Send Petra Packing

Jane The Virgin came to us with a delightful telenovela premise -- a virgin who becomes pregnant in a medical mishap, surrounded by characters in equally dramatic situations. There's the single mom who's kept the secret of her daughter's paternity for more than twenty years (she's the one who's about to be a grandmother); the stern abuela with the dire warnings about sexual purity (she's the one who helped keep our titular Jane a virgin her whole life); and the rich, irresistible businessman who may or may not still be a playboy (and whose sperm it is that helps cause Jane's pregnancy). And then there's Rafael's wife, Petra, who's not quite in love with Rafael the way she used to be (see: the affair she was having with his best friend until said best friend got murdered). The truth about Petra and Rafael's relationship could have been concealed and/or teased out for weeks on end, prolonging the agony for the viewer as Jane proceeded in ignorance of the unhappy marriage she'd agreed to place her child in. But since it hasn't, Petra? PEACE OUT.

I admit that I almost always want TV plotting to be 40-60% simpler than it is. I grokked The Affair until they added the whole after-the-fact murder investigation aspect. Revenge lost me when it started delving too deeply into the business intrigue around who owned which magazine publishing company and why. The Jane The Virgin pilot was so much fun that I even forgave its ongoing police investigation into the goings-on at the hotel where Jane works because it was Mike, Jane's fiancé, conducting the investigation and the fact that Petra was involved made it germane to Jane's storyline, if a few degrees removed. Plus there was the whole thing where Roman's murder brought Mike and Petra together in deception -- a time-tested staple of soap-opera story plotting.

But once Rafael got wise to Petra's infidelity/money-grubbing schemes, there truly stopped being a reason for her to continue being on the show. The bond between them was broken, and Jane had decided she didn't want to give up all access to her eventual baby anyway. Petra would no longer stand as the impediment between Jane and Rafael getting together, as even then they were obviously destined to do. When Rafael shut Petra and her even more odious mother up in their suite and started cutting off their access to water, air conditioning, and finally even TV, I admired him for maybe the first time in the whole series: by making her existence so unpleasant that she was forced to evaluate how important her squatter's rights really were to her, he was truly acting in my interest.

"The Czech guy, though!" I hear you saying. "She's not just a gold-digger, she's being blackmailed! That's interesting!" But is it, really? Do you care enough about Petra to invest in the question of whether she's going to get out from under her financial burden and find true happiness with the dude she threw over for Rafael? Because I don't. Petra has yet to do anything to make me sympathetic to her: it's the whole reason the notion of her trying to grub Rafael's money for no other reason than to have and enjoy it was so easy to believe. She's a rank opportunist at best and a con artist at worst, but we know she'll have no claim on Jane's baby. Who cares what happens to her now?

The crazy thing about Petra's continuing presence on the show is how little she impinges on any other character's plotline. Other than an episode-closing moment here and there -- when she's claiming Rafael punched her, or, like this week, engineering a hostile takeover of his company (zzzzzzzzz), it's mostly just her, shut up claustrophobically with her mother. So it was with Rafael's idiot sister, for the first few episodes, and then what happened to her and her girlfriend/stepmother? They melted away like so much ice in a Marbella poolside mojito. I don't know where Luisa went, and I don't care, but she should invite Petra for a visit and then cut up her credit card.