What I’m Watching: Jane the Virgin

Jane the Virgin: Season 3, Episode 17 “Chapter Sixty-One” (B+)

Things don’t always work out as you expect them to on this show, and this episode was full of surprising revelations. I hadn’t really noticed that Lina had been absent for the entirety of this season’s flash-forward events, since she’s never been the show’s most interesting character by any sense of the term, but it was interesting to see her blow Jane off and then have the truth come out about why she decided to give up on the friendship. Kudos to Fabian who, in addition to having unexpected depth and being willing to read books after expressing that he just read magazines, was able to get Jane to reconcile with her onetime best friend. Speaking of getting back together, the misdirect about Xiomara lying to Rogelio was wonderful since that made her extremely sweet proposal, which he loved but couldn’t react to because of his earlier Botox session, all the more fantastic. Rafael being into Petra wasn’t going anywhere at the start of the episode since she was so into Chuck, but the twist that he is indeed JP, better known as Jerky Pants, changes things in a big way that puts Petra in real danger. This episode had some nice political subtext, addressing the current threat of deportations in the United States in a nuanced fashion when Alba was traumatized by someone shouting a shopper down for speaking in Spanish and then decided to march. Her romance with Jorge is going pretty well, and things may indeed work out for that older couple after all.