Recap: The Real L Word, Season 1, Episode 2
Raise your hand if you’ve been the victim of a lesbian game night
A new day dawns on our heroines, once again trapped in their screen saver chamber. This time, an unseen producer has asked them what type of lesbian they are. Mikey says she’s a “Mikey lesbian, and there should be many more of you out there.” Agreed. Jill seemingly does not know any terms for lesbians. Babe, you’re a femme. Whitney says she’s a “soft butch, hard femme,” because she knows how to swing a hammer. She’s obsessed with the gender implications of swinging a hammer, and I don’t actually believe she knows how to do it.
Just as we left her, Whitney is pulling up to the arrivals gate at the airport. This time, she is picking up a teeny tiny brunette with a nasal Jersey accent named Tor. Tor is apparently moving to LA to do hair for movies, but also maybe to try it with Whitney because they hooked up once? Her expectations are unclear, both to us and to Whitney, and possibly to herself. She is moving in with Whitney and Alyssa, who is her cousin. As Whitney puts it in confessional, “we’re U-hauling it and we haven’t even started dating yet. It’s a record!” She then explains the U-haul joke. I think most people watching this show already know.
Tor and Whitney arrive home. Whitney’s house is teeming with an infinite number of tiny dogs at all times. I swear to God, you never see the same one twice. Tor says in confessional that Whitney is the first girl she’s had feelings for: danger. Alyssa tells us that she sees their chemistry, but she is concerned for her cousin, because Alyssa is not a fool. She spots a hickey on Whitney’s neck left there by Sara and disapproves. Whitney and Alyssa’s relationship consists mainly of lying on two separate outdoor couches with tiny dogs crawling over their bodies while Alyssa tells Whitney that she’s concerned about her behavior. This dynamic seems to work for them, so who am I to judge?
We cut to Mikey. She shares a few rapid-fire details about her harrowing childhood. She grew up in the projects of LA, and she watched her childhood friend get shot. And now she’s planning Los Angeles Fashion Week!
Speaking of which, today she’s checking out a warehouse studio space for Los Angeles Fashion Week. She asks for a tour, but it appears to simply be a huge concrete box. Mikey approves. Time for her favorite joke: offering to blow people in order to get a favor.
At Chez Stamie, Stamie and Tracy are hacking open a morning coconut for Jagger, Nico, and Dautry. Unfortunate that Stamie chose the exact names I was planning to use for my children, oh well. Tracy tell us about how Jagger, a special needs child, is such a beautiful soul. This genuinely touching comment is paired with a shot of Jagger getting bopped in the face with a ball. The producers of this show are trolls of the highest order. Then it’s just a bunch of chaotic shots of the kids running around and coughing. The scene ends with a slow-mo shot of Tracy grimacing, which is fully just a rude edit of her making a normal face. LMAO.
Nikki and Jill have left the house! They are pitching a show to some network based on a book called Sexual Fluidity about “women and men falling in love with someone despite their gender.” I love when someone falls in love with me despite my gender! This book seems to have changed their lives. Today they’re meeting with Dr. Lisa Diamond, the author. Dr. Lisa Diamond looks like an adorable cartoon character.
Jill and Nikki are both late-blooming queers. Jill is very reticent to claim any sexual identity in a way that makes it clear she still has some “work” to “do.” She apparently dated women before Nikki but never told her friends or family about it. She’s not comfortable calling herself gay. She says that, for her, it’s about “the person versus the gender,” and she doesn’t like the term bisexual either because she thinks it still makes it about gender. Sounds like a pansexual queen to me! I wish her all the best on her journey.
Stamie and Tracy are hitting the bball court randomly. Tracy gets buckets. It’s cute. Then they head to the Abbey with Tracy’s friends. Tracy’s friends are a bunch of Bieber lesbians all wearing slouchy beanies and enormous sunglasses. Stamie is being noisily charming, cracking Borscht Belt type jokes, and Tracy is moony-eyed toward her. I love these two.
Whitney’s also at the Abbey, chilling with her crew of possibly the same Bieber lesbians - it’s impossible to tell. Romi rolls up, beanie drooping. Like Sara, Romi is a beautiful femme who has chosen chaos for her confessional look. She is confused by Whitney’s mixed signals. They have an unintelligible conversation while their spiky haired friend looks on. This is followed by a smooch. Whitney again mentions that lesbians “fight one second and they’re making out the next.” I would argue that this is mostly a her thing.
