The third season of The L Word: Generation Q is upon us, and I’m here recapping every single episode. Whether it be the epic rekindling of everyone’s favorite (or least favorite) romance, the fallout of an ill-advised affair, or a viral moment in a movie theater, I will be talking about every key moment and giving you all a chance to chat about it in the comments.
Let’s start off by saying I deeply enjoyed this episode of The L Word! The show seems to really be hitting its rhythm this season with a balance between friendships, relationship drama, and the world’s most confusing timeline.
We start off with both simultaneously, with Alice on the phone with Shane to confirm that they’re going to the movies together that night. Shane hangs up abruptly when Tess comes up the stairs of their apartment. Shane is busy packing things up for Tess’s mom, and she also wants to talk about what happened, but Tess is detached.
Their awkwardness is abated when a bee flies through the kitchen and Tess screams. Apparently, she’s terrified of bees, something which has never once come up in their year plus of living together and dating. Shane catches the bee— she’d never kill it, it’s endangered— and they run out onto the back porch to release it.
For reasons unbeknownst to me, resident bug-saver among my friends and girlfriend, Tess insists on shutting the balcony door before letting the bee free. It buzzes off, but unfortunately they traded the bee’s freedom for their own. As Tess attempts to storm back off and resume being (deservedly) bitchy towards Shane, they find out the door’s locked. They’re “fucking trapped out [t]here together!”
Mack, the dog, is unable to open the door on his own, and so Tess supposes they might as well talk, since that’s what Shane wanted to do anyways.
It’s at this point that we get our first timestamp of the episode. It’s 3:36pm and Hendrix wants to go on vacation with Angie! No time to ponder the fact that our grown adult friend is planning on literally pulling Angie away from college, because Bella has a “she-mergency”, which is how you know that Millennials who haven’t talked to a young person in at least 10 years are writing this show.
To be fair to Bella, the emergency is real. She had sex with one of the Lambda Chi baseball boys last night, and the condom is STILL INSIDE OF HER. To the Reader’s At Home: If you ever get something stuck inside of your vagina, it’s important to relax the walls of your vagina, and then you should be able to reach inside and pull it out. Bonus points if it’s before 3:36pm the day after!
Over at Finley and Sophie’s, the not-so-happy couple has just woken up and decided to talk about Dre, the person Sophie hooked up with. Finley says that “Dre” is a hot person’s name (true) and Sophie says they’re not hot (false, as we later find out). Somehow, Sophie and Dre only had sex once and hung out twice while also managing to meet Maribel. If we’re taking this as truth, that makes Maribel’s comment at game night even crueler. Dre was not the “person [Sophie] was fucking while [Finley] was away”, they were someone she spent one weekend with.
Sophie says it ended because she was in love with Finley. She was worried telling her would make her stop doing as well, which is a pretty worrisome precedent for a relationship and one I’d want to talk about more if I was Finley, but that’s just me!
Downstairs, Micah is getting off the phone with his mom— who he finally told he was dating Maribel! Maribel is ready to celebrate, and by celebrate she means organize the tupperware drawer. Micah suggests that they look for a sperm donor, and this “crazy” couple decides to do both!
It’s not going quite so well for Shane and Tess, who are still locked out on the porch. Shane is sorry, but Tess doesn’t want to hear that. After some pushing, Tess admits that she just feels like an idiot.
She knew who Shane was! Everyone does! And yet she still somehow believed that it would be different. Shane tries to explain that she still loves Tess, and that she didn’t mean to hurt her, but that just seems to make it hurt more.
Shane says it’s just an “old pattern”, but for the first time in her life Shane is taking the time to talk through the reasons why rather than just running away. She needs to take some time to think about her actions, which is perfect because they’re locked on the patio with no phones and nothing to do!
This episode really reminded me of the reason why I loved Tess so much in the first two seasons. She stands up for herself, but she also has the biggest “I can fix her” personality of anyone on the show. She’s all of us who are sitting at home right now just knowing that if we were with Shane (or Bette) we could make her better. This is representation for the mentally ill simps.
