This post contains spoilers for the Season 5 premiere of Jane the Virgin. Jane the Virgin’s Season 4 finale ended with a revelation that has been called “jaw-dropping,” “heart-stopping,” and “the most shocking TV twist ever.” I’m not sure I’d go that far, but the reappearance of presumed-dead Michael Cordero (Brett Dier) was certainly one of Jane the Virgin’s boldest surprises to date. Michael’s death midway through Season 3 changed the tenor of the drama, triggering a years-long time jump and eventually driving Jane (Gina Rodriguez) into the arms of her baby daddy, Rafael (Justin Baldoni). Now everything has changed again. Advertisement Rafael does the honor of explaining Michael’s return just a few minutes into the Season 5 premiere: “He has amnesia.” Well, of course he does! Amnesia is a classic soap-opera and telenovela trope, where a bonk on the head can change a character’s identity and open up brand new dramatic avenues for the writers—in the case of Jane the Virgin, potentially reconfiguring the show’s central love triangle. Even if you ignore all of the clues leading up to Michael’s reappearance, the plot device is so predictable and cliché that it should have us rolling our eyes. Advertisement Advertisement Except that Jane the Virgin thrives on clichés, and if you’re most concerned with the logistics of the twist—how did Michael get amnesia, why did everyone believe he was dead, what the heck has he been doing for four years—then the show is rolling its eyes at you. Literally. We learn most of those logistics in a flashback, where the imprisoned crime lord Rose breezes through the explanation: She used a toxin to slow Michael’s heart rate, sent in her own EMT drivers, then blackmailed or bribed or otherwise “incentivized” the coroner to fake the death certificate. As for the amnesia, “electroshock therapy focused on the hippocampus and temporal lobe,” she explains dismissively, eyes drifting skyward. Who cares? He’s back! Advertisement It’s Michael himself—sorry, “Jason,” named after Jason Bourne—who fills in the other blanks. “Four years ago, I woke up in a field in Montana with no memories,” he tells Jane, speaking in a slow, decidedly un-Michael drawl. “Some lady was there, said I should start over. The lady said that I was in a whole lotta trouble, so I didn’t know if I was a good guy or a bad guy.” There’s no faking it, either, since Rafael got a DNA test. This isn’t a long-lost twin or some stranger in a hyper-realistic mask. This is Michael. But it’s also not Michael. Get Slate Culture in Your Inbox We encountered an issue signing you up. Please try again. Please enable javascript to use form. Email address: Send me updates about Slate special offers. By signing up, you agree to our Privacy Policy and Terms Sign Up Thanks for signing up! You can manage your newsletter subscriptions at any time. Jane the Virgin usually sells its most absurd plot twists by grounding them in real emotions, and that’s exactly what it does here, even as the writers get hand-wavy about the plot mechanics. (“There’s so much we don’t know about the brain, it’s really not an exact science,” says the neurologist they visit.) To pull off the twist requires full commitment from the entire cast: Dier playing “Jason” as an entirely different person who can’t meet Jane’s gaze, Baldoni playing Rafael as quietly supportive even as the character’s entire future with Jane is thrown into jeopardy, Jaime Camil playing Rogelio as gleeful at the unlikely resurrection of his best friend—and so self-deluded he believes the sight of him will bring Michael’s memory back. Advertisement Jane the Virgin thrives on clichés, and if you’re most concerned with the logistics of the twist, then the show is rolling its eyes at you. It’s Rodriguez, though, who gives her best performance to date in this episode, delivering a seven-minute near-monologue in which Jane cycles through every conceivable emotion—sadness at being forgotten, anger at “Jason” even as she realizes that it’s not his fault, confusion about whether this means she’s still a widow or still married or something else—spiraling out while insisting, repeatedly, that she’s fine. She acts as a kind of mouthpiece for the writers—which she is, in a way, as the one telling the story. “What is the story even about now?” she asks her mother and grandmother, listing all the crazy things that have happened in her life, including her husband’s sudden death. “Obviously, that is a very easy detail to just change on the screen. And then my husband died—delete delete delete, done. Delete delete delete, not a widow.” Advertisement Advertisement As that mouthpiece, Jane more than anyone else acknowledges the absurdity of the amnesia twist, bitterly joking that she can just join the “My Husband Came Back from the Dead” support group. Recognizing how ridiculous it is to pull the amnesia card is what allows the show to transcend it: Being a widow has become a key part of Jane’s identity as a character, and that can’t be waved away the same way the exact details of Michael’s condition can. Just like the twist of Michael’s reappearance, the news that he lost his memory and has a new identity doesn’t delete anything that has come before. It just casts it in a different light.