Natalie and Rose are at their house, which is a desolate expanse of beige carpet. They are getting ready to go out to celebrate their seven month anniversary. That’s right, seven month. Rose asks Natalie why they have to do this every month, and she responds, “because we never know if we’re gonna make it past the month.” Rose says in confessional, “for me, she’s the one- for right now.” So you can see where Natalie is coming from. Natalie asks Rose what kind of restaurant they’re going to, and Rose says it’s French-American. Natalie repeats “French-American” in the breathiest, dreamiest voice imaginable. Poor Natalie. She was not built for this cruel world.
Natalie says she’s “inspired Rose to be another person,” which is always a good sign. They order crispy pork belly and mashed potatoes as the starters for their meal, which, respect. Their dinner is a tense check-in about how Natalie wants babies and Rose parties too much. Rose has apparently told Natalie she is retiring from partying after this year. Fucking yeah right! Get a grip, you two.
Romi is calling Whitney to ask what their relationship is, as she is wont to do. Whitney says she wants to be just friends but she has an uncontrollable attraction to Romi. Romi explicitly asks Whitney to stop flirting with her if she’s not going to date her and Whitney says “I can’t physically restrain myself.” Whitney!!!!! You! Suck! Alyssa comes out to reprimand Whitney for leaving Tor inside “twiddling her thumbs” while Whitney juggles her non-girlfriends. Why Alyssa is trying to push these two together is beyond me. Maybe she actually hates her cousin?
Home from their romantic seven-month-anniversary mashed potatoes, Rose and Natalie go upstairs to light 500 candles in their desolate beige bedroom. They start to smooch. Natalie whispers “I want to have sex right now.” I’m totally going to steal that line. As the camera pans over the candles, Natalie asks, “where do you want me to rub you?” A disembodied mouth blows out the candles. Sex achieved.
Stray Mikey observation: she always talks like she’s chewing a gum ball. Huge Mikey W: Mikey got the studio for Los Angeles Fashion Week. Raquel and Mikey make plans over the phone to meet up at the most 2010-LA-ass-named establishment, Citizen Smith, where Mikey will be inducted into the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce. This is a pretty uneventful scene.
Alyssa and Whitney are doing working on their business together, which consists of making special effects prosthetics for bottom-of-the-barrel action movies and doing “Zombie makeup.” They are making a torso for a movie called Voodoo Cowboy, so today they’re making a body cast of their friend. Whitney tells a shocking story about her life before she moved to LA: she got a rare neurological symptom called Guillame-Barre from a vaccine, which rendered her temporarily blind and unable to walk. But look at her now!! Three tiny non-girlfriends, three hundred even tinier dogs, a head full of dreads and a body-cast full of goo: she is living the dream.
Jill and Nikki are picking up Jill’s friend Derek who is flying in from San Francisco. They both scream “D-MONAYY” when they see him. Jill’s relationship with D-Money is…confusing. He is wearing wrap-around shades and is a HUGE J.S.G. (Just Some Guy). Jill glows from the inside to an upsetting extent when she talks about him. She hornily tells him she can’t wait for him to take off his shirt so she can see his new tattoo. Jill and Nikki both keep continually calling him D-Money and joking about seducing him. After they park, Nikki waits on the other side of the road as Jill and D-Monay share a deep embrace and a dry but furtive smooch. Nikki says she “can’t compete with a man.” Who could compete with D-Money, though?
There’s a boring scene where Tracy gets lunch with her high school friend. He’s a J.S.G. with a hint of gay. Sorry but who cares.
Rose hangs out with her dad. He warns her not to drink too much and once again tells her to settle down with Natalie and have kids. To support that point, he exclaims, “You’re thirty something!!” I actually would like to know exactly how old she is.
Back at the Tiny Dog Pit, Whitney invites Tor to jump into her arms like a “baby koala.” She smacks her tiny butt cheeks and comments repeatedly on how smooth they are. As Tor and Whitney frolic in the living room, Alyssa pokes her head out of the bathroom to announce that she is sick from eating “steamed vegetables and yarn fish.” What the fuck is “yarn fish”?!? She says again, clear as day, “l shouldn’t have eaten that yarn fish.” Meanwhile, Tor has a severe case of marble mouth. She says something that I transcribed as, “If you can get me going and make me going, I’ll be yours, guy girl I don’t give a shit.” I won’t double check if this is right. Moral of the story: she’s bisexual and bad at talking.
