Hola, fellow Jane babies! One million and one crane-flying apologies for getting this premiere recap up so late. The move to the Friday late slot has really thrown me for a loop! Still, I will try to get these up over the weekend most weeks, because obviously now that there’s a teen twentysomething werewolf* in Jane’s life, we will have LOTS to discuss.
Speaking of teen wolves/first loves, this was me, literally, IRL, face muscles nearly sticking for holding the expression so long, this entire episode, from the moment Adam’s Lady Latin Lover Narrator (vocally) appeared:
*not a real werewolf, in case you, like my dad, set your expectations on the wrong path after hearing Tyler Posey referred to this way
AWARDS
THIS WEEK’S MVP(arent)
Rogelio, with an assist from Xiomara, for managing to put his diva tendencies aside in order to make tentative piece with Darcy for the sake of their baby.
BEST TELENOVELA TWIST
I know it should be something about Rose, given the cliffhanger kicker scene of her killing some dude by strangling him the wrong way (Sin Rosetro doesn’t need to follow anything so common as physics), but YAWNNNNNN until they make Rose do something on screen, in a prolonged way, ever at all, I just can’t care that much? Also Anezka coming back HAD to happen, because how could any of us survive without Yael Grobglas getting to throw her gleeful all into that performance? So I’m going to go with…Matelio’s recasting! To a kid actor who not only looks as little like S3 Matelio as S3 Matelio looked like OG Matelio, but who does NOT have the half-excuse of being aged up to explain away the change. Nope! Between XoRo’s final wedding reception dance and Jane’s ocean swim with Adam, Matelio managed to change faces AND grow a whole three inches at LEAST.
I love it.
BEST PRODUCT PLACEMENT
Tattoos!
They went the opposite direction of Teen Wolf and actually ADDED tattoos to Tyler Posey’s arms for this role. So great.
PREVIOUSLY ON JANE THE VIRGIN
Approximately one thousand years ago, Jane was artificially inseminated by Dr. Luisa, who accidentally used her brother, Rafael’s, last pre-cancer sperm to do so. Luisa was canned as a doctor, but not as a sister…until Rafael didn’t loop her in on the bombshell discovery of his secret adoption, which makes him not a legitimate heir to the Marbella, which they owned, jointly, with his ex-wife/sneaky second baby mama/current girlfriend, Petra, whose own secret childhood secret turned out to be a twin, Anezka, who was left in a Czech orphanage to grow up feral and who briefly took over Petra’s identity and who has now teamed up with Luisa to take Rafael and Petra down.
Wait—isn’t this show about Jane? Right. So, Jane kept Rafael’s baby (Mateo), then was stuck in a love triangle between him and her pre-baby fiancé, Detective Michael Cordero Jr., then she chose Michael, then they got married, then Michael had a heart attack after finishing his LSATs and died, there on the floor of the testing room, his glowing heart fading to nothing, breaking me into a million pieces every damn time they replay the scene. Then there was a three year time jump, baby Mateo got a new face and some toddler attitude, and now it is the future! And Jane is 28! And finally dating again! And maybe kind of in like with Rafael again! Also her parents, single mom Xiomara and telenovela diva Rogelio, finally got married. And Abuela Alba supported it. And then Jane, on her way to tell Rafael she has feelings again for him, was given a long-lost pre-wedding letter from Michael, and it turned out that it was her first love, Scott McCall Adam, who found it! Meanwhile, “Rafael” texted Petra to meet “him” “where they fell in love,” only it was Anezka using Raf’s phone, and she had a gun! And Luisa, back in the hotel, had Raf! And she was blackmailing him out of his share in the hotel!!!!!!
Also Mateo (AKA Matelio)(AKA Mr. Sweet Face) USED TO look like this:
GIF from fyeahjanevillanueva
But now he looks like THIS:
GIF from fyeahjanethevirgin
Thanks, favorite VoG narrator, for making that update as transparent as possible!
