Okay, Okay, Okay. I’m going to totally go against popular opinion here. Please don’t kill me! (ha, ha…)
I loved the last episode of the L Word.
Well, maybe not quite loved – really, really, really liked. Lived, perhaps. (Get it? Liked + Loved? I’ll stop now. I usually don’t make horrible puns, but somehow it feels okay here. I think I’m high on L Word juice, or something)
Warning: This going to be super long – I have a lot of feelings at the moment.
Quick summary: I liked the Alice/Tasha/Jamie resolution. Sure, it was a bit artificial in the beginning, but it worked here. And I liked Helena and Dylan’s fight. It never made sense that they would make up so quickly. And I was sure that Jenny had screwed up the impersonation of Nikki’s manager. I felt relieved that Shane found Molly’s letter and the negatives. I loved nearly every scene with Tina and Bette. And I especially liked the last five minutes. (I’ll get to that in a minute.)
Alice/Tasha/Jamie. Threesome waiting to happen. And, I kind of wish it had. But, in real life (so I’m told) those things almost never turn into real relationships. Either the ‘third’ is the third wheel (and is only in it for sex), or one of the original couple gets jealous/falls for the third/both. The only way it can work is if the whole thing consists of nothing but sex, or if the people involved are very, very unusual. I can’t see Tasha “thinking is cheating” even coming close. And, I think she came back for the same reason. She was attracted to Jamie, but she never thought about it. Once she thought about it, she realized that she really wanted to be with Alice. Jamie was just a temporary attraction.
Helena and Dylan. Are one fucked up couple. Full Stop. They were weird back when they were playing ‘power sex’ that got caught on video tape. They were weird when Dylan couldn’t make herself do the right thing regarding the lawsuit, and yet still obviously loved Helena. And they are weird now, what with cutting clothes up with a knife and all. And, I think they still have a bunch of cycles to go before they work it out, or finally give it up. There’s just not time in eight episodes. I think that that’s okay, though. IC showed us just enough to make me happy.
That is one of the things I really liked about the finale, by the way. One of the stupid things about the L Word, has always been the assumption that the audience consists of idiots. The sledgehammer foreshadowing, they endless scenes of talking head exposition, the spelled out references, like this one:
[paraphrasing!]
Bette: “Lez girls. Cute, Jenny.”
Shane: “Like les girls. Nice play on words.”
Yeah…
We were never allowed to assume anything, to guess anything, to figure anything out. But thanks to time constraints in the finale, they allowed us to guess at a few things (the banister rail being an exception). The fate of Tasha/Alice, for example, and the future of Helena/Dylan for another.
!!!INSANE TANGENT WARNING!!!
I really wish the sequel was about Helena. Picture this: Helena, finding herself rather broke (through some unknown means), leverages her prison smarts, and becomes a big shot crime boss. Dylan is her on again, off again, girlfriend who insists on keeping a separate identity through her film-making. Helena would knock people around, sleep with hot cops to keep them quiet (and she’d play blackjack! and eff hookers! [sorry]), blow up Mormon churches (for being anti-gay!) (oooh, and the Mormons would be like the rival mob!) and all the while Helena would rule the criminal underworld with an elegant fist. At the end of the whole thing, Dylan would be killed by the cops by mistake when she stumbles into a big fight, and Helena would go on an insane rampage, and when they finally corner her, she has a bottle of wine in one hand, a detonator in the other, and she’s like, “<British Accent>Bloody Hell. Oh, fuck it all…</British Accent>” and she punches the detonator and blows up a whole city block!
Soooo… that was nuts. Hey, a girl can dream, can’t she?
Back to the L Word.
!!!END INSANE TANGENT WARNING!!!
Where was I? Oh, yes, Shane and Jenny. Shane’s storyline finally came together, for once. I never really cared for Shane, honestly – sure she was interesting (and hot!) the first season, but the whole ‘that’s Shane. She fucks a lot of girls.’ shtick got really old, really fast. Then came Carmen, who Shane dumped, and Paige, who Shane dumped, and probably a bunch of others I’m forgetting. And the whole Shay incident. Ok, we get it now – Shane has commitment issues. She also has no spine, despite her baby butchy demeanor. Why, oh, why, oh why can’t she change? Develop? Just a little bit? Then came Shenny, and the Shenny ’shippers were happy. The rest of us didn’t get it. What – another one for her to dump? What was the point? I think the point is: that Jenny was the first person who wouldn’t let Shane go. Sure, that girl in the first season was clingy, but she didn’t buy Nikki Stevens for 25,000 dollars! Shane is trapped. Will she break out? We assumed she wouldn’t – we didn’t have any reason to. But Shane actually did it! She found Molly’s jacket and decided that enough was enough. She didn’t get a change to actually do it – but her interaction with Alice, both at the party and before (at Alice’s) led me to believe that’s she’d really do it. She finally figured it out. (And by the way – yay for the understatement, again!)
