Jane the Virgin Series Finale: An (Almost) Perfect American Telenovela We’re Lucky to Have Loved

I know we throw around the word epic a lot, but that’s often a failure to understand what that word really means. Because it’s about [a] lot more than dangerous battles and literal physical journeys through strange and distant lands. Genuine Epics understand the biggest journey is often from who you were to who you are, [a]long with all the ways we can stay true to our most moral and aching hearts. — Film Crit Hulk

A few months ago, that favorite mystery denizen of Movie Twitter, Film Crit Hulk, sat down with Nickelodeon’s beloved animated series, Avatar: The Last Airbender, for the very first time. For the AtLA fans among Film Crit Hulk’s followers, the slow-burn reaction thread that followed became a temporary obsession. Inherently kind, open-hearted, and filled with both humor and humility, AtLA is as close to the Platonic Ideal as a television series can get, and one of the deepest joys of being an AtLA fan is getting to watch someone you love and admire figure that out for the first time. To see Film Crit Hulk catch on to the series’ exceptional artistry early on and then to watch that admiration deepen and evolve over time was immensely satisfying, of course, but more satisfying still was having Twitter’s favorite big green critic reach the finale and articulate anew the two things AtLA fans know in their bones to be true: A) On every level, “Sozin’s Comet” is a perfectly balanced epic finale, and B) We are all endlessly lucky to have had AtLA in our lives.

For the last five years, Jane the Virgin has been making a serious play to join Avatar: The Last Airbender in the Perfect Series Club. Despite the wild surreality of its original premise—a devoutly Catholic twentysomething virgin is accidentally artificially inseminated by her ex-crush/current boss’s sperm during a routine gynecological appointment (chaos ensues)—Jane the Virgin’s exceptional artistry was also evident from the jump. Too, as any of its most passionate fans can attest, it’s been all but impossible for any new viewer’s admiration not to deepen and evolve as the creative swings taken by Jennie Snyder Urman have gotten bigger and bigger as the seasons progressed. Have there been some hiccups over the years? Of course. As much as it’s true that more Petra (Yael Grobglas) is always better, the goofy small-time villainy of her charlatan mom, Magda (Priscilla Barnes), was often too untethered from the rest of the narrative to be compelling. The Michael-Jane-Rafael love triangle, too, was old long before it got unnecessarily Frankensteined back into life in the final season, and ultimately left Rafael with less internality in the final season than he deserved. Overall, though, Jane, like AtLA, was from the start a firecracker that refused to go out.

Now, with the long-anticipated (and, given the absence of a true “Chapter Ninety-Nine,” slightly cheating) “Chapter One Hundred,” Jane’s journey is finally over. All the arcs that Urman set up along the way—from those tracing Jane’s, Rogelio’s and Petra’s professional ambitions to those following Rafael’s, Xiomara’s, and Luisa’s journeys to understanding their own hearts, to those invested in everyone (minus Michael’s dog) getting a happy romantic ending—have been wrapped up tight. All the mysteries, from Rose’s villainous endgame to the Latin Lover Narrator’s true identity, have been solved, and all the various interpersonal injustices, from Magda’s intimidation of an undocumented Alba to Michael’s amnesiac isolation in Montana, have been resolved. In true telenovela form, Jane’s villains met a gruesome (Rose), chilly (Magda) or mutually beneficial (Darci and Esteban) end in the penultimate episode, and Jane and Rafael’s happily-ever-after wedding capped off the finale.

For the most part, that is, Jane the Virgin managed to pull it all off.