How low can you go

Trouble is coming: it’s going down, down, down (better start running)

Well, it’s been quite the challenging week for hardcore fans of The L Word around the world. We barely managed to process seeing Bette and Tina back together, only to then have to come to terms with them not being on our screens for most of the remainder of this 3^rd season of the show. Apparently, the powers that be decided that it was a great idea to first take away the OG’s season 6 happy Tibette ending by having them divorced in season one of the reboot. To show us how there definitely needed to be some evolvement (on Bette’s part only…) before they could actually be in a real happy ending and drive into the sunset together, only to be seen again at the end of the season. In the meantime, Jennifer announced she’s “taking a step back to make room for other stories”, leaving some with hope that she will still be back occasionally to add her radiance to the show. Yet leaving others, who are convinced that Jennifer is too much of a quality person to ever diss the project she’s put her heart and soul into and that still has her friends in it, devastated. They feel that if (and at this point this seems like a big IF) the show is renewed for a season 4, Jennifer nor Laurel will be around much for any of it. Especially now that Jennifer doesn’t show as an EP either anymore.

So, those were last week’s events, that I will dive into more deeply in another column at a later stage. But today let me dissect the pros and cons of episode 3! I won’t beat around the bush here: it was the most painful episode of The L Word (OG and Gen Q) I ever had to watch. Deliberate choice of the words “had to”, as I really felt I should write about it, even though after seeing the very first scene in the ambulance already made me want to turn off my TV. But hey, I’m a tough cookie, so just shouting at my device when events really became too far stretched and ridiculous to even be remotely believable, helped me through.

Ok then, let’s do this. First off there’s Nat to arrive at the crash scene before Dani, as Gigi’s emergency contact. With the one-year time lapse after last season, Dani and Gigi have now been together for at least a year. And yet the co-parenting talks and meetings Gigi has with her ex not only still seem new and undesired by Dani, it seems they also led Nat back to wanting Gigi so much that she felt it appropriate to kiss her in the ambulance while Gigi was in pain and waiting to be taken to the hospital. We must have all misunderstood the “Yes, this is real” part, that Gigi conveyed to Dani to reassure her in S2, right?!

Next up there’s Alice’s 100^th show airing, with a special dating item, intended for Alice to find “the one” as the main treat of her show. “Finding the one”?? Again that 1 year time-lapse leaves us with lots of questions, the most important one being “what happened to Tom?”. Let me briefly rewind to s3 ep 1. We are to believe that after finding ”the one” with Dana, and after she died, finding true love again with Tasha (what happened to her, by the way?), then in
Gen Q moving on to find what felt like love and a good match, to me at least, with Tom, she now has become this person who will just be f*cked without any passion by some random and much younger guy that she has absolutely nothing in common with? Dumping him shortly thereafter and going on a hunt for “the one” on her show, and choosing the person who appears most intellectually challenged, with cheesy jokes, at best. I’m sure we all can’t wait to see how that turns out…

Shane, in the meantime, decides to start tearing down a wall together with Finley, in the new to be bar that she and Tess bought.
So far so good, and all perfectly normal and understandable. Until out of the blue they embark on some dance moves together, as if they were auditioning for flashdance (to lyrics like “if you’re horny, let’s do it, ride my pony”), instead of tearing down a wall! At this stage I’m starting to wonder if the writers even know their characters at all? This is pretty much the last thing that Shane would ever do, seriously! To make it even worse, Tess walks in right before Finley whacks the wall right where the water is, which is now splashing everywhere. And we get to disregard the good place Tess and Shane have been in for, I guess, over a year already (again that horrid time-lapse), and have to buy into their little argument over this being enough for Shane to get back to her old tricks of womanizing. All evolvement out the window. Sure, we’ll accept that narrative…

We get a little taste of momma T or momma B’s presence through a phone call with Angie. What a relief, as we thought that they had just left her to take off to Canada without saying goodbye last episode. Oh, and without a ticket for Bette, or a passport and some clothes either, but those are minor issues, right!

Tess managed to quickly find a plumber to fix the leakage. Gen Q really likes their parallels, doesn’t it? And here we have Carrie brightening the watch party again, tampons in nose and everything. We don’t have to miss out on any of the absurdity they came up with for this character, how awesome. She and the plumber almost literally run into each other at Dana’s in the bathroom, when Carrie gets the door smashed into her nose and the plumber helps her out with that leakage by, you guessed it, shoving a tampon on either side. How could you not get attracted to one another after such a heartwarming, intimate moment!

Carrie was there to see Finley, by the way.

“Tess described you so perfectly. She said “Leonardo DiCaprio, from Romeo and Juliet. And with the hair and everything, I totally see it.”. My god, who writes these lines, please?!

And then goes on to explain: I’m here to tell you about the tsunami of depression that kicked my ass after I found out that my fiancée got back with her ex.

Now back up a little bit, because I’m confused here. I thought Bette and Tina got back together after that year’s time-lapse. Which was after Carrie and Tina had already broken off their engagement, no? So, that tsunami is now a week old?

On related Carrie trivia, so far we have learned that she uses groupons, has a texture thing with scallops, she gets reflux, she drinks a gallon of iced tea in a row, she gets free subs with her punch cards, and she doesn’t like wet bread. And apparently, she remembers Lamaze class when she badly needs to go to the bathroom: Kegel and hold, don’t sneeze…!

So, by way of a quick summary, Gigi and Nat are into each other again, leaving Dani lost, throwing oranges at their car and now open to reconnect with Sophie and Finley. Alice chooses the least likely person behind her blind date wall. The suspense for their future ahead is killing us, really. Carrie dares Finley into sending out her college application in return for her asking out the plumber. And Shane f*cks make-up artist Ivy, because apparently she still can slip back into her old self just like that.

Okay, that’s all folks. Or in Bette Porter’s own words: we don’t buy what you’re selling! Try and put at least some effort in making your stories believable, if you want a snowball’s chance in hell of die-hard fans wanting to keep watching this, once so lifechanging, show. Because you know what, we miss it. We miss how it used to make us feel. How it used to lift us up. How the friendships used to make us smile. How the relationships gave us goosebumps and lasted longer than just a few episodes. And most of all, we miss Bette and Tina. If you honestly think this show can be a success without them being on screen in every episode, then not only don’t you know your show and your characters, but you also definitely don’t know your audience either. And it’s likely going to “go down, down, down” indeed.

BettePorter_LA