What are you doing reading this intro? THREE MONTHS just passed in Jane’s Miami! WE DO NOT HAVE TIME FOR AN INTRO (I gotta write like I’m running out of time).
THIS WEEK’S MVP(arent)
I don’t know! Too much happened! I am very stressed out! Petra maybe! She’s really holding her shit together considering her only support system is a pair of narcissistic villains, and her only source of nutrition is Slovak pickles, and her momentary lapse in best-life judgment has resulted in TWINS. She’s going to a therapist! On her own! And leaning into the possibility of forgiveness from the Villanuevas! Oh, Petra. My fingers are crossed so hard for you.
BEST TELENOVELA TWIST
I DO NOT KNOW TOO MUCH HAPPENED I AM VERY STRESSED OUT
Magda blowing up her hand and eye, maybe, for the fact that it was such a minor incident in the whole scheme of everything else that happened between 9:00 and 9:59 that it didn’t even warrant a full on-screen explosion.
Runner-up: the backstabbing MFA BFF secret investigative gossip book twist. If we’d had any time for Wesley Whatshisface to make a real impression as an important part of Jane’s new life, this might have landed harder. As it is, his betrayal is not even half as interesting as Andi’s was last year. And hers was ultimately pretty forgettable! Still, f*cking Scott, man.
BEST PRODUCT PLACEMENT
PREVIOUSLY ON JANE THE VIRGIN
Jane was artificially inseminated, had the baby, survived the baby being kidnapped by the baby-daddy’s supervillain stepmom, and still found herself stuck in a dumb love triangle because contemporary American romance storytelling is drunk and needs to go home. She picked Michael, her ex-fiancé, over Rafael, her baby daddy, but immediately regretted her decision when Michael and his terrible temper and sense of entitlement came rolling up to Rafael *while he was holding Mateo’s baby seat* and punched him right in the face, hurting Mateo in the process. He also lost his job, because Sin Rostro his own bad detective skills and subpar professionalism. And now he’s been kidnapped by his ex-partner! Bye, Michael! Don’t let the door to all of Miami hit you on your way out! Also Petra knocked herself up with Rafael’s last pre-cancer sperm sample in a gambit to win him back, but found herself blackmailed into marrying her terrible arms-dealing ex, Milos. Dang.
THIS WEEK THIS QUARTER
If there is one thing that JtV excels at (there’s not; there’s a billion), it’s taking on something that on paper just should not work, and turning into television gold. It is a show about not one, but now TWO successful, unprofessionally administered artificial inseminations! It has Catholic grandmothers getting stoned while effectively and compassionately representing the nuanced struggle of immigrants and immigrant policy in the US! It has one lone twentysomething detective investigating the entirety of the criminal network run by Miami’s greatest supervillain since the 1980s! All of this could be entertaining, in any hands, but none of it should be Good Television™.
JtV doesn’t care. JtV will decide what can be Good, and it will make making it Good look easy. Which is why I shouldn’t have been surprised that this week’s race through the many milestones in Jane’s/Rafael’s/Petra’s lives over the course of three months—a race that on most shows would have come off as a slapdash, lazy way to kickstart each plot arc’s momentum into a new phase at BEST (ahem, Blacklist), and a quasi-clip show at worst (ahem, BLACKLIST)—was bracing and compelling.
On the one hand, I felt genuinely stressed and jittery the entire hour, with so many plot points and a moments of real character development whipping by with zero time for processing (this is a show that needs SO MUCH PROCESSING). On the other hand, though, losing all the processing time that any one of these arcs might have had in normal JtV mode (all of them put together could basically have fed this show through May sweeps, if we’re being honest) helped to underscore the fact that, just like in life, it isn’t the plots or conflicts themselves that matter, but rather the way we as fallible human beings react and grow in and around them. That’s the story. It may be (seriously bonkers) fun to stretch Jane’s crazy life out one day at a time and put every minuscule twist and turn under a beachy, pastel magnifying glass, but that’s not the point. The point is, time flies. We live. We grow. We tell the story.
And, it doesn’t hurt that this particular three-month story ended with Jane saying yes to a date with Rafael.
Yeah, I’m biased.
