Petra & Rafael Might Stay Together for a While

Let me start off by saying that if you haven't seen The CW's Jane The Virgin premiere, you're missing out. I mean, this show is the perfect addition to The CW's supernatural-heavy lineup that's only made better by the fact that it's based on a telenovela and retains the best aspects of that genre. Well, and that it's not making us wait forever to find out who the father of Jane's baby is (SPOILER ALERT: it's Rafael). God, it's refreshing to have a CW show that I don't have to hate-watch half of the time due to a total lack of answers to big questions. But that doesn't mean that Jane The Virgin hasn't introduced questions of its own — the greatest of which might be what will happen between Petra and Rafael in Season 1?

During last Monday's premiere, the series introduced essentially everything we need to know going into Season 1. Here's the short-list of what we got: Jane and Rafael used to be a thing, but Rafael's now unhappily married to Petra and Jane's engaged to Michael, who's pretty sketchy — she also just got artifically inseminated, accidentally, by Rafael's frozen sperm. Those are essentially the important details of this situation, but when it comes to Petra and Rafael, things seem to be more complicated.

From what Jane The Virgin revealed last week, Rafael wants a divorce from Petra and, when she sensed that he was drifting, she tried to get pregnant with his baby. (As you can see, I wasn't exaggerating about the telenovela influence here, but it's amazingly done.) Of course, things didn't work out that way and Rafael wanted to go ahead with the divorce until he realized that Jane probably wouldn't give them the baby if they broke up. Dun dun dun. So, Petra can now hold this over his head, because it's obvious that Rafael doesn't have a "devil may care" attitude about this whole baby drama.

So, will this pair be kaputs? It probably won't be that easy, even if Petra is having an affair with another man that may or may not be under investigation for a serious crime. Why? I mean, Rafael is a good looking man and it's obvious that Jane would totally want to be with him if she could. Well, again, the telenovela influence is super-strong on Jane The Virgin. If the new CW series stays true to the genre from which it's derived, Petra and Rafael will have to stay together at least until the end of the season.

Daytime soaps love a drawn-out, complicated, and kind of dirty separation, during which one person in the couple engages in increasingly shady activities when it concerns keeping their partner manipulated. Petra's already shown herself to be super-manipulative on Jane The Virgin — I mean, she was trying to get pregnant so Rafael wouldn't divorce her. And now she's planning on manipulating him with the idea that he'll never see his child if they break up. So I wouldn't put it past her to try incredibly hard to keep this relationship together while mentally overpowering Rafael like she's done for so long.

Jane The Virgin is setting up a love triangle between Jane, Rafael, and Michael because that's what The CW does best, but that doesn't mean that Jane and Rafael could get together — or should, for that matter. At the very least, those two would have to wait until Petra was behind bars or on the other side of the country before they could get together, lest she go totally crazy and try something drastic to keep Rafael and Jane apart. I'm sorry, I'm running away a bit with myself here. But there really isn't any possible way that Rafael could break things off with Petra without there being some intense consequences for everyone involved — especially since his lovely, scheming wife is supposed to join forces with Michael in Monday night's new episode.

Image: Greg Gayne (2), Tyler Golden/The CW