That brings us to Jenny, who wasn’t nearly as despicable as she has been. Jenny’s just… crazy, really. Not clinically insane, but just her own brand of personal crazy. The season 2 acid trips with the circus clowns represent the worst of this. But I don’t mind her obsession that Bette admit to having an affair with Kelly. She honestly feels justified. And, her video project was really sweet and non-creepy.
Finally, Tina and Bette. Who had the sweetest and hottest sex and post-sex scenes ever. I’m so happy they ended up together. I always wished that TiBette hadn’t broken up at the beginning. We needed a strong central couple to hold the crazy together, and their breaking up was the worst thing in the show. Still, I think that there is closure now. And perhaps their new New York lesbian circle will be just as crazy, only they’ll be smart enough to hold it together themselves. Funny, TiBette is my favorite couple, but I can’t seem to find much to say about them here! Still – love, love, loved.
A few random bits: “Bye, Daddy.” Completely unnecessary. After ONE day at the zoo. I expect this show to be stupid, but when did it become hetero-normative? (He was in drag at the time, I suppose…) Also – they completely wasted Lucy Lawless. She’s seriously one of the best living actors, if not THE best. They could have at least put her face on camera more than twice! And Shane’s ‘voice over’ at the beginning was too extended. I felt like I was watching Sugar Rush!
Finale:
But these little nitpicks aren’t the point. Neither is the silliness all this season, or the disappointments seasons past. I think I’ve finally figured it out.
Near the very end of the episode, Jenny (as Ilene Chaikan) is sitting in front of the camera, saying goodbye. At first, of course, I thought, “Oh, great. IC’s finally gone off the deep end. Silly Meglomanaic!” But as the credits began to roll, as the cars drove up, as the women disembarked, walking, no, sashaying across the LA skyline, their bodies standing out like paintings, almost glowing, I realized: We’ve all been so wrong. The L Word isn’t a ‘realistic show’, a drama, a dramady, even a melodrama. It’s epic fantasy, in the tradition of, say, Gilgamesh or Faerie Queene or even Dune or Lord of the Rings.
Because the world is so, well, enormous and different. It’s the L Word, where all the woman are strong and beautiful, the men are mostly idiots, and the children are way, way above average. Goddesses abound. Bette may screw up, but when she does, it’s huge. She falls like a stone, at a pace mere mortals can’t began to follow. We can only worship. Marina’s the Succubus who when she can’t have her victim, tries to kill herself. When Alice outs somebody, she does it on national TV. Shane can’t just sleep with a few dozen girls – she has to sleep with thousands. And when Helena steps in shit, she does it in $40,000 boots.
I think it’s the theme song that fooled us. “The way that we live,” and all that. We said, “that’s not the way we live!” And it wasn’t. So we were angry. We took it at face value, thinking that they were at least trying tell the truth, and we missed the fantasy. Dana was another source of confusion. She was relateable, friendly, identifiable. We made the show about her – and missed that she was everywoman, the one source of real humanity in the whole fantastic mess.
It wasn’t the typical ‘epic struggle’, or course. No ‘Good against Evil’ or ‘Woman against God’. It was about love, friendship, of course, but not in the way we normally expect. Instead, it almost exists in stasis, a series of character portraits who are destined to act in a particular way, rather than let us identify with them.
Which is why we didn’t understand Jenny. Jenny was… us. Us, and IC. Jenny’s the one who dreamed the world into existence, or rather stepped through the looking glass to find it. That’s why she thought it was all about her – she didn’t catch the epic nature of it either. And that’s why she had to die. The world began with her. It could only end with her.
So as the final credits rolled, the characters blowing past the camera, back into that huge storybook called LA, the theme song (which sounded amazing without vocals, by the way), I had chills down my spine. The L Word succeeded, not because of wonderful stories, not because of meaningful human insight, but because the characters, the world, were so big, so different.
Lesbians, Loving, Lying, Laughing…
