Will A Horrible Shared Experience Finally Thaw Relations Between Jane The Virgin And Her Mother-In-Law?

Did we think there was really a chance the show would kill Michael on his wedding night?

I'll admit it: I was pretty sure the show didn't hate Jane so much that it would rob her of her happiness so quickly. And, sure enough, it hasn't: Michael survives his injuries, which we will get to in just a second. But of all the shows I watch that might kill off a main character and leave its protagonist to grieve under heartlessly brutal circumstances, Jane The Virgin could be it. It may be a fizzy romantic comedy most of the time (and, as the episode-opening framing device reminds us, those do have rules), but it's also a telenovela, and people do face life-and-death situations. After all, I might not have thought a fizzy romantic comedy would put a newborn in jeopardy either, but the Season 2 premiere set me straight on that one.

That said: do I think there's a chance Jane and Michael won't get the future she maps out for him before his spinal surgery, through two more kids and years of Sunday night family dinners and ending with them, in their very old age, fondly bickering on the porch about the details of their stories? I do think that, because my guess is that she and Rafael are ultimately going to end up together, and I don't see what breaks up Jane and Michael other than his death. But I think that's probably a ways off yet, and that Jane will at least get to lose her virginity to Michael before the show kills him off.

Jane got out of all her wedding gear on her own?

Far less believable than that Michael would survive a gunshot to the heart at pretty close range...

...is that, while he was getting ice/bleeding out, she was able to free herself from her gown without a second pair of hands. Those fuckers are complicated.

Were we all ready to say goodbye to Sam?

Since we know how things actually end for Jane and Michael, the narrator decides it's okay to let us know Jane was already in a love triangle when she met Michael at her twenty-first birthday party: she'd been crushing on this guy Sam for two years ("Seventeen months!") while he was seeing first one and then another broad, but he dealt with all that just in time for her big night.

Sam was cute, understood Jane's habit of reading the end of a book first rather than be disappointed by the long-ago betrayal of The Last Song In Avalon, and gave her Where'd You Go, Bernadette?, which means he had excellent taste. And probably still has excellent taste: it's not like he died, he just got chased away by Michael. I'm not saying I want Sam to show back up in the present to mess with Jane's marriage; I just wish that, after we were introduced to that adorable face, it didn't have to be dismissed so quickly. (I also kind of expected them to get to the book reading and for Maria Semple to cameo as herself: she started her career as a writer on Beverly Hills, 90210, so she probably still has a soft spot for soapy TV shows targeted toward young women!)

So she's just going to be Jane The Wig-Head now?

During her hiatus, Gina Rodriguez shaved half her head and cut the rest into a bob and it looks rad. But that look is not very Jane (besides which no one would expect her to stop on her way from the Marbella corridor to the hospital to freshen up her look), so I expected it to be covered, and it is.

Do we expect that, in a future episode, Jane would cut some of the length? If she didn't do it when Mateo was an infant, maybe she just never would. And if this wig is her new lid, I've definitely seen worse.

Will this horrible shared experience finally thaw relations between Jane and her mother-in-law?

Patricia hasn't thought much of Jane since she broke off her first engagement to Michael, and although Jane is our heroine and we're supposed to be on her side come what may...it honestly would be weird if Patricia didn't hold a grudge about that on Michael's behalf. But the horror of having to react to Michael's shooting seems like the event that's going to change their relationship even more than the actual wedding did. To wit: though the bullet passed fairly cleanly through Michael's heart without doing catastrophic damage, the bullet lodged in a location that compromises Michael's spine. Their choices are to wait, treat the spinal swelling with steroids, and hope for the best -- which could still result in paralysis from the waist down -- or operate to remove the bullet, at the risk of killing Michael in the process. Patricia immediately says they can't operate, but it's Jane's decision, and she remembers Michael telling her he's a fighter, deciding that if he could decide for himself, he'd choose the surgery. Grudgingly, Patricia comes back to Jane and says Michael's father told her the same thing.

Of course Jane is right (as is Michael's absent father): Michael's surgery is a success. And while he was out, Jane started learning to assert herself as Michael's wife while still being respectful of Patricia's relationship with him, and Patricia started learning to back off and let the presiding Mrs. Cordero make decisions about Michael's care.

How long is Anezka going to be able to keep to her schedule of giving Petra paralytic booster shots?

We learn via phone call to Magda in prison that the effective period of a dose of whatever drug Anezka has is eighteen hours -- so now that the ticking clock has been set, we can probably count on at least a couple more episodes of Anezka needing to get to Petra up before the paralysis wears off and, even after Petra's been moved back to the Marbella, being comically detained from making it to her suite to deliver a new dose. Reviewing security footage of the hotel around the time of Michael's shooting made sense; if this gets dragged on much longer, it's really going to get annoying. And anyway, now that Rafael's told her that their reunion-tour sex sesh didn't do it for him and he's no longer interested in reconciling, Anezka's project of destroying Rafael in vengeance for her spurned advances has a lot more dramatic potential than sneaking syringes into Petra's vicinity. Let Magda give Anezka a tip on a drug that lasts longer and get on with giving Rafael Hep C or something.

Will the show actually go through with Xo's abortion?

In a chivalrous effort to safeguard Jane's privacy at the hospital, Rogelio strikes a deal with a couple of tweakers who seem like they're about to tweet a photo of Rogelio with Jane: if they delete it, he'll furnish them with clean pee. But then he has to toss it into a bush when Xo mistakes it for a beverage and asks for a sip, and when she offers to replace the sample herself, she is forced to take back the offer and confess her pregnancy. Once Rogelio gets over his initial fury at her having been inseminated by his mortal enemy, he promises to stand by her and the baby. "I'm not having the baby," she tells him. "I didn't want to have a baby with you, who I love so much. I'm not having a baby with Esteban." "Well, that's your choice," says Rogelio, correctly. "Either way I'm here." Since I had expected that this would be the show's sneaky way of cancelling out the one point of contention keeping Ro and Xo apart, I'm impressed that it's actually even mentioning the possibility that Xo really meant what she said about midlife motherhood and that she'd exercise her legal choice to terminate her unplanned, unwanted pregnancy. And given all the other ways this show has done right by the progressive causes it's dramatized -- immigration reform, gay rights, the challenges to organized labour -- I'm eager for this primetime network show with a large audience of young women to take on abortion and portray it as the right choice for Xo.

Not to give you whiplash, but...

...And Rose has a submarine now?

Sure, why not.

Let it sink. I'm so over these two.