“To L and Back” L Word Podcast Episode 608: Last Word

Friends, we have come to the end. Episode 608. The “Last Word.” This episode has everything: Molly with an alternative lifestyle haircut, a three-hour goodbye video, a trip to the attic, Alice eating Red Vines, Bette comparing Max to a used car, the ugliest house re-model ever, Dylena knife-play and Jenny taking a fateful dip in the pool.

Also DON’T WORRY we will also be doing an episode about the Interrogation Tapes and there will be a special live episode coming up, details TBD!!!!

The usual:

Riese: Hi, I’m Riese!

Carly: And I’m Carly!

Riese: And this is—

Carly and Riese: To L and Back!

Riese: Oh my God.

Carly: Oh my God.

Riese: I’m so excited.

Carly: I’m so happy. I’m so happy.

Riese: To talk about this terrible episode. I have so many things to say.

Carly: Oh my God. We have so much to talk about. Today it’s just the two of us, there is no special guest, because we have so much we have to talk about.

Riese: It’s going to be a long episode.

Carly: Oh my God. Riese, hi, how are you?

Riese: Hi. I’m just—

Carly: Are you overwhelmed?

Riese: Overwhelmed. Yeah. I’m overwhelmed by the amount of information that we are going to be communicating today to our listeners who deserve it.

Carly: Absolutely. Just so everyone is prepared, we have multiple investigations to discuss today, both canon and otherwise. We have all kinds of scientific things to talk about, a lot of very confusing character situations, and a time vortex that is impossible to comprehend.

Riese: Yeah.

Carly: So I hope everyone’s ready, it’s going to be exciting. But first, we have a very special announcement.

Riese: Which is?

Carly: On May 31, you thought this was the last episode, but it’s not. We have a special bonus episode where we will be dissecting The L Word finale interrogation tapes.

Riese: AKA therapy with The L Word.

Carly: Exactly, because somehow the show is confused between what would happen in an investigation for a crime, versus what would happen in a therapist’s office. We’ll get to that later. So May 31st, bonus episode. Yeah, there’s a lot going on, on May 31st. I think just take the whole day.

Riese: Yeah. Take the whole day off.

Carly: Yeah.

Riese: Bette sure would.

Carly: Oh my God. Bette would take a week off leading up to it, just to prepare.

Riese: Yeah, Bette’s going to take the rest of her life off.

Carly: She sure is. Well, until 15 years later, when she gets a new show.

Riese: 10 years later when none of this has ever really actually happened.

Carly: Oh, well, Riese, it’s time.

Riese: Yep. It’s time. Let me guess, you give the information at the start of who directed and wrote the episode, right?

Carly: Do you want to guess?

Riese: I’m going to guess.

Carly: Guess, please guess.

Riese: I’m going to take a guess.

Carly: Okay.

Riese: Was it Ilene Chaiken for both?

Carly: Ding, ding, ding. You are correct.

Riese: Yeah!

Carly: Ilene Chaiken both wrote and directed the series finale of The L Word, episode 608, entitled “Last Word.” Now, last week’s episode, if you recall, was entitled “Last Couple Standing,” so they’re kind of reusing the word “last” here in the title, but I guess we’ll let it slide because it is the last episode. I think they should have called it “Last Episode.” That would have been really funny.

Riese: Yeah, I do too.

Carly: That would have been really, really funny.

Riese: But then it wasn’t.

Carly: That’s true. This originally aired March 8th, 2009.

Riese: Which was also the day that Autostraddle launched.

Carly: Autostraddle’s birthday!

Riese: Jenny died. Autostraddle emerged from the swamp.

Carly: Like a Phoenix rising—

Riese: Like a Phoenix out of the swimming pool.

Carly: Rising from the pool.

Riese: Yeah, and was like, hey guys, we have four posts on our website, come read it.

Carly: Come read all four of them. Read them again.

Riese: Yeah. Well, I mean, technically I had my L Word recap blog was also called Autostraddle. Well, it’s called The Road Best Straddled. But it was just my little thing and then it became a big thing.

Carly: It’s a huge thing now.

Riese: I don’t know if you’ve heard of it. Yeah. Now it’s a very huge thing. I can’t get out of it.

Carly: Nope. You’re stuck with it forever.

Riese: Okay. Let’s begin.

Carly: Let’s begin. I just want to point out that the previous-lies they used for this are very ridiculous.

Riese: Bananas.

Carly: Completely bananas.

Riese: They’re all over the place.

Carly: They tell us the entire history of Alice, Tasha, Jamie; then Dylan, Helena; then Jenny, the film negative; Molly, Jenny, Shane’s jacket; then Max, Tom and the baby; then Kelly, then Bette, then nonsense, then Marcy and New York City. It’s all here. This episode has everything, this is — New York’s hottest club is the Last Word episode 608. It’s got everything, it’s got Lucy Lawless, it’s got murder, it’s got a baby, it’s got a drag queen.

Riese: It’s got a lonely dog.

Carly: A lovely dog. Glad to see the dog back.

Riese: It’s got a movie star hiding in the bushes.

Carly: Which is always where movie stars are hiding, everyone knows.

Riese: It’s got a pregnant man grilling burgers in his backyard.

Carly: Yes, yes it does.

Riese: The thing about this episode is it actually had very little.

