What happens when Jane the Virgin isn't a virgin?

(Image credit: Tyler Golden/The CW)

last updated 3 November 2016

Jane the Virgin is a virgin no more.

The winky CW meta-telenovela about a virgin who was inseminated by mistake finally destroyed its premise in its 47th chapter this week. It did so with its trademark combination of G-rated fanfare and thoughtful, amusingly anticlimactic reversals. But underneath the humor was a pretty serious reckoning with the show's structuring conceit: "Chapter 47" finally released the show from the burden of its title.

The episode did a nice job of treating Jane's first time with its usual levity: Not once but twice, the camera cuts away from the actual sex to cartoons of Jane and her husband riding a rocket through a Jetsons-meets-Pinocchio fantasy world. This is more than your euphemistic train-through-a-tunnel footage of early film, though. The cartoons here are smashing you over the head with the fact that this event reframes, well, everything:

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The two strands of this show's DNA are absurd melodrama and psychological epiphanies. The former consists of massive plot twists — criminal subplots, face-swapping villains, accidental and intentional pregnancies, murders, and evil twins. The latter does careful character-work and dwells with loving specificity on Jane's memories, development, and current frame of mind. The results don't always meld well (Jane's hopes for her son's birthday party are treated as commensurate with another character's feelings about being blackmailed by his brother and birth mother, for instance). But the episodes tend to break down into Jane's sane small problem and everyone else's wackier, louder, crazier set of issues.

What's interesting, though, is that neither the cartoon, nor the narrator, nor Michael capture that Jane's first time was less than perfect. There are hints: She's a little too eager to get a drink of water. She says to herself that she's different now that she's a person who's had sex. But she needs something: She brings a bottle of wine to the bedroom only to find Michael asleep, and her need to process, without knowing how to process, feels like a moment of startling realism in a show that tends to show crises sunny-side up. We see Jane consider texting her mother and deleting the text, twice.

This should be the beginning and end of the episode's Jane problem. But the issue turns out to be more than suboptimal sex. Jane feels fine about losing her virginity, or so she thinks, but in practice, her sense of herself is wavering. Jane, whose affinity for romance novels has created some unrealistic expectations the show gently but frequently disappoints, has to undo a lifetime of programming about what sex does to your identity. Jane's problem turns out to be a massive gender problem. The show is at long last reckoning with its pilot, which opened with a 10-year-old Jane getting lectured by her grandmother Alba about virginity. Jane is holding a flower in her hand. "Notice how perfect it is," Alba says, before telling Jane to crumple it. She does.

One of the pleasures of this bubblegum series is Jane's function as an anchor amid the soap opera insanity. Alba's lesson, however intense it was, didn't affect Jane's view of others. She has no moral objection to her mother Xiomara's extramarital affairs, abortion, and other behaviors of which Alba might (and does) disapprove. But it turns out she's unable to extend that broad-minded approach to herself. She has a healthy sex drive, but it doesn't translate to actual sex. Here she is trying to enjoy married intimacy with Michael:

Other subplots mirror Jane's subconscious sense of loss, neatly layering anxieties in ways that invite Jane to see an identity crisis where none exists. When Xiomara is reconsidering whether she wants to change careers, Jane insists that she keep chasing her dream of being a singer. "I am a singer," Xo says, placidly. "It just feels like you're giving up on this huge thing that was so important to you for so long!" Jane says. Xo realizes that Jane is projecting.

That turns out to be the major breakthrough, and it's not a Jane plot, or a soap opera plot. It's an upheaval of the show's title so massive that Jennie Snyder Urman, the show's creator and showrunner, plans to make it literally true. Not by deleting "the Virgin," as the cartoon letters did above, but by adding a new identity for Jane that lasts a single episode instead of an entire series. Urman says future episodes of Jane the Virgin might be titled "Jane the Person Who Doesn't Like Her Mom's Boyfriend," or "Jane the Person Who Wants to Get a New Job."

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Lili Loofbourow is the culture critic at TheWeek.com. She's also a special correspondent for the Los Angeles Review of Books and an editor for Beyond Criticism, a Bloomsbury Academic series dedicated to formally experimental criticism. Her writing has appeared in a variety of venues including The Guardian, Salon, The New York Times Magazine, The New Republic, and Slate.

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