AWARDS
THIS WEEK MVP(arent)
Rogelio, Darcy, Esteban, and Xo (they named the baby after Michael! and are working so hard to get along!), but to not double-up from last episode, let’s also give a big award to Alba for her not-quite-in-law parenting of Rafael:
Whoa. Heavy. #Owlba FTW.
BEST TELENOVELA TWISTS
Nobody died!!! But Rafael’s swing at honesty with Katherine at the end, well, that possible death remains to be seen… (He is obviously, definitely not dead.)
BEST PRODUCT PLACEMENTS
Two words: BALL. PITS.
THIS WEEK
Yes, we’ll get to the drama of the adults in a second, but first, a baby sister(s) photo shoot:
Lololololol forever.
Okay, broad strokes again!
1) When Jane asks Petra to set her up on a business lunch with Petra’s hot literary agent pal and Petra just straight up agrees, the two frenemies, evidently new BFFs, realize that without Raf in between them, they can just…get along. They are both so relieved to hear it!
2.) Unfortunately, their relief is cut incredibly short as a ship’s wheel chandelier crashes down in the Marbella dining room alongside them, raining termites down behind it. Evacuation time!!!!!
Luisa, of course, is behind it—part of her own scheme with the sketchy dude “Rose” “sent” “to help” Luisa get the money Rose needs to effect her escape, by burning the hotel down to collect the insurance money—but Petra has no idea. She is still trying to operate the hotel with Luisa, the two of them at an uneasy detente, and thus while she doesn’t expect Luisa to be necessarily forthcoming, she is surprised at home friendly and on-top-of-things Luisa seems when she goes to confirm fumigation details with her later.
Little does Petra know, Luisa’s friendliness was a ruse! (Duh.) A ruse to keep Petra out of the office, since she can’t see Luisa’s sketchy friend. Literally, his words verbatim, “she can’t see me.” And, spoiler! She can’t. Literally no one else but Luisa can, because Luisa is hallucinating him. She’s gone back over to the crazy side, and is letting an imaginary sketchball hide her own arson-y inclinations from herself! Anezka, thankfully, figures it out, when she comes upon Luisa later that night as she is about to start the fire, and lo and behold, the Czech Doofuses finally have something with which to leverage something from someone. They choose Petra, and reveal their secret, for the price of Petra cutting them in on the final deal. Petra agrees, for the price of them leaving the country when the deal is cut, and never, ever coming back.
3.) Wait, never mind, Jane and Petra aren’t BFFs anymore, because Jane discovers that Raf, after all his high-horsing with Adam just the episode before, went behind her back and introduced Mateo to Katherine without telling her—and not because he actually is planning a future with Katherine like Jane is with Adam, but in order to use his kids as pawns to convince Katherine he is for real, so that she will stay on long enough for their Marbella buy-back to go through. But Katherine is a legit terrible influence, giving Mateo a tablet when Jane has a no-screen rule, threatening Jane’s job as her future boss, just generally being the worst. But every time Raf has the opportunity to come clean and try to make the deal without being a sleaze, he just doubles down—both because he genuinely thinks it is the best play, and because he is tired of Jane’s judgmentalness about his socioeconomic character/preferences.
So, Jane turns to Petra. They’re new BFFs! Petra will totally be on her side! Only, Petra isn’t. She wants/needs the deal to go through as much as Raf does, and so she not only forbids Jane from meddling (or else she won’t set up the lunch meeting with the agent friend), but forbids her from delivering the letter Jane writes when she can’t help herself from meddling just a bit. And, when Raf misses their first family brunch ever because he is on a yacht with Katherine, Jane and Petra finally have it out.
Petra wins the ball pit fight and shreds the letter, but Jane has it memorized and races to the dock to just say everything she has to say about how Raf is a better person than all of this, in person. But joke’s on her: he is unmoved, and ultimately triples down on his ruse with Katherine, telling her he’s falling in love with her. It isn’t until Alba finally steps in and counters Raf’s complaints about Jane not understanding what it is like to have money and lose it, explaining how her husband left a wealthy life and inheritance to be with her and move to America, and never lost sense of himself and his honor, that he finally comes to his senses and goes to be honest with Katherine before the deal is made.
She runs him over with her car, and leaves him bleeding on the pavement.
4.) Rogelio and Darci are working SO HARD to get along…and they are succeeding! The biggest issue they face right now (well, other than Xo keeping her distance, which it turns out is just self-preservation so she doesn’t lose her new career and independence to having a baby in her life, which Rogelio reacts to perfectly and immediately)? Naming the baby. They spend al episode trying out name after name—Rogelio working especially hard to find something he might like better than Amada, which is very good, but was also Esteban’s contribution, along with being the name of one of Ryan Gosling’s daughters—but ultimately they can’t find anything they like better than, just, Baby. It’s weird, but sure! And Darci is willing to let Rogelio pick the middle name, if he goes along with her on this. So at long last, they present their baby to the family: Baby Michaelina De La Vega Factor. YEP. Michaelina! After Michael, who was, Rogelio reminds us all with genuine emotion, Rogelio’s best friend. It is very lovely.
5.) Adam! Jane and Adam spend the majority of this episode on a week-long break, which they decided they both needed to give Adam time to wrap his head around his panic, and Jane time to think about what their future could look like relative to her own needs. They make it almost the whole week, but when Jane is distracted writing her letter to Rafael, Mateo takes her phone and video chats Adam, and invites himself over to see all of Adam’s comics. Jane tries to squash it, but Adam says yes!
So they go over, and…Mateo immediately starts knocking things down, then throws a fit when Jane pulls the mom card. Later, when she and Adam are on the phone discussing it, Adam exclaims over how that experience was actually great, because he had been worried about what having a kid around would mean, but now he knows “I could put up with it.” DING DING DING. ADAM. Wrong choice of words, my dude! Jane immediately tries to shut things down, using his poor choice of words as an excuse to break things off. Well, she would say “valid reason,” but when she talks with her mom about it later, she is made wise to the fact that it really was an excuse: inviting Adam in for real and good would be a serious move, and maybe Jane was pulling what Raf was in doubling down on his Katherine plan: using “for my family” as an excuse to cover for what about herself she didn’t want to get hurt. And Alba points out that Adam taking the week to think showed maturity, and that reacting to Mateo’s tantrum in the way he did wasn’t rude or an indication that he will “just be putting up with” anything—it was a reasonable reaction to having a kid, from a non-kid-having perspective.
So Jane and Adam talk, and Jane admits that she was still kind of hung up on how he left her back when they were 19, and got a flash of something like that happening again, if Mateo ended up being “too much to put up with.” Adam assures her it won’t, and reminds her that he is very very bad with words, and voila! They are back together.
NEXT TIME
Lina is BACK. And about to get married. And Jane? She’s ready to meddle! BBF shenanigans 5ever, please and thank you.
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.
