Jane the Virgin season 5 went from a rocky start to strong finish
By Leah Smith
Jane the Virgin wrapped up its five season run with a finale the showcased the series at its best. While the ending was strong, the path to get there was not always on solid ground.
When the final, white end-screen appeared to mark the end of Jane the Virgin, the series had delivered something very difficult to achieve, a satisfying finale. And it is all thanks to Jane the Virgin being a telenovela, based on the book Jane wrote about her life.
As the narrator told us during the finale, telenovelas end with a wedding and happiness and that is how Jane the Virgin chose to end things as well. The drama was settled last week with the death of Rose, so now it was all about Jane and Rafael’s wedding. It also spent a lot of time on the most important relationship of the series, the women of the Villanueva family.
When Xo gets cold feet about moving to New York with Rogelio, Jane and Alba spend the night before Jane’s wedding together sharing their fears and convincing Xo to go. Even if they are all scared to be apart for the first time, a good porch swing chat can solve all problems.
Seeing as this show still is a telenovela, there were a few big twists and reveals. It starts with finally learning who Rafael’s biological parents are, a plot point that is made even happier given the family he has built with Jane, Petra and the kids. Next up is confirmation that Magdah was telling the truth, that Petra has a triplet brother living in Siberia.
Finally, the last two twists are connected. First, the theory of future Mateo being the narrator we’ve been hearing all series proves to be true and there is another meta element to the reveal. On the advice of his great-grandmother, Mateo ends up doing voiceover work and he ends up becoming the narrator of the telenovela adaptation of his mother’s novel — otherwise known as the Jane the Virgin series we have been watching for the past five seasons.
The series finale was all about looking to the future and showing that everyone would live happily ever after even if the audience never got to see any of it. This was a big change from the beginning of season 5, which was about looking back at where everything began, with the Michael-Jane-Rafael love triangle.
Of course, there had to be an amnesia twist at some point for Jane the Virgin to be a telenovela and tying it into Michael coming back from the dead gave it even more of an impact. But, sorry Team Michael fans, it was clear from the start that Team Rafael was going to win this one. Even when Jane decides to explore her feelings for Michael when his memories returned, it always just felt like a way to keep Rafael and Jane apart for a little longer.
By this point in the series, no matter how much Jane loved Michael, she was always going to put her family with Rafael first because that expanded to include Petra and all three kids. Michael sadly never stood a chance this time around. Also, Jane the Virgin never gave us a reunion between Rogelio and Michael, an opportunity wasted.
Despite having 19 episodes to work with in season 5, all the major plot points this season were stuffed into the middle and the end. It left a middle chunk of the season, where Jane and Rafael were apart, in which the show felt like it was just spinning its wheels waiting for the two to reunite. That is not to say that the storylines for Alba, Rogelio and Xo weren’t great this final season, but they were mostly in the background to Jane and Rafael. So, a strong episode involving This is Mars or Xo figuring out her new career path is still going to function as the B plot to what Jane is going through.
Jane the Virgin could have benefited from a shorter season, but there was something special about reaching the 100 episode milestone. The problem is, thanks to the retrospective episode counting as “Chapter Ninety-Nine,” there is a case to be made that the series only reached 99 episodes. And if the goal of 100 episodes of actual story was not going to be met, why not cut done on some of the Jane and Rafael apart episodes and make this an even stronger final season?
The problem is that cutting back on the episodes where Jane and Rafael are apart takes time away from the best new relationship of season 5, Jane and Petra. They have grown to become sisters to each other and it is great to see them supporting each other through everything.
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Overall, the good far outweighed the bad in this final season of Jane the Virgin. It may not have been the ending Team Michael fans wanted (they have reasons to be upset about how his character was treated post coming back from the dead), but the final stretch of episodes were some of the series’ best. Ending on a high note is a great accomplishment for any series and Jane the Virgin pulled it off.