Hello, friends! Welcome to the middle of the season! Welcome to the slate of terrible men she will NOT be marrying by the end of May sweeps! Welcome to the second week in a row of everyone is Jane’s life *knowing* she has always had one strong personality trait, but her not figuring that out until after a run of heartbreak and/or shenanigans!
AWARDS
THIS WEEK’S MVP(arent)
I do believe Alba came through with the best (grand)parenting again this week, although Rogelio was a close second for working so hard (if eventually failing) at reverse-parenting his mom.
BEST TELENOVELA TWIST
Thank goodness for a slower than normal week in Jane’s real world—it lets me hand this award to Rogelio’s new AMAZING show-within-a-show sending their pre-Victorian cobbler hero forward in time…to the Stonewall riots.
Like I said: amazing.
BEST PRODUCT PLACEMENT
Wells Fargo. Or rather, Justin Baldoni as a product placement FOR Wells Fargo.
Runner-up: Cinderella, as portrayed by every character in their own way, and invoked by Miami’s off-brand Tinder, Cynder.
Runner-runner-up: Pretty Little Liars, somehow??? Who knew that when I saw that beanie in last week’s promo and invoked RGWBIFB that it would turn out to be an *actual* Rosewood boy (if non-white) under that sk8rboi slouch.
It’s a small world when terrible men are involved!
PREVIOUSLY ON JANE THE VIRGIN
Jane entered a graduate program for creative writing and finagled an ex-Magic Mike as her advisor; Rogelio’s mom/Jane’s Glamma came to town and stirred up DRAMA by lying multiple times, in multiple ways, about how Ro’s dad is gay and leaving her; Rafael’s mom/Mateo’s Grandma proved to be a Grand-LARCENY-ma when she revealed herself to be none other than the international crime lord, Mutter, by jabbing a syringe into her own son’s neck as she demanded he give up the location of that microchip Michael illegally traded to Nadine/Rose in exchange for kidnapped Mateo’s safe return.
THIS WEEK
Portrait of a Writer as a Baby!Jane
Here is a secret (that is probably not so secret) about people with DREAMS: sometimes (often) we get so subconsciously scared of actually following through with the daily grind of hard work needed to achieve them, that we fixate on the lack of a specific tool or milestone or flash of divine genius and decide that absolutely NO progress can be made without it/the other/all three. This is the exact position that Baby!Jane is in when she determines that a Real Writer needs a laptop in order to be able to “write anywhere,” and thus why she spends months and months and all her quinceañara money to get one (rather than just carrying around a comp book and a handful of pens). It’s also the exact position she finds herself in when it turns out that it wasn’t just the laptop she needed to be a Real Writer, but also for the muse to speak to her.
Luckily, our Jane is as much a worker as a dreamer, so she manages to grasp so tightly to this pattern that the “wait for the muse to strike” thing does ultimately work out for her, both as a teen and as an adult. Unluckily, her dependence on her computer…does not. SURPRISE! Technology is dumb and unreliable, and we are its slaves!
Right, so present-day Jane, after spending all of her night awake tending to her muse, loses all of her work to baby Mateo’s giddy first crawlabout, a pitcher of orange juice, and the lack of any form of Cloud account. GIRL. Dropbox! Google Drive! How are you not already on this (she asked, composing a recap in a CMS system that has repeatedly eaten all her work over the years because she’s too lazy to open up a new Google Doc tab)???
Lena’s Back, Everyone!
As BFF Lena (HI LENA) discovers when she accompanies Jane to Computer World later that day and physically has to restrain her jaw from falling to the floor when Jane is completely blind to the pass Dax the Comp Jock was making at her, it turns out that the Cloud is not the only piece of modern technology our Jane isn’t hip to. Jane is so far behind the dating times that OKCupid isn’t even a blip on her radar, let alone Cynder. Jane is so far behind the times she thinks a meet cute is “the old fashioned way” of meeting a new potential partner.
Lena, predictably, is horrified. And just as predictably, she sets up a Cynder account for Jane behind her back, which leads to a supes poorly matched dudebro ambushing her at a coffeeshop later when she takes off the afternoon to try and reconstitute her midnight genius from scratch (man, been there). At least Lena is self-aware enough to realize that maybe that was one step too far, and she passes all Jane’s account info on for Jane to do with as she sees fit. And while Jane is initially dead set on deleting it, sight unseen, the surprise of finding four dozen messages and twice as many winks waiting for her in her mailbox leads catches her short.
Cynder, or Goldilocks?
Naturally, all the messages she has the guts to open are tamely horrifying, but the fact that they exist at all prompts Jane to experiment with what interest she could garner changing her party pictures out for ones with Mateo, and her party “likes” out for Isabel Allende and grilled cheese. And it works! She gets ONE guy interested—a cute scientist (“no, for real”) who shows genuine interest in Mateo and Jane’s life as a young mom. The two start chatting, then eventually set up a coffee date. And it goes so well! At least, until Jane’s imagination runs away from her and starts planning her and Mateo’s future with the guy, and her overenthusiasm prompts him to text his friend for a rescue call.
Jane’s problem, both Lena and Xo explain later, is that she is too stuck in the idea that she needs to find Mateo’s stepdad, when what she *actually* needs to do is go to a bar in search of some hookup action. It’s like they don’t even know her!! But Jane lets herself be swept along by their enthusiasm, and soon finds herself downing shots with Lena before running into Dax the Comp Jock and surprise sk8erboi, who is (surprise!) terrible. How terrible? Well, after flirting with her all night and teaching her how to (wipe out on a) skateboard, he implies that he’s ready to make their hookup a one-night stand…and then proceeds to use a weekend away with his girlfriend as the reason he can’t make plans with Jane on Saturday.