<doc-sep>Tonight is the night! Jane the Virgin is *finally* back on television, and we can’t wait. If you don’t know when and where the show is on, don’t worry, we got you. What Time and Channel Is It On? The telenovela will air on Wednesday, March 27, at 9 p.m. ET on The CW. What Will Happen When [Spoiler] Character Makes His Return? NOTE: DO NOT CONTINUE IF YOU AREN’T UP TO DATE. Fans were certainly shocked when they learned that Michael (Brett Dier) was not dead, after all! “Within 45 seconds, you’ll find out what happens with Michael,” the actor said during a PaleyFest Los Angeles Jane the Virgin panel on March 20. “It’s gonna cause a lot of problems. It’s gonna be great and emotional and you’re gonna love it. Y’all are gonna flip.” Jennie Snyder Urman — the show’s producer — added, “It will change things a lot for a lot of characters.” Valerie Macon / Getty Images Will Gina Rodriguez Direct More Episodes? Yes, she will! Gina Rodriguez — who plays the main character Jane Villanueva — directed the premiere episode where she also had to memorize seven pages of dialogue. LOL, no biggie. “It’s trippy. It was an incredible experience,” she gushed. “If it wasn’t for Jennie, I wouldn’t have this newfound journey … it’s a dream to direct.” So, what was the 34-year-old’s reaction when she learned Jennie wanted her to do her monologue in one take? “It was kind of like a battle, people told me I couldn’t do it,” she said. “And so we did it, and it’s long. It’s a culmination of what’s happened with Jane in that moment. It was incredible to do it. It’s always an awesome challenge. I feel like a giant and it’s a crazy experience. I’ve directed a show outside Jane and that’s not the experience.” Is This The Show’s Final Season? Unfortunately, yes. In April 2018, the CW announced that the show will end after this season. However, there is a Jane the Virgin spinoff coming titled Jane the Novela. Jennie confirmed in January that Gina will be the narrator on the show and it’s been described as a telenovela anthology where each season is based on a different fictional novel “written by” Jane. “I’m excited because it’s a different world, but it’s a similar tone,” Jennie exclusively told Life & Style. “There are different characters, but it shares a sense of whimsy and magical realism and narration. I think more fans of Jane will recognize things but also be transported into a totally different world.” Vincent Sandoval / Getty Images Will We Ever Meet The Narrator? According to Jennie, we will find out who he really is before the show wraps up. She also revealed that there have been “hints” throughout the show as to who he might be. Hmm … sounds like we better go back and rewatch! Season 5 of Jane the Virgin premieres on The CW Wednesday, March 27, at 9 p.m. ET.<doc-sep>Jane The Virgin returns Wednesday with the start of it's fifth and final season, and it's slated to be dramatic. Season 4 ended last spring with a wild cliffhanger that implied Michael, who died in Season 3, may really be alive and well. So what exactly happened, and is Michael (played by Brett Dier) back for good? Fans will find out at least some of what they need to know in the first episode, and the wait for the premiere is finally over. Jane The Virgin, the final season, premieres Wednesday night at 9 p.m. ET. That's 8 p.m. CT. The episode, as usual, will be an hour long, and will be hosted on The CW. In the first episode, questions will be answered quickly, according to the show's creator Jennie Snyder Urman in an interview with TV Guide March 20. She also explained the seeming return of Michael will have a huge effect on both characters and plot for the rest of the final season. While the first episode is sure to set up a long-range storyline for the rest of the season, fans are expecting to negate or prove theories they've held since Michael was first seen alive again. A handful of theories explain Michael's disappearance could be an undercover mission for the police department, and if Jane knew of anything, her safety would be in danger. Viewers also want the new series to answer a series of questions like "How did Rafael know Michael was alive?" and "What does this mean for Jane and Rafael's pending engagement?" Most importantly, maybe "Do Jane and Michael still love each other?" When viewers left Jane last season, she'd just seen Michael for the first time and looked as if she saw a ghost. Before that, though, she was expecting to become engaged to Rafael, the unintentional father—remember, way back in Season 1, she was wrongfully artificially inseminated—of her first child, Mateo. The final season is sure to include flashbacks to both her relationship with Rafael and with Michael throughout the series, as a series-long question has now been reopened: which of the two men will she choose to spend her life with? Though Jane originally chose Michael, she was on a path for happiness with Rafael after his death. Will it all be uprooted?