so - saw that episode again (and also started jtv again because...want to go through the first fourteen episodes again for soulmate au purposes) and here are the things i gleaned!
1) jane thought rose was 38 instead of 51.
like - i know we harp on the 51 bit but this time it’s the 38 bit that stuck out to me. not because there’s an age difference there of thirteen years (yikes) but more because of the age difference that would be between lu and rose. at the end of the series, lu is roughly 45. in fandom, we usually put rose at three years younger than lu (because bridget is roughly 3 years younger than yara), but jane is here making rose seven years younger than lu.
and here is why that is important (and also indicating a missed opportunity that i would have liked them to delve into more): jane is seven years younger than rafael. jane is mentally putting the age gap between rose and lu as the exact same as the age gap between her and raf, where lu stands in for raf and rose stands in for her. this is just another bit of that mental paralleling that we see jane do between herself and rose - or the writers do between jane and rose - that we see coming up again in the episode: rose making the claim that this isn’t jane’s love story, it’s hers (when we, as the viewers, know it is the other way around); jane setting them up as good vs. evil in that final confrontation (and the parallel of rafael coming to save her vs. luisa coming to kill rose)--
even before this, there are instances of rose/lu meaning to be a parallel of jane/raf. rose constantly saying that she and lu are the greatest love story ever told (as compared with jane’s preoccupation with telenovelas and her love story turning out to be one); rose and lu having literal fireworks over their first kiss as opposed to the dramatics that we see happening with jane’s “first” kisses with her respective love interests (the fake snow falling with michael; the blossoms with rafael (not her technical first kiss, but in context, i think you understand what i mean). both love stories are shown with that telenovela flair to them so that there is a contrast between them. you can even bring up jane and her different janes (critic!jane, drunk!jane, etc.) and compare them with the different masks that rose wears as sin rostro.
(you can make a fandom argument here. i don’t feel like making it, but you can, technically, make it.)
to an extent, rose is a negative version of jane where her love - and her obsession with her love interest - destorys her, changing her life for the worse instead of changing it for the better the way it does with jane. (and you can make the argument that jane tries to make the appeal that lu should be her michael and that rose should move on to find her actual raf, but idk how much water that holds).
we can also look at jane making rose and lu’s age gap similar to her age gap with raf as a way of her trying to connect to their love story as she writes her novel. for most of her writing time, jane’s relationship with luisa is...rocky, at best, if it’s actually there at all. you could make the argument that she didn’t actually really start understanding writing luisa until the flashback chapter in s4 and used that as her basis for writing her, but the point is that most of what jane wrote about luisa and rose would be built from what little she knew. those parallels would be her insertion.
i’m just surprised that she put rose in her place instead of lu. but that may be due to rose was emilio’s trophy wife, so she has to be the younger one, which - says a lot about what jane thought of emilio (from the little time she spent with him and the stories she likely heard from raf) that he would be married to a woman she thought was seven years younger than his oldest daughter.
(there is also the potential thought that jane thought rose was 38 at the beginning of the series and that rose was 51 at the beginning of the series - which, you know, would make more sense in terms of where authors would talk about their character’s ages, which would make rose, what, 59? at the end of the series? (a year a season with a three year time gap would be eight years - s1 isn’t really a full year, but there’s a time jump in s2 re: petra’s pregnancy, so i’m evening it out - so 59? almost 60? idk. jtv, maybe make things a little clearer here. actually, don’t. it’s more fun to speculate.)
2) where rose was stabbed through by the statue (which probably wouldn’t have happened anyway, that thing was probably made of styrofoam or some other lightweight material that would more likely have broken under her weight, but i digress), she probably still could have survived. with some immediate medical attention and a lot of constraints, probably.
or faked it, to be fair, but let’s not go there.
the statue stabbed through the lower half of her torso, approximately cutting her in half. but not entirely. idk, in a telenovela sort of way, she could have survived that. i just think i originally thought the statue stabbed, you know, her heart, not her lower regions. so maybe she couldn’t have actually survived that. it just feels like it’s more likely there than otherwise.
idk i have less proof for this, just a general feeling.
3) xo is really good at keeping secrets to the benefit of other people.
this is less a that episode thing and more of a starting jtv over again thing but like! she spent all of jane’s first twenty-four years letting jane believe that she had wanted an abortion and alba convinced her to keep her instead of the other way around so that she could protect jane! and she kept the secret about rogelio for just as long and let alba think she didn’t know who the dad was and was just a random hook-up (because she didn’t want to be with rogelio then) because that was the better option! like xo is a determined woman who is actually very good about protecting her people and that’s something i hadn’t noticed before and like, yeah, i might have a higher appreciation for xo now.
4) luisa is definitely wearing the same dress when she goes to jump off the bridge that she is when she explains to jane and raf and petra and xo that she artificially inseminated the wrong woman.
it’s the same blue dress. she literally went immediately afterward to try and commit suicide and rose talked her out of it, like, i’m wondering - i know that lu was supposed to die when roman apparently did (but aaron actually did), but i’m wondering if the bridge jumping thing was a callback to the original plan (and if in that universe, luisa’s death was a suicide and not a murder by sin rostro. not that aaron/roman’s murder was. but you know).
5) also luisa and no patient confidentiality why are you telling rafael that jane works at the hotel where is your privacy woman
there are probably more but, uh, gonna stop there for now. maybe will bring up more later with further episodes! will see!
