-Generally I don't put spoiler warnings in my reviews because I figure it's a given that there will be spoilers but if you have not seen last night's "Jane", I would stop reading now unless you have no intention of ever watching it because seriously... SPOILERS!
-Um, wow. I don't even know where to start. This week in titles, I guess: Jane The Mom Covered In Vomit... Who Has A Cool New Job Opportunity!
-Ten episodes into the first season of Jane The Virgin, Michael, who was currently broken up from Jane, tells Xo that he'll never stop believing that he and Jane belong together, prompting this ominous line from the narrator that served as the episode's cliffhanger: "And for as long as Michael lived, until he drew his very last breath, he never did." Those words have hung over Michael's time on the show ever since, warning us not to get too detached because at some point he would draw his final breath. It was only a question of when. The problem was it was hard not to get attached to Michael. Brett Dier gave such a winning, likeable performance and he and Jane were so good together that Michael's initial character flaws eventually faded away and only the most hardcore of hardcore Rafael fans weren't eventually won over by sweet, loveable, beam of pure goodness Michael (I held out until the middle of the second season). So when the second season ended on him being shot in the chest on his and Jane's wedding night it was a gut punch of an ending that made the wait for season 3 almost unbearable, and when he pulled through in the season 3 premiere, it was such a relief that it was easy to put the fact that he was still going to die out of mind, even with the ominous hints that things weren't going to work out like Jane and Michael were planning. So when Michael suddenly drops dead out of the blue upon completing the LSATs, the victim of an Aortic Dissection that resulted from stress put on his heart following his shooting a few months back, it's absolutely devastating and totally unexpected, even with all the warnings and foreshadowing.
-Kudos to The CW advertising department for not hinting what an eventful episode this was going to be. Often when it comes to big moments on shows like this, especially the death of a major character, advertising is all over it with promises of an "unforgettable episode" to make sure ratings are as big as possible at the expense of the element of surprise (When Grey's Anatomy did a similar big death a couple years back, the promos basically spelled the whole thing out for us.). Going into Chapter Fifty-Four though, it seemed like the biggest thing that would happen would be lots of discussion about Rogelio's penis. That made the big moment much more shocking when it came.
-The thing that's really surprising about Michael's death is how ordinary and random it is. Because he was often tied to the more fantastical crime elements of the show, it seemed a given that he would die in heroic fashion, trying to bring Sin Rostro to justice or something like that. Yet, while you can trace his death back to the dramatic shooting at the end of the 2nd season, the suddenness and mundane nature of his death is a stark shot of reality into the fantastical world of Jane The Virgin. People don't just drop dead of a simple heart condition in telenovellas and yet here we are.
-I seldom ever cry and I made it through the collapse and the fading of Michael's heartlight all right, but I came incredibly close to full-on tears in the scene where Jane gets the news about Michael. Gina Rodriguez is terrific week in and week out and she is absolutely heartbreaking here. It starts with the look on her face right before her phone tumbles out of her hand and goes to the way she drops to the ground uncontrollably sobbing with a guttural scream that's going to haunt me for a while. You fully believe that this woman has just lost the love of her life and it's that moment that the reality that Michael has actually, truly died sets in.
-It's obvious in retrospect that the episode was building up to Michael's death. The episode opens on a Michael flashback instead of a Jane one, there's a lot of emphasis on memory and how we remember how we feel about the big moments, we spend a long time following Jane and Michael recreating their first date, showing how far they've come as a couple and serving as kind of a final tribute to their relationship, and there's a lot of focus on planning for the future, courtesy of a pregnancy false alarm that gets Jane and Michael thinking about moving up the timetable on their family. There's even a discussion about reliable and unreliable narrators, which reminds us of all the things the narrator promised would happen and whether we could trust him (Turns out we can.). It's subtle enough and typical enough for the show that if you didn't know what was coming, you wouldn't notice how you were being set up for it. The biggest indicator that something is about to go down is the memory spotlight (One of the better visual motifs the show has come up with) on Michael as he goes out the door after Jane tells him how proud she is, which becomes very significant once you realize this is the last time Jane will ever see Michael.
