On this chapter of The Queerest Things I Watched Last Week, I was away on vacation last week, but I made time to watch the Jane The Virgin series finale.
Last week I was on vacation in Provincetown, one of the queerest places on Earth, and had a 24-hour visit from LezWatchTV team member, Nikki!
I saw many queer things IRL last week, but the queerest thing I saw on TV was the final episode of one of my favorite shows.
- Jane the
VirginGoodbye – Season 5 Episode 19 “Episode One Hundred” [Live] -
When Jane the Virgin debuted in October 2014 I almost didn’t watch it. I read on either Autostraddle, or a website that shall not be named, it was going to have a lesbian character, but I couldn’t imagine liking a show about a straight virgin. I watched it anyway because back then there were fewer shows with regular queer characters, and TBH I would watch almost anything with gay in it. I soon learned this was not a typical comedic drama, it was magic.
I love soap operas, and this was my first time watching a telenovela-style drama. The show was female-centric, feminist, fantastical and completely over-the-top. I absolutely loved it.
When Jane the Virgin started, we had much fewer entries in our database than we do now. And this show has given us queer characters since the beginning. Rose and Luisa (the greatest love story of all time according to Rose) have been on the show since episode one.
Luisa, Rafael’s lesbian sister, was the one who accidentally inseminated Jane and made her a pregnant virgin. Rose was the primary super villain for all five years of the show. I think it’s fair to say the two of them had the most entertainingly dysfunctional queer female relationship in the history of television. Over the course of its run, Jane The Virgin gave us 15 queer female characters from main to guests, and in Season 4 Episode 13 “Chapter Seventy-Seven,” they had seven queer female characters in a single episode.
The greatest gift Jane The Virgin ever gave the wlw fandom is making Petra bisexual. We watch shows, sense a character is not completely straight, and tweet at show creators begging them to make them queer. We did this for Petra and the show said, “Okay, we’ll give Petra a girlfriend.”
Not only did Rosario Dawson join the show to be Petra’s love interest, but they had amazing chemistry, making them one of the best queer female ships on TV!
The Jane The Virgin series finale was hard. I am going to feel the absence of this show in my life. I’m not a crier, but I felt choked up the entire episode. Overall, the finale was mostly sentimental. You could also tell the actors were not completely acting as they did their final emotional scenes. To be completely honest, I wanted more telenovela-style drama but appreciated the closure and happy endings.
I especially loved Petra and JR getting the happy ending they deserved.
I absolutely loved this scene, and I may have watched it 20 times. I only wish there could have been more than 1 minute and 20 seconds of Petramos content in this episode, but I fully understand the title of the show is Jane The Virgin and not Petra the Emotionally Challenged Hotel Boss.
I will miss Petra and JR, Ro and Xo, Jane and Raf, The Narrator, Mateo, and the twins and especially Rose pulling off a fake face.
Goodbye, Jane the Virgin, see you in re-watches on Netflix.
So many shows are back: Orange is the New Black, Dear White People, Derry Girls…AND I’ve been binging Veep lately. After being away, I have so much to catch up on and write about this week.