<doc-sep>SPOILER ALERT: Do not read if you have not yet watched the fifth and final season premiere of “Jane The Virgin.” It took five seasons but the CW’s take on a telenovela finally delivered one of the biggest genre tropes: amnesia. Picking up immediately from where the third season left off, Jane (Gina Rodriguez) was confronted by the fact that Michael (Brett Dier) was actually alive, after Rose (Bridget Regan) faked his dead, burned off his fingerprints and put him through electroshock therapy of his hippocampus and temporal lobe so that he would forget who he was. “Amnesia was the thing that first entered us into that space with Rogelio’s telenovela, and so once we knew Michael/Jason was coming back, amnesia felt like the right move in terms of just how to create so much drama for the finale season — and also the emotional toll of how someone you love looks at you like a stranger felt very exciting but also challenging, in terms of how to ground that,” showrunner Jennie Synder Urman explains. Once Urman knew that was where she would be taking Michael, she knew the most important part of the storyline would be taking seriously “the trauma of him waking up and not knowing who he was.” Awakening in Montana years earlier, Michael didn’t know if he was a good or bad guy and chose to make a new life for himself, rather than search for the answers about who he really was. Now calling himself Jason, he prefers dogs over cats, isn’t much of a talker, and called everyone from his wife to his mother “ma’am.” “We had to recreate everything. And how would you do that if you didn’t know if you were a good person or a bad person? You wouldn’t be talking all of the time because you’d be afraid of what you may say that could be bad or incriminate you in some way or give away something that you don’t know,” Urman says. “So that made us think about him as somebody who was just sort of keeping his head down, quiet and observing — just sort of watching people for cues and things. That made him a more internal person because he’s lived without any kind of sense of history, memory — anything — to hold on to.” Urman notes that this also allows Dier to tap into different parts of himself as an actor and gives the show a new relationship to explore — because he’s “this new character, but she’s looking at him as her husband.” “It raises interesting questions about the soul and soulmates and what makes a person,” Urman continues. “If we’re a collection of the stories we tell about ourselves, or if we’re actually what’s essentially there — and how experience molds us.” Michael’s return has thrown Jane for a loop, and going forward, Urman shares, she will focus on trying to stimulate his memories. She believes if he is around familiar people, places and things it will spark something, so she will put some of her life on pause to take him around and tell him stories of their past. But, Urman says, she is still going to keep him at some emotional distance because “obviously he’s different and she’s different,” and things are further complicated by the fact that she is with Rafael (Justin Baldoni) now. “It’s part of the journey — what does Jane owe this person [and] how can she help him, while also preserving her sense of herself and her family and where she is in her life. How does it not take over her life? The answers to that are not easy, and they keep changing,” Urman says. The season premiere saw Jane spiral into the stages of grief once again upon living with the shock of her dead husband’s return, culminating in a seven-and-a-half page monologue that Urman wrote and Rodriguez performed (and directed) in a oner. Urman admits that before she writes anything she thinks about how she would feel if she were in the character’s shoes, and when it came to this monologue, “it was such a complicated well of emotion in terms of memory and your heart and what you owe them and who you are now and who you were then,” she explains. She also felt like because the revelation was “so huge,” it deserved to be shown in a “new, fresh way” than anything else on the show. “It’s about all of the range of human emotion that you would have in that instant,” Urman continues. “Trying to keep things together, gradually falling apart, finding the humor in it, finding the tragedy, finding the sorrow, finding the irony — all of those levels — because it’s such an unimaginable thing that has happened. It’s an outpouring.” Although Jane “let it all out,” so to speak, in the final season premiere, that is not to say her newfound grieving process is complete. “It keeps changing as the