Jane returns home, rightfully (and righteously) angry at both Dax and the idea that she might be expected to KEEP going on dates that may or may not turn out just as bad, JUST to get a little action. “It just seems exhausting,” Jane sighs, quoting my actual inner dialogue anytime I recall that dating is a thing women my age maybe should do, “the prospect of doing this time and again for what amounts to nothing.”
“Well, you’re just a relationship girl,” Xiomara and Alba both shrug, which seems like a fact they could have convinced Jane of before she went out and spent money and time on strange men. But whereas I regularly reach that conclusion about myself and just…stop…both Xo and Alba impress upon Jane the importance of keeping herself open to—and looking for—possibilities, because if you let yourself get into a rut, you’ll be a lonely old woman set in her ways before you know it. And considering the very on-brand sex dream Jane has that night about her kid-, grilled cheese-, Isabel Allende-loving advisor later that night, it is advice Jane has taken to heart.
(Oh, and her computer: the files come back fully restored, but it ends up not mattering because Jane took Professor Chavez’s story about The Sun Also Rises to heart and lets herself be struck by a different muse, rather than trying to reconstitute the other chapter from memory. And what does she use to write it down? A notepad and pen.)
Rogelio’s New Glammanager
While Xo is reveling in the fact that she was always right, Rogelio is still reeling from the revelation that his mother is a master manipulator. He is independent enough to not be completely taken in by her It’s a wonderful day to be Rogelio warbling and sweet+savory breakfast apology, but it does soften him up enough to try to solve the problem by asking his father to keep up with the marriage-as-partnership-not-romance as before, at his mother’s request. Alas, Ro’s dad is in love and ready to move in with his new partner, and it is clear to everyone in the Villanueva home that he is so so happy, so that’s a non-starter. Knowing how lonely and adrift his mom is feeling, Ro determines that what she will need to bounce back is something to do with herself, and so he does the first thing that comes to mind: he hires her as his manager for his new telenovela, Tiago Through Time (!!!!).
Or rather, re-hires her. Because it turns out (as we see in glorious Baby!Ro flashback), Liliana was his manager as a kid! Xiomara and every single person who has ever watched television and/or had a mom immediately knows that this is a bad plan, but Ro is set on it. Unfortunately, Liliana is a nightmare on set. She rewrites scenes, complains on his behalf about things he actually likes, and, worst of all, replaces his rip-away cobbler’s apron with a solidly tied one.
Xiomara tries to counsel him to keep Liliana on and just talk issues through with her as they come up, but Rogelio knows what he has to do, and fires her. Liliana is crushed, but understanding. She is also warmed up to Xiomara after Xo tries to take the blame for the decision. “That’s a winner,” Liliana tells Rogelio later on, as Jane listens in from the other side of the soundstage wall. “You should marry her.”
It’s Not a Wonderful Day to be Rafael
While Jane was whizzing through her computer drama, Rafael was waking up from his crime lord mother’s tranquilizer, coming to terms with the fact that not only did she abandon him as a child, but she is a worse human being even than Rose, and then racing to the hospital when Petra starts bleeding and checks herself in. Oh, also he has to lie to Jane about how he really feels about her still, after she confesses to her coffee shop ambush date and he confesses to feeling awkward hearing about it, even if they are technically together.
The Elena/Mutter thing gets shifted to Michael’s storyline, thankfully, but Raf is still stuck with the rest. Petra, especially—stuck on bedrest for the rest of the week (/her pregnancy?)—is a tough nut to crack, because she is a tough patient to nurse, because, it turns out, she is freaking the eff out about that late-term miscarriage she had five years ago, when she and Raf were still married. Once Raf realizes that that is what is making Petra so impossible to be around that not even paid medical professionals will tend to her, he warms up and keeps her uninterrupted company, and we are all treated to a very sweet scene where they use a fishbowl to determine names for the babies-to-be.
How Is Michael Still Employed
After realizing too late that Elena was the crime lord they were after all along—and after Rafael tells Michael that what Elena was after when she drugged him was the microchip that Michael illegally traded for Mateo—Michael has to come clean to both Susanna and his boss about it (had he not done this already??). Susanna, rightfully, storms off and immediately sets to writing up a report on every act of misconduct she knows about, and it takes Michael a fair amount of begging to get her to give him a chance to figure out what might have happened between him giving the chip to Nadine, and Nadine dying. To that end, we are treated to a truncated flashback to his and Nadine’s month in Mexico, which was apparently spent apart but for weekly beer dates on the beach, the last at which Nadine used a distraction as an opportunity to break her beer bottle, slice open Michael’s leg with it, insert the teeeeeeny microchip in the cut, cast a curse on it to keep it from falling out when Michael got home and cleaned the wound, and then give Michael a very cryptic message about, whatever happens tonight, know that it’s ON YOU. As in, physically on you, not metaphorically on your conscience. Though feel free to keep feeling guilty, too, Michael!
Anyway, the Miami PD has a the chip now. Fingers crossed it brings Rose back to our screens!
Alba’s Got a Brand New Man?
Finally, a cute cliffhanger, in the form of Jane convincing Alba to set up a retirees’ dating profile, and then Alba returning to the computer later to website page search a specific name that none of us have ever seen before. So, poll:
NEXT TIME
Jane doesn’t embarrass herself AT ALL with her new awkward crush on her advisor. AT ALL.
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.
