Jane the Virgin creator always knew she'd end her telenovela that way

Warning: This post contains plot from the series finale of Jane the Virgin. Read at your own risk!

Jane Gloriana Villanueva got her happy ending. In the series finale of Jane the Virgin, not only did Jane get married to Rafael, but she revealed that her book's ending plays into the very show that fans have been watching for five seasons. (As does her son Mateo.) In the final moments of the finale, we got this exchange from the newlyweds:

Rafael: "What happens at the end of your book?"

Jane: "They make it into a telenovela."

Rafael: "Who'd want to watch that?"

The kicker? Years ago, when Jane creator Jennie Snyder Urman pitched the series to The CW, she pitched that very ending. "I remember telling them the story of it," Urman says of the pitch meeting. "I don't think I had a narrator at that point but the story was very similar. I told them the ending lines in the pitch for the show."

While there were a number of unplanned twists and turns along the way—"I didn't know at the beginning that Michael would come back," Urman says—the end never changed. "I always knew where we were building to. Because so much of Jane is about being a writer and we have a narrator who's reminding us all the time that you're watching a telenovela, I felt like knowing the ending was so important so that you could have trust in the storyteller and know that they're taking you on a journey and they know where it ends," Urman says. "It's not just going to be huge twists and turns for the sake of twists and turns, it's all going to be adding up to something and that was always very important to me."

And the very idea of an ending is something that Urman always knew was incredibly important to the structure of a telenovela. "It's all baked into the idea of a telenovela and what a telenovela is and how they always have endings," Urman says. "They're different from American soap operas where they're built to keep churning out story and to go on as long as the viewers will have them. Telenovelas are built with endings in mind and I felt like it was very important for me to embrace that structure when I took on Jane and to be true to the format of what a telenovela is at its core, and that's a story with an ending. So when I thought about Jane, I thought about how it would end and I wanted it all to be adding up to something that would feel like a whole, complete journey that has an inevitability to it. And so that was so important in thinking about the project and thinking about the telenovela roots of it, so I did pitch them the ending at the beginning."

And more than five years later, fans got to see that very same ending play out onscreen.

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• Jane the Virgin series finale reveals narrator's identity
• Jane the Virgin cast posts emotional farewell photos after series wrap
• Forget Team Michael or Rafael, Jane and Petra are now the heart of Jane the Virgin