Jane The Virgin Needs To Get Rid Of Magda

Season 2 of Jane The Virgin has not been super-great for Petra Solano. Nursing a doomed crush on Rafael led her to the rash decision of using his miraculous plot device of an extra sperm sample to get herself pregnant (and given that this is a feat sometimes not even achieved by accredited OB/GYNs, maybe Petra should give up on being a hotelier and go to med school to follow her true calling). She's been extorted into a marriage of convenience with Milos, her dangerous criminal of an ex. Even so, this week's episode finds her trying, despite the odds against it, to carve out whatever tiny amount of happiness is possible for her given the generally horrific circumstances of her life. Too bad Magda's out of prison, fucking it all up.

That Petra has no friends is...well, actually one of the realistic aspects of this ridiculously heightened show. She shouldn't have friends; most of the time, she's a terrible person. But in recent episodes, she's had occasion to make herself vulnerable with Jane, someone who knows the truth about Petra's past with Milos. Though Petra wasn't able to heed Jane's encouragement not to marry Milos when he came back into her life, she has been touched by Jane's warmth, particularly given their complicated, mostly antagonistic acquaintance with one another. When, in the latest episode, Petra makes herself even more vulnerable by trying to parlay Jane's warmth into friendship and asking her for lunch, it's a sweet, genuine moment of the kind this show does so well.

Though a lot of its relationship storylines are romantic, Jane also shines when it takes seriously its characters' friendships and familial ties, and I was excited by the idea that Petra seemed to be climbing out of the villain box that made her so expendable in the show's first season and turning into a person.

That I thought this even as I knew Petra still had Ivan's corpse on ice in her bedroom is, I guess, proof of how fully I've bought into the show's wackiness, because when it comes to the appointed time for Petra and Jane's lunch and Petra runs into Magda in the lobby with cover-up supplies, my response wasn't "You can't grab lunch with your gal pal when there's a body to deal with" but "DAMMIT MAGDA WHY MUST YOU RUIN EVERYTHING?" But seriously: why must Magda ruin everything? The body they're currently trying to manage is one Magda killed -- offscreen and almost certainly impulsively. Nothing we've ever seen Magda do has suggested that she has any socially acceptable problem-solving skills.

But while the body allows for physical-comedy high jinks in the challenges its disposal creates...

...the larger issue is that Magda's there at all. Petra's life wasn't great when Magda was in prison for pushing Alba down a flight of stairs, but at least those were a few months she didn't have to worry about managing Magda eruptions and concealing Magda schemes. But Magda's return to the Marbella has Petra on red alert all the time because Magda can't be trusted to look after herself or be cool -- like, for instance, being in the lobby in broad daylight when Jane's there waiting to pick up Petra for lunch (risking reminding Jane that Petra is the daughter of a violent criminal who assaulted a member of Jane's family, possibly leading Jane to re-evaluate whether Petra, as Magda's daughter, should be around Mateo after all), and coming up with a wacky plan to mask the odour of Ivan's decomposition that Petra must participate in, forcing her to cancel on Jane with zero notice and look like a flake. Later, when Jane runs into Petra and Magda as they're wheeling Ivan out of the hotel on his way to his shallow grave -- the digging of which is probably not something a woman who's enormously pregnant with twins should do -- Petra has to get Jane away from the corpse, and the quickest way to do it is by telling her, "I just don't need us to be friends, okay?"

The phrasing isn't just hurtful to Jane, but is actually kind of heartbreaking coming out of Petra. She really does need them to be friends! Petra has no one but Magda, and Magda isn't just a drain on her already taxed resources now: she's undoubtedly going to seem like even more of a liability when, any minute now, Petra has two infants to take care of, mostly by herself. When Magda was away, Petra might have formed romantic ideas about the help and support she would enjoy from her mother. But that was before this twisted murderer moved into her suite. And while I can imagine that there are plenty of women who, with the use of one eye and the assistance of a prosthetic hand substitute, are wonderful grandmothers, I am not crazy about the idea of Magda being around the twins with that hook.

On top of all her other deficits as a character -- and honestly, she is barely that -- Magda is just evincing all the attributes that Petra was when I called for her excision from the show in its first season. Magda's storylines are self-contained and annoying, and she's done so many awful things that there's no drama or suspense in waiting to see what she's going to come up with next. And unlike Sin Rostro -- who I could also do just fine without -- Magda's not even creative: she's just reactive, and then clumsy and ungrateful as Petra is forced to help her fix what she wrecked in the first place. Magda not only adds nothing to the show; she's also preventing Petra from being integrated into the rest of the show in a way that will redeem her crappiness in Season 1. Let Magda get convicted for murdering Ivan, and then...oh, Florida has the death penalty? Sweet. That would solve this problem forever.