character changes and as the circumstances change and as the expectations change and as the relationship between her and Jason changes. This is the first,” Urman says. In a pivotal final season premiere scene, Jane walked into Rafael’s work “telling him she loves him, just like in the pilot when she came into Michael’s office,” Urman points out. “It was a way to really invigorate the love triangle, but tell totally different stories,” she says. Going forward, Michael’s reemergence in their lives will be a disruptive influence, but it is one that will dissipate from the spotlight as the initial shock wears off and people settle in back into their relationships. Storylines such as Rogelio’s (Jaime Camil) new show and relationship with River Fields (Brooke Shields), as well as Petra’s (Yael Grobglas) broken heart over J.R. (Rosario Dawson) will become “more present in the second episode and beyond because life goes on,” Urman shares. “The other characters’ storylines start to take off.” And just because the show is a take on a telenovela does not mean Urman will focus her whole final season on characters’ relationships.<doc-sep>
[This post contains spoilers about the Jane the Virgin episode, "Chapter Eighty-Two."] The final season of Jane the Virgin is finally here! Obviously, this is incredibly bittersweet for all of us. We're out here waiting on all of the answers to the questions we were left with at the end of season four, but also want to cling onto this series for as long as possible. To further complicate our feelings, the show's creators have been pretty transparent about the fact that they're going to emotionally destroy viewers with plenty of little winks at the first season. So far, they're doing an impeccable job. The season premiere felt like one long episode of déjà vu. Well, unless you're Michael, Jane's husband who has returned from the dead and has a case of amnesia. As far as he knows, Michael is a guy named Jason who woke up in a field in Montana with no memories. He now speaks with a slow drawl, and seems to have also lost his sense of humor and love for cats. Jane spends a lot of the episode unsuccessfully trying to refresh Michael's memory, and the rest of it grappling with what his return means for her novel, her personal identity, and her relationship with Rafael. For everyone who still has a functioning memory, the following tiny details may have felt familiar. Luisa's Powdered Donuts Sin Rostro, AKA Rose, is still in jail. But that doesn't mean she can't mess with everyone on the outside while she's there. In an attempt to reconnect with Luisa, instead of just sending a letter or making a phone call, she has a TON of powdered donuts delivered. The CW If you remember correctly, Luisa and Rose would always eat powdered donuts after sleeping together during their affair. When Rose visited Luisa in the mental hospital she was committed to in the first season, she brings a sleeve of powdered donuts as a sugary white flag. Unsurprisingly, it didn't work. This time, Rose stepped it up by sending baskets of vegan powdered donuts. (BTW, Luisa is apparently a vegan now, in case you missed that little clue from our beloved narrator.) Jane's Yellow Dress In the middle of all of the Michael/Jason drama, Jane visits Rafael on the first day of his new job to tell him that she still loves him and wants to stay together. Normally, this move would seem a little over the top, but when your husband comes back from the dead and you’re about to move in with your fiance-to-be, it’s nice to keep everyone in the loop. The CW The dress that Jane is wearing in this scene is actually significant, because it's a nod at the yellow dress that Jane wore to visit Michael at his job to tell him that she loved him in the very first JTV episode. I guess yellow is the color to wear when you're about to let somebody know about a huge decision you've finally made? Noted. Jane visiting Michael at work in the first episode. The CW It's probably also important to note that the scene where Jane visits Michael in the pilot ends with a warning from the narrator that everything is not what she thinks, and that the decision that she felt very confident about making in that moment may change in the future. Knowing this show...this is some serious foreshadowing. A Magical Outdoor Kiss After Jane spills her heart to Raf, the two share a very telenovela kiss outside. There's music, and a flower petal even falls from the sky. The CW If this feels familiar, it's because this scene looks a lot like the first time Jane and Raf ever kissed after she broke up with Michael in "Chapter Six." Ah, memories! Except, there's only one little flower petal this time instead of a sky full of them like in the first season, which feels a bit sus, no? The CW While you try to decide if you're team Rafael or Michael/Jason, please enjoy these Twitter reactions from Jane the Virgin fans who are in the same damn boat.