THIS WEEK
FLASHBACK(S)
SO MANY flashbacks this, the first week back!
First, flashback to Jane getting married to Michael, who wrote her a letter at their priest’s suggestion, then hid it in the floorboard hole of their apartment, where it was found by the next tenant, Adam, who was contacted by the NEXT tenants when Jane came over in the hurricane before her parents wedding looking for it. And the letter was so beautiful, and it turned out Adam was HER Adam, her first-love Adam, and it turns out that for Jane and Adam, first love meant THEY ALMOST GOT MARRIED. When they were 18 & 19, respectively, when Adam got into a fancy NYC art school and Jane could only follow him and afford to live there if they lived together, which meant getting married—which, in a flashback-within-a-flashback, we see Baby!Jane falling in love with the idea of marriage via her telenovelas (hi, Harley!). Alba and Xiomara were NOT okay with this arrangement, but Jane strongarmed them into supporting her. Nevertheless, Adam backed out of the engagement, declaring them too young for it, and thus the engagement, and their relationship, was over.
Second (or third), flashback to Luisa and Anezka ending up in the same Uber of Shame to the airport, also in the hurricane before Xiomara and Rogelio’s wedding, and the scheme they came up with the take vengeance on the siblings who so shunned/disappointed them: turns out, while Luisa’s role was to blackmail Raf out of his Marbella shares (using his adoption secret as leverage), Anezka’s role was to shoot Petra and stuff her in some storage locker. WHOA. Luisa has let Rose rub off on her a bit TOO much maybe???
BABE Adam???
Yes, Babe Adam! He of the long-lost-letter, of the surprise-lady-narrator, of the totally-separate-comic-book-epic—he’s got a nickname, given in secret by a judgmental Alba and Xiomara, and Alba has not only seen him smiling that smile at Jane in the Marbella lobby, but she has raced right up to Xiomara and Rogelio’s would-be honeymoon suite to fill Xo in on the terrible news. (Not that she is interrupting much, as Rogelio is too distracted by Darcy’s dad-shaming insta posts about her pregnancy to pay enough attention to Xo.)
As Alba and Xo race to get a telescope set up to spy on Jane and Adam’s reunion, Jane and Adam go snag a spot on the beach to catch up. How did art school go? Good! Adam is now a professional comic book artist—or graphic novelist, if he is trying to impress us all, and he is, and we (and Jane) are. How’s her 5-year teacher plan? Good, but diverted to being a writer! He likes pictures to tell stories, she likes words. He likes stars, she’s googly woogly (Alba’s words). And then they are skinny-dipping, and Alba and Xo are scandalized, and new Matelio thinks his mom is in danger, and he’s off with a baby superhero cape to rescue her!
It’s embarassing for everyone, but Jane is still all warm and fuzzy. Despite Alba’s reservations—and the fact that Jane had been about to tell Raf about her resurgent feelings not hours before—Adam’s prospects are looking pretty good.
Okay Okay Okay, I Get it, Adam is Complicated But Probably Great—Now, Is Petra OK????
Petra is okay!
The next day, after Jane *did* tell Rafael about her possible feelings, and he responded with a blank stare and then retreated for apparently twelve hours in the shower (he is living there now that Luisa kicked him out, apparently!), AND after Jane confronts Rafael with her desire to find a new school for Mateo, as Mateo’s loose lips about “being poor” made the administrator’s immediately leap to warning her that they would need notice about tuition changes for the following year (“the wait list is extremely long”) and got Jane’s non-rich feelings all het up, Jane gets a call from Petra, who has been pulled from the ocean by EMTs after struggling with Anezka over Anezka’s gun. And despite what complex feelings Jane might have about Petra wrt Raf, her deep feelings are ones of family love and relief that Petra is okay; the shot of Raf AND Jane racing to hug Petra as she sits alone and shivering in the back of the ambulance, enough to warm even the coldest (Petra’s) heart.