Anyway, here’s what happened over the course of three months:
Month One
Michael takes off to Mexico with Nadine, whom HE called, not vice versa. He blames Sin Rostro (cough) for everything that went wrong in his life (double cough) and so has recruited Nadine to help him go vigilante on Sin Rostro’s whole operation. Cool! I’m sure it will go well!
Jane apologizes to Rafael for letting Michael get into her head and not believe Raf’s side of things. Her being on the forgiveness-asking side is particularly helpful when the two of them immediately thereafter go to a meeting with an estate planner to discuss the logistics of the reality that Mateo is like, super rich, and will be for his whole life. The #richgetricher, but Jane’s not in a headspace to judge Rafael over this quirk of chance. The two start drafting a plan that will give Mateo the best chance to survive the perils of richesse.
Jane also starts grad school! Officially! And nothing about her new writing teacher or group makes my opinion of inherently snobby MFA programs any sunnier, especially as a means to finishing a novel—which is literally the first lesson Jane Gloríana (she’s not using her real name for obvious reasons) learns after making a terrible impression on her social media h8ing prof when rolling in late on her first day. Academia is the worst!
Also the worst, the television business, which gives and takes with no regard for anything but money.
What’s being taken from us now? The Passions of Santos. Yep, it’s a wrap on the most successful telenovela ever! Why? Who knows! Telenovela convention, I guess, which dictates that stories actually end, rather than running for four decades. Although one would have thought that the wrap on such a major show would have warranted at least as much stress as getting high ratings for the Make Love Week sweeps, which according to my calculations was like, yesterday in show time. I dunno! Santos is over, that’s all I can say. And Santos crew? They’re over, too, stolen by Ro’s first wife as she moves on to her new telenovela project that co-stars Ro’s archnemesis. I am sure that this will go well, too!
Month Two
In order to make up for her terrible first impression, Jane doubles down on her writing—even forgetting to focus on Mateo’s tummy time and ending up with a flat-headed baby who needs a medical helmet—and gets her first ever C. Her new professor sure isn’t charmed by her! It’s probably because he quit solving crime in Miami for like two hot seconds and came back to find the whole city flailing under the incompetent eye of Michael Cordero. That’d make anyone bitter! Also, social media. He sure hates it.
To try and make up for her terrible first MONTH of impression, then, Jane commits to spending her first night away from Mateo to go on a writing retreat with the rest of the class, who, it turns out, also have not been charmed by her. Why? Because, the very rude phone-addict Wesley informs her, they open up about personal stuff in class every week, and Jane Gloríana has kept completely mum. Exhausted from a month of feeling like a failure as both a mom and a writer, Jane, instead of felling him with a glare and reminding him that it’s a writing class, not group therapy, gives into this dumb peer pressure and regales them all with her *real* life story. And yay! Now Wesley is her dear friend who is most definitely not pumping her for the most juicy and publishable of details about the Solanos and Sin Rostro!
On the baby daddy front, Rafael is both picking up Jane’s slack at the weekly Musical Mommy (idk) class (omg how happy he looooooooooks) AND keeping fully abreast of Petra’s progress, the latter in spite of Milos’ horrendous, insulting existence. And big, unsurprising news: Petra’s having twin girls! Man, for a man who is both infertile and currently celibate, Raf sure gets the job done.
As for Petra, the twins news is just one overwhelming development of many. She has not had an easy pregnancy (she’s got that severe morning sickness Kate Middleton had, oh la la), and on top of it has had to deal with have 2,000 live grenades that Milos keeps failing at selling off as roommates since she got sham married. Things are so bad, she breaks down both starts therapy (!) and visits her mother in prison (!!), the latter who convinces her to butter Jane up and get the Villanueva blessing for her next parole hearing so Petra can finally have some reinforcement against the many horrors in her life. And yes, she recognizes that that reinforcement is in fact just one more horror, but a step at a time, ya know?
Meanwhile, Rogelio is struggling to find the perfect project with which to follow the success monster that was Santos. His grand idea? Mad Men: The Telenovela. It is played to be a completely ludicrous pipe dream from an out of touch diva, but let’s be real: that idea is gold. Just look at this very show’s pedigree! If crazy can come from the telenovela realm and be elevated to (screw you, subscription cable) Prestige TV, then Prestige TV can be adapted the opposite direction and elevated as Prestige Soap. But whatever. The network exec gives him the greenlight just to keep him happy, banking on the likelihood that Rogelio’s ego and lack of EP experience will run it into the ground soon enough, so that they can just move him to whatever series needs a ratings boost at that moment.
