to term in the series, or even as to whether or not Denny — who has Juvenile Huntington's Disease — will survive to meet the baby. Viewers will have to wait and see what the future has in store for them. However, in the meantime, one of the series' co-showrunners is very confident about the new pathway Lizzie is on.
In the books, Lizzie ends up with Ricky
Speaking with Glamour Magazine in October 2023, executive producer and showrunner for "Virgin River," Patrick Sean Smith, explained that figuring out who Lizzie is as a character as she enters her late teens and approaches adulthood has helped to shape her actions and storyline in a fresh way. "[O]nce it felt like we had a sense of what her character's mission was, it was much easier to write for her. She felt a little amorphous, but I think that that suited where she was before when she was young and lost," Smith explained. He went on to add that Lizzie's mentorship relationship with Hope will help to broaden Lizzie's character and mature her.
Whoever Lizzie ends up becoming after she comes through her pregnancy, she might not end up with Denny at all if the show follows the continuity of the book series. In the book world, Lizzie and Ricky grow up and separate. Ricky serves in the Navy but returns wounded to Virgin River — and he and Lizzie get back together as adults, ultimately settling into a happy marriage. No matter who Lizzie ends up with in the end, in both the book and series versions of "Virgin River," she at least has Hope, Doc, and all of her other friends to stand beside her when times get tough.