As Petra recounts it, Anezka used Raf’s phone to lure her to the dock with shop talk (in reality, Anezka had “Raf” apologize and restate “his” love). In Jane’s car, Petra asks to borrow her phone to check her messages, and as the car-assist Bluetooth made clear to Petra, Jane, Raf, and all of us in the audience, one of those messages was from Raf, apologizing, and another was from Jane, telling Petra she had been right about Jane all along, that Jane DID still maybe have some feeli—
Jane cuts the phone off, declares she had spoken wrong, but Petra is no fool: she demands whether Jane truly is “100%” over Raf. “100% is such a big number,” Jane hedges, but she has a date! With someone else! Tonight!! So that should be good enough for everyone involved.
No one involved thinks that is good enough.
Adam, Meanwhile…
Adam’s narrator is very put out to have her hero sucked into Jane’s story, especially when half of Jane’s story is “a mean blonde woman walking through hallways with paperwork,” and that is fair!! But also, here is what Adam is hilariously up to while Petra takes on Anezka’s identity to try and figure out what Luisa’s scheme is/get Raf back in on the Marbella:
Sandwiches and coffee, and work on his art in his shared apartment. Lololol, oh, Adam…you have no idea what you are getting dragged into.
The Date
That night, Jane almost lets Rafael’s puppy dog eyes and request to “talk” convince her to cancel her date with Adam, but she soldiers on and puts on a very Good Dress and makes it over to Adam’s apartment to find that he has made her HER perfect grilled cheese sandwiches, and it is just so cute. Then they look at the stars together (he is really into astrology and probably also astronomy?), and then she spies a guitar and he picks it up and plays the only song he wrote that was ever good, which he wrote for her, which is…
…her love theme! It is SO. GOOD. This show, yo. This show.
But then Jane gets distracted by second thoughts about Raf and can’t focus on the date. In a move of honesty (#BestStorytelling), she tells Adam what’s up, and he responds by reasonably saying she should take time to figure everything with Raf out and then get back to him. Best storytelling!
So Jane takes the bus back home, her mom texting good vibes all the way. At home, she finds a glass of wine on the table with a post-it saying “I’m in the shower.” She downs the wine, uses it for liquid courage, and starts shedding clothes to join Raf in the shower and “figure” this whole thing out. Only, it isn’t her feelings he wants to talk about! It’s Mateo’s school tuition, by which he means that he PAID Mateo’s school tuition, using money from Mateo’s trust fund, and now Jane is wriggling back into her clothes and is spitting mad that Rafael did that A) without consulting her and B) after she explicitly made clear she wanted Mateo away from that school and that money-focused mentality. Which Raf takes as a dig at his own person, which Jane lets him, and while I think this is a very good fight for them to be having, I also had to work to remember that for the last half of last season, Raf was painted very clearly as Jane’s best friend, and this premiere puts them on totally different footing. But I guess Raf HAS just had his whole life and livelihood turned upside down, plus Petra almost died, so he is bound to be looking at things through a fog of emotion more than he would normally.
So they fight, and Raf goes back to Petra, and Jane goes to Adam. And the drama of Season 4 finds solid ground.
About Petra…
Well, she HAD been pulling off her Anezka act, and had convinced Luisa that she had found a buyer for the Marbella that, while offering under Luisa’s asking price, was willing to pay cash (the buyer is her and Rafael, using the three kids’ trust funds; the cash is to trigger some offshore escape account to get Rose out of prison)…but then Anezka showed up, a little worse for wear, but with the Anezka tattoo off her forehead, and ready to out Petra as the liar she is.
Meanwhile, off in prison, Rose is being visited by a big bald man who says “he” will “never know anything” and then Rose says “you’re right” and then she throws her handcuffs around the BACK of his neck and, like, massages his neck muscles aggressively for a minute or so, and then he dies, and the prison wardens come take her away.
Literally no one can die like this?
Crime lords gonna crime, I guess!
NEXT TIME
Jane and Adam get to getting re-acquainted…
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.