Month Three
Raf, after being told by Jane in Month Two that she still isn’t over Michael and so doesn’t want to start anything yet with Raf, because fairness, starts dating one of the other moms in the baby play group. Jane is weirded out by it, and weirded out by her weirded-out-ness, but insists on not standing in the way. She also insists on burning the candle at like twelve ends, including continuing to pump breast milk long after Mateo has weaned off of her (devastating Month Two milestone). This decision backfires and she gets boob-flu, which sounds like the worst thing ever, NO THANK YOU, and which also gives us/Rafael in a tux a chance to see what a horrendous bitch Sick!Jane is.
He is, obviously, completely charmed by this discovery. So charmed that he comes back from his charity gala date with Not Jane just to make sure our Jane is okay, and to discuss the need to be flexible with your plans as a parent. So Jane had planned to breastfeed for a year—it didn’t work out that way, and she is just making herself sick over trying to keep up with the pumping just to keep to that schedule. He wants her to be healthy, too! And so together they make their first big joint parenting decision. And that first one allows them to make more, like with the trust fund, which has haunted Jane for months (Baller!Mateo and OliverTwist!Mateo = gold). Their solution? To tie his trust fund money to a charity, so that every dollar he spends for himself gives a second dollar to charity. And because this is Jane, the final vision of future Charitable!Mateo doesn’t go to waste, with his chubby cheeks addressing the UN about the #62MillionGirls girls’ education crisis.
Charitable!Mateo? More like BallerSJW!Mateo, amirite?
Back at the Marbella, Magda’s presence has successfully scared Milos out of the country. Unfortunately, their plan to use his absence is scuttled when he appoints their former hostage, Ivan, to babysit them/the grenades in Milos’ absence. Petra and Magda successfully get Ivan out of the picture by sending copies of Milos’ internet crimes to the Czech authorities for a month, but one loose grenade manages to blow off Magda’s hand and eye, making her even worse company than usual. The only bright spot in Petra’s life turns out to be Jane, who really is warming to Petra and her plight, and not only assures Petra that motherhood will be okay and that not all parents have to be Magda, but manipulates things so that Petra just “happens” to swing by the Villanueva home to be a lovey-delivering parenting hero just as everyone is sitting down for Thanksgiving dinner, so that Jane can just “happen” to invite her to join them. And Petra’s face at this invitation? Gold. That woman breaks my heart.
The Thanksgiving meal serves as a capstone to the frantic FFWD of Jane’s life, and as it wraps up we get a sense of what the new, normally-paced plotlines are going to look like. Jane, moved by turkey and wine and time’s incessant passage, agrees to go on a real date with Rafael. Rogelio, reveling in the warm if weirdly laughter-filled reception of his scrapped- then privately-refinanced Hombres Locos project, gets a phone call from his lawyer and learns that Matthew Weiner (“Who???”) has issued a cease-and-desist. Petra’s newest brief moment of peace and optimism is against smashed to bits by some monster from her old life, as she returns to her suite to find Magda looming over Ivan, her hook and his neck dripping blood. And Michael? Resurfaces in the Miami police department, tanned and sand-worn and lurking in the dark as he waits for Detective Susanna Barnett to return.
And Luisa? WHO KNOWS. Woman gets kidnapped, then doesn’t even get to have a nice family Thanksgiving. #JusticeForLuisa #TurkeyForLuisa #SinRostroForLuisa?
NEXT WEEK
The ultimate product placement as Jane unapologetically turns into an hour-long actual commercial for the worst anti-holiday in the modern world that I will still gladly, gleefully, Thanksgiving-ly gratefully watch on loop.
About the Contributor:
Alexis Gunderson is a TV critic and audiobibliophile. A Wyoming expat, she now lives in Maryland, where she runs the DC chapter of the FYA Book Club. She can be found talking about Teen TV on Twitter, and her longform criticism can be found on Authory.