-I hope Jennie Urman and team realize that they can never use the heartlight motif again after making the audience watch Michael's (which is connected to Jane's in keeping with the "final breath" thing) go out. There's no way they'll ever be able to top that moment in terms of sheer emotional power.
-Of course Michael's death is only the first big twist "Jane" springs on us. As the narrator announces that we are at the end of Book 2 (Book 1 was the first season), Book 3 kicks off three years later with Jane and 4 and a half year old Mateo getting ready for a wedding. The time jump is smart for a few reasons, the biggest being that "Jane" is a comedy that has always been committed to honestly exploring the emotions of the characters. So if we were to explore Jane's grief in real time, it would either totally consume the tone of the show, which would drag down the quality or it'd be pushed aside in a way that'd be unfair to Jane's relationship with Michael. So by jumping ahead, the show allows itself the chance to have Jane farther along in the healing process, while still being free to jump back in time and show how she got to this point.
-The other good thing about the time jump is it allows the characters the time to have actually gone through with some significant changes. Rafael spends the episode trying to decide if he should just plead guilty and go to jail for those white collar crimes it turns out the show hadn't forgot about. If the show was continuing in real time, clearly he wouldn't wind up in jail because the show couldn't keep him offscreen for very long but with the jump, now he can go to jail for a time and we can catch up with him having gone through that. Likewise, it was hard to get invested in Xo and Rogelio's relationships with Bruce and Darci because it seemed clear that they'd eventually break up but the jump opens the possibility of those relationships continuing and thriving for three years. Xo goes into the jump ready to move in with Bruce having smoothed things over with Tess (Thanks to how she handled things with Bruce after Tess showed up at Jane's drunk) and Rogelio goes into it having shown Darci he cares about her enough to star in her reality show with her, even if that wasn't how he planned his acting career to go (After some more penis-related silliness and a hilarious rant that goes viral). Could one of them be the ones getting married? It's possible (I hope it's Rogelio and Darci, because I've become a huge De La Vega Factor shipper. All of the storylines in this episode set up promising possibilities for the future and now we get to see what became of those possibilities. It's very exciting.
-Before Jane gets that devastating phone call, she gets much, much, much better news when she secures a job as a publisher's assistant. After all she went through to get this job (Which she was able to secure even after accidentally sending naked pictures of Rogelio instead of the treatment she was supposed to submit thanks to help from Michael), it doesn't seem likely that she would quit it, even after the death of Michael. That means we'll get to see Jane further along in her quest to be a writer (hopefully), which I'm assuming will eventually lead her to write the books of the show we're watching (Hence why the show is putting things in books and all the literary references).
-Scott and Anezka are out and in the open now that they have Emilio's will to hold over Petra's head. The consequences of restoring that will have yet to happen but since we now know for sure that the narrator is reliable, the other shoe is bound to drop sooner or later.
-Also Rose is back, with a new identity (Eileen) and actress (Welcome Elisabeth Röhm). Turns out Luisa couldn't quit Rose after all and after taking the face of a woman she paid 10 million dollars to take a bunch of medical tests to satisfy Rafael and then leave the country, Rose is ready to give up crime for the love of her life. Based on how she threatened the woman though, that might not be so easy for Rose. This isn't going to end well.
-I'm going to miss Brett Dier. I wasn't a fan of Michael at all in the beginning, but Brett's earnest, goofy, loving performance wore me down and won me over. As Michael became more and more of a saint, I became concerned that he might grow boring as a character, but Dier always made him interesting a human, even as he grew more and more perfect. "Jane" just won't be the same without him.
-Following the episode, show creator Jennie Urman published this open letter to fans, where she gives tribute to Brett Dier and explains why Michael had to die and why we've jumped ahead three years. It's well worth a read if you still need help processing things.
-Seriously, for all the pain at the end, this was an incredible episode of television and I can't wait to see where the show goes from here.
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