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Longing for “The L Word”: My Fantasies for Season 2

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 fiancĂ©e 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.

It’s too bad that there was so much Jenny (Mia Kirshner) not to mention gratuitous straight sex with the cuckolded Tim (Eric Mabius) in the promo to distract me from fantasizing about Shane and Alice and Dana. Like many viewers, I have not been a big Jenny fan. Sure, I empathize with her coming-out struggles and even her uncertainty over how to be bisexual, but most everything else about her annoys me: her hair (yes, I do feel that hair is very important), her big doe eyes that pretend to be innocent, her melodramatic writing about manatees, and her consistent lying and manipulating of her lovers who all, inexplicably, find her irresistible.

But to be fair, I remember that the Season 1 finale left me feeling surprised at how much more I liked Jenny at the end of the season than at the beginning. Maybe in Season 2 she’ll be less of a caricature of an emotionally wrought artiste and become a realistic character. The one thing that gives me hope is the shot of Jenny standing in what looks like a waitress uniform while she asks in a voiceover, “Did you guys hear what happened to Marina?”

While most viewers seem to think that Marina (Karina Lombard) is the bomb, I actually have never much cared for her. When I heard Jenny’s voiceover my first thought was, did Marina have some kind of accident that will force her to leave the show? Please? I hope that with Marina gone from her life, Jenny will come back to earth, learn some lessons, and get a haircut. If the spoilers are correct, at least one of my wishes might come true (hint: I’m obsessed with hair).

Which brings us, of course, to Ivan the drag king (Kelly Lynch) and his seduction of Kit (Pam Grier). The Season 2 promo does feature Ivan in several scenes?once with a bandanna sweatband that makes me think of The Dukes of Hazzard, and once with a do-rag that in profile looks like it ends in a rat-tail. The hair is still difficult to accept, but when Ivan tells Kit, “You’re a queen,” I actually caught myself thinking that he was sexy. I’m still not sure whether or not I want Kit to go down the queer path with Ivan leading the way, but it might be an interesting journey.

It’s clear from the promo that Bette isn’t at all happy about Kit’s interest in Ivan, and she tells her that “Ivan is not a good idea. You’re straight.” Kit’s naughty-child retort of “Who says?” made me chuckle though, and I wanted to cheer for Kit in the face of her younger sister’s prissy disapproval.

It was the scenes with Bette (Jennifer Beals) and Tina (Laurel Holloman) that I found least interesting in the promo, although I was happy to see that they seem to be single so far in Season 2. I’ve never been a huge Bette fan, but it was fun to see her picking up a woman at a bar and being the mack daddy we all know she is beneath her perfectly pressed suits. I liked seeing Tina get pissed off at Bette, too, and I hope that the fire we see in the Season 2 edition of Tina, who tended to be too bland in Season 1 lasts for a good long while.

A season in which Bette and Tina are at odds, yet yearning at some subconscious level for one another, might be the perfect way to get us interested in this couple’s love life. We may all want to be married (or at least coupled) in our real lives, but do we really want to watch it on TV. I bet we’d rather watch heated arguments involving flying furniture, outrageous flirting in gorgeously lit bars, and Shane picking up every hot chick in L.A. (When she’s done with La-La Land, she can make her way up to San Francisco.)

So what’s an L Word fan to do while waiting those excruciating last 3.5 months for the second season premiere (Feb. 20th, 2005, for those of you who are marking your calendars). I suggest hunkering down with the following: DVDs of the first season (which comes complete with the Season 2 promo), a few bottles of your favorite wine, and a bunch of friends.

Put it all together on a Sunday night and it’ll be just like last spring?or at least it will be at my house.

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