When I first started watching The L Word in January 2004, I enjoyed it, but I also found lots to nitpick about: Shane’s hair, the lack of butches, and the annoying lesbian-pregnancy storyline, not to mention Jenny. As the season progressed I even, at times, found myself slightly bored by the dyke drama; sometimes the only thing that kept me watching was the fact that Sunday nights had become a raucous L Word-watching potluck with my friends in my living room.

So I was quite surprised when, after the end of the 13-episode season, I felt the unmistakable symptoms of TV withdrawal. That’s right—the same feelings I felt at the end of every season of Buffy and The X-Files: the longing to know what was going to happen next; midnight scanning of message boards for Season 2 spoilers; even pondering whether I wanted to start reading L Word fan fiction.

At some point in its four-to-five month run, The L Word and its pretty people had wormed its way into my subconscious, and I felt the sudden lack of my weekly fix sorely.

By the time the Season 2 promo hit the Showtime airwaves in late August, I was more than ready to download and hit repeat. The prospect of rewatching all of the first season on DVD in the near future whetted my appetite for more of our favorite gang of luscious lesbians, so the other day I found my old file of the Season 2 promo and warmed up my media player in anticipation of some titillating tidbits for the future.

Here, then, are my fantasies for Season 2—stimulated by the promo and, I must admit, by some quick spoiler scanning.

First of all, let’s just give a round of applause to The L Word’s hair and makeup team for giving Shane (Katherine Moennig) a decent haircut. The Season 2 promo reveals Shane with a deliciously hipsterish do that tends definitively toward the butch and leaves behind the awful tangled mess that marred her otherwise yummy features in Season 1.

Now, when she kisses that beautiful, mysterious girl in the promo, I find that I am easily able to watch that scene several times over (luckily it’s a digital file so the quality doesn’t deteriorate with frequent use). Shane always moved with a certain feral, tomboyish grace that was easy to look at, but that haircut has pushed me over the fence into a diehard Shane Fan.

I don’t even care who she’s sleeping with next season—yeah the girl in the promo is gorgeous, but I’m focused on Shane. I hope she will fully evolve into the Bad Girl You Hate to Love next season; then I can focus all my pent-up frustration with the chicks I date on the fantasy figure of Shane. Given the writers’ tendency to give her a hard life, I’m sure she’ll have to pay for her love-’em-and-leave-’em ways—probably in some gut-wrenching melodrama that proves to us that she possesses a heart of gold just waiting to be uncovered by the right girl (i.e., me).

I’m also a big fan of the new look on our favorite gay-actress-playing-bisexual Leisha Hailey. Alice’s flirty new blonde crop reminds me of Leisha in her dark-haired punk-dyke-band days, and also makes me wonder just how much longer the writers are going to try pulling off this Alice-is-bisexual crap. She looks so gay now it’s just, well, fabulous.

The tentative, awkward moments with Dana (Erin Daniels) following their Season 1 finale midnight kiss are also a thrill to watch, and I hope to the lesbian goddess above that Dana’s fiancée Tonya (Meredith McGeachie) gets dumped this season. She was annoying in Season 1, and she remains annoying in the promo. When she says, “She always wants what I want more than what she wants,” I want to slap her: deluded much? Someone (maybe Alice) needs to tell her to step off, bitch.

If my fantasies were to come true, Alice and Dana would spend a solid majority of Season 2 dancing around the traditional lesbian issue of how to transition from friendship to relationship. After a couple months of will-they-or-won’t-they, they’ll finally both understand that falling in love with each other is inevitable, and Alice will surprise Dana with a romantic candlelit picnic dinner on the tennis courts. Or Dana will come out of her shell and admit to Alice that “Hell yes, I like you—I think I love you!” And then the camera will move in slowly, echoing the time-stopping way you feel when you kiss someone you really like, accompanied by some sexy background music—maybe Angie Stone, or if that’s too obvious, some breathy, bass-heavy Morcheeba.

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