Mikey and her posse (her assistant and her intern) settle in at Citizen Smith. Mikey sits in between them and says, “I like to be in the middle of all the hot chicks.” Ew, Mikey. A server brings around brownies and Mikey makes a very dad jokes about how she only wants pot brownies. Raquel is MIA and her phone is dead. You can see in Mikey’s assistant’s eyes that she is terrified of where this night is heading. The ceremony starts and it consists of fifty Business Guys plus Mikey, who can’t help but to spew a barrage of dick jokes. Mikey is handed a plaque and says, “I’m one of the boys. I’d like to say my plaque’s bigger than yours, but apparently they’re all the same size” to a confused man standing next to her. The ceremony is over and Raquel shows up just as Mikey is starting to freak. Mikey screams, “BABE!” and makes another joke about her penis. All is well, good night you two.
Now for a hectic sunrise at Chez Stamie. Nico wakes up Tracy at the crack of dawn in the most adorable fashion imaginable, by asking if Tracy’s dog is awake. Having clearly just woken Tracy up, she asks, “did I wake you up??” Well, now everybody’s up, and Tracy is (understandably) dying to go back to sleep. But it’s time for all the children to be awake and start coughing, and cough they do.
Mikey is in a tizzy with the preparations Los Angeles Fashion Week. She’s running a photo shoot for a designer named Ani, and Raquel is doing the hair and makeup because “this is the one opportunity I get to spend the day with her.” Woof. Fortunately, we get treated to some very 2010 fashions! Mikey describes this shoot as “very, very, very high fashion,” and I think you will agree.
Unfortunately, the vibe is brought down by a call: it turns out Mikey is getting booted from the stages she wanted for fashion week. Planning Los Angeles Fashion Week is no fucking joke! Mikey hollers for Shanna, her assistant, and quite literally gnashes her teeth. :( Tough stuff.
Rose gathers her Biebers and femmes for a game night. The game? Getting wasted. She starts doing her daily yelling as her friends arrive and pile onto a sectional couch that is oddly stranded in the corner of the beige-carpeted living room. Natalie is melancholy and lurking on the other side of the room. She miserably takes a photo of everyone on a digital camera. Baaaad vibes.
Rose is on top of the world. She’s shaking up cocktails. She’s making everyone cheers each other. A Bieber is chugging clear liquor out of a measuring cup. They’re doing jello shots. They all scream at one Jenny-Schecter-looking girl to show her tits and she does. Natalie is pacing around anxiously.
Rose yells at Natalie about some stupid bullshit and it’s the straw that breaks the back of the camel that is Natalie. She starts ranting to a random one of Rose’s friends that she doesn’t want a “stupid girlfriend who acts like a fucking fool.” Rose is standing 4 feet away and yells at her to shut up. She then adjourns outside to have has a drunken heart-to-heart with her dopiest looking butch. The butch asserts, oddly, that “there’s not a lot of hot girls in LA,” and Rose chimes in “and I get them all!” In the most dirt-baggy tone imaginable, she adds, “the last girl I dated was fucking bangin,’ dude.” Hell yeah, brother.
We cut over to Whitney’s for a jiff. Whitney is trying to sneak out to her friend Scarlett’s house to confront Romi in a hot tub. Alyssa is pissed that Whitney is leaving the house when Tor’s there which honestly is unreasonable IMO. Like, they’re not dating and also even if they were, Whitney’s not on house arrest. Alyssa gives Whitney a stern talking-to about her pattern with Romi, but she should know by now that there’s no use.
Lesbian game night has gotten rowdy as hell. No games have been played; hundreds of shots have been slammed. Rose is being a buffoon. Natalie is PISSED and calls Rose a douche. Rose calls Nat a hater. Natalie retires upstairs with a tiny white dog, and Rose follows her. You can tell from Rose’s blank facial expression that she is absolutely blotto. Natalie says, “sorry you asked me to move in.” Rose is like, “then move out.” She then abandons a crying Natalie in the bedroom, and the camera cuts to Rose screaming downstairs, where the lesbians are finally playing a game of some sort. Sad piano music swells as Natalie tearfully tucks herself into a bed with the bottom sheet slipping off the corner. As the credits roll, the piano dirge is pierced, one last time, by the deafening bellows of lesbian game night.
One minute you’re tucking into your seven-month-anniversary mashed potatoes with your lover, and the next thing you know, it’s like you’re miles apart. Life really comes at you fast. Good night.
i cried tears anew seeing "yarn fish" put down in text
once again the review truly takes me back and i love it and also i could never rewatch this show alone so i appreciate the option to read it instead. and now i am pondering would gen z understand the concept of a bieber lesbian, like do they know about baby era justin and the lesbians who look like justin bieber blog? or if you said beiber lesbian would they picture modern justin youth pastor vibes?