It’s night time in Los Angeles, and if we assume from other conversations that it’s November 1st, that means that its past 6:00pm. Unfortunately Angie and Bella have made no progress getting this condom out in the past two and a half hours. I’m going to assume that’s because Bella had a (justified) panic attack about getting pregnant and they decided to go to CVS Pharmacy and get a Plan B, because that’s the only reasonable explanation!
Angie tries to walk Bella through it, but to no avail. There’s only one option left— Angie needs to do it.
Outside of Dana’s, we find out that Roxy took a flight to Costa Rica. Dani nearly gets hit by an electric scooter listening to this voicemail when a person comes out of nowhere and saves her. They want to kiss her, but since it’s not a romcom they won’t do it. No worries, Dani got in there and kissed them first! They’re so cute together!
Finley is at work behind the bar, which apparently just means getting paid to flirt with Sophie. She’s DTF, in the back office, in 10 minutes. Sophie’s into it and they kiss as Dani walks up and orders a tequila.
Dani compares kissing the hottie outside of the bar to The Wedding Planner, and we get some terrible meta conversations about how problematic it is that a Puerto Rican is playing an Italian person (which, as an Italian, is it?) which is obviously a reference to Carmen. I’d be more mad, but Dani and Sophie are so fun when they’re friends!
Maribel and Micah are browsing a sperm donor website. Speaking from experience (Just for fun! @mom @girlfriend) these websites are incredibly overwhelming, and even finding someone that fits the description of “chinese man without a terrible medical history” is pretty difficult. Maribel’s demand that they go “six feet or bust” is certainly not going to make it any easier.
Micah points out that this sort of feels like eugenics, and Maribel disagrees before announcing she wants the “perfect baby” and walking it right back. These are the banter-y semi-argument conversations that actually make their relationship make sense.
It’s right around 7:30pm, the time of the aforementioned movie date between Shane and Alice. Alice, of course, is the only one there, because Shane is still locked on her balcony patio. You know who is there, though? Taylor! On a date!
Alice had presumably invited Taylor to this very movie earlier that week, and Taylor had said that she was working. Did Alice not mention it was to the movie theater? Did Taylor just really not think it through?
We don’t find out answers to anything yet, because we’re back on the porch with Shane and Tess. Tess thinks that sex “always means something” (disagree) and Shane says to her it’s sometimes really “just sex” (agree).
Tess proposes that Shane is proposing ethical non-monogamy, which seems like a genuinely great solution! Shane doesn’t have to hook up with anyone if she just wants to be with Tess, and if she does lapse, Tess won’t be nearly so hurt by it. That’s not what Shane wants though: she wanted Tess, and Tess wasn’t there.
Tess asks if Shane is an addict, which makes it make more sense to Tess but isn’t really the whole story. Everything between moving in, Tess’s mom, and the second bar are all too much. Shane feels like her girlfriend doesn’t see her anymore, and that’s been hard.
Tess agrees, but she processes emotions without hurting everyone around her, so she just “wrote in [her] fucking journal” instead of “fucking the first person that showed [her] some kind of attention”. To that I’d like to say, Shane arguably did not fuck the first person to show her attention; there were lots of girls in line!
At Dana’s we find out that Dani is organizing Fletcher’s album release party next week, and also that the hot person who Dani kissed is Dre! Dani is understandably devastated by this, because she was really into them and now she doesn’t know what to do.
Sophie scampers to the back room to find Finley, but Finley kisses her before she can get anything out. Over a soundtrack of Dre singing rather delightfully, Finley and Sophie start to have sex. Despite these two being very hot and having had very hot sex scenes in previous episodes, the eye contact between Dre and Dani is hotter!
Sophie feels it too, and she makes Finley stop. I’m glad she’s telling her girlfriend, but I just feel so badly for Finley! She was so ready to get over her fears!
Sophie tells Finley that Dre’s here, and Finley storms out of the room. When Sophie follows her out and then immediately starts staring at Dre, Finley freaks out and pulls the fire alarm.
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Write Through the Night 