Carly: Oh yeah, no, it had very, very little. It had to tie up a lot of loose ends and tied them up poorly. Many of them weren’t tied up at all. Actually, I would argue none of the loose ends of the series were tied up.

Riese: None of them. In fact, this episode is nonstop loose ends. We’ve already talked about how this is the worst episode ever on television, but we are thrilled to be discussing it today because obviously we have a lot of feedback.

Carly: We have some notes.

Riese: We have some notes. I have many notes.

Carly: Also this episode is extra long. So we have even more notes than we would normally have.

Riese: And quite unnecessarily so. And it’s not just that this is bad, it’s that literally nothing, and we’re always like, “That doesn’t make sense. That doesn’t make sense.” This does not make sense.

Carly: At all.

Riese: Nothing. Not one minute of this checks out in the world of the show, in the world of time, in the world of the world. There’s nothing about this that makes sense, and it’s also clear throughout that as we know the writer of the episode did not know who killed Jenny and did not decide that when they wrote the story. And that’s actually, you can’t do that—

Carly: No.

Riese: When you’re writing a mystery story.

Carly: You cannot.

Riese: Even if you don’t reveal the winner, or, the winner—

Carly: The winner is the one who killed Jenny.

Riese: Even if you don’t reveal the killer, you as the writer, do you have to know who the killer is.

Carly: You have to be writing towards something. You have to be writing with a story in mind. You can’t just write with nothing. It doesn’t work. And I think that this is a prime example of how that doesn’t work.

Riese: Work. Right. Because in a story where someone has killed someone, I mean, we’ll get into this, but I don’t think this episode makes the argument that anyone was killed. But there is one person or several people who did it, which means there should be clues and circumstances that point us in the direction of that person. You can’t just be like, well, it could be this person or it could be this person. No, it could only be the person who did it.

Carly: Right. Because you have to know who did it, so that you can have like the red herrings. Like, oh, I’m going to make it seem like this person did it, but they didn’t because this person actually did it. But you can’t do that.

Riese: Because there’s no such thing as an open-ended story. That’s not real, you can’t do that.

Carly: That’s not how television works. I mean, that might be how life works, I feel like in life, there are open-ended stories, although eventually things end—

Riese: Of course.

Carly: In some way, shape or form, but in television and film where you are writing scripts, there is an end to a story. A story has a beginning, a middle, and an end.

Riese: In life too. In life. Someone did do it. In life, someone did it. So even if we don’t, if we never figure out who did, it’s still, the fact remains that someone did.

Carly: Or no one did.

Riese: Or no one did, perhaps.

Carly: Because I mean, we’ll get to this later, but, what did she even die from?

Riese: Oh my God.

Carly: Whatever. I think honestly, with all of these questions swirling in the air around us, that I feel like this has just become like a Twilight Zone recap show.

Riese: It has become a Twilight Zone.

Carly: I feel like we are now entering…

Riese: Butterfly territory.

Carly: Yeah. You know what? This is the butterfly’s world and we’re just visiting it.

Riese: Remember in New York in the museum, when they had the butterfly room, when you go in and all the butterflies would fly and land on you. Do you know what I’m talking about?

Carly: Shit, do you know what? I do. But I never went, do you think that’s why this is happening to me right now?

Riese: Probably.

Carly: I did once go to a place called butterfly world in South Florida.

Riese: Oh, nice.

Carly: And I feel like that should have garnered some amount of goodwill, unless, I mean, I was a child. So maybe I was an asshole to the butterflies, I guess that’s possible. Although that doesn’t really seem like something I would do, but.

Riese: No, when I think of you, I think kind to animals.

Carly: Thank you. I appreciate that.

Riese: You’re welcome.

Carly: So you’re now entering a dimension of nonsense and lesbians.

Riese: Yeah.

Carly: Let’s do it.

Riese: Okay. So we open in an interrogation room.

Carly: Uh-huh.

Riese: This is a room where if you want to see someone’s face really close up, you absolutely can.

Carly: You can do that to your heart’s content.

Riese: And we opened with Shane saying—

Shane: Listen, I can’t tell you, I didn’t think about it. I was kidding. It’s not like I would ever do something like that.

Riese: Which I think she means, I thought about—

Carly: Killing Jenny.

Riese: Right. Which is obviously that’s the vibe if I was being interrogated for someone’s murder, that is a hundred percent the vibe I would be going for when I walked in. I’d be like, just so you know, I have thought about it, but I didn’t do it.

Carly: And I think that I should be rewarded in some way for having those thoughts, but not acting on them.

Riese: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. We’ve been through this before.

Carly: I guess she could have been saying, I thought about breaking up with her, but then right before her death, we see that Shane didn’t consider them a couple any longer, so.

Riese: Right.

Carly: Because of the repeated betrayals.

Riese: Yeah. And then also the other thing, and this is an underlying issue with the whole episode, Shane would never kill anybody. That’s — these are characters, you’ve established them over six seasons. Shane would kill Jenny? Never!

Carly: Also, I truly believe that out of the whole cast, the only person that I truly think is capable of murder, is Bette. And I think that she makes a really good case for herself being capable of murder in the scene late in the episode where she confronts Jenny. Because I think that she has something in her that kind of combined with her self destructiveness would lead her to do very upsetting things, if it meant keeping her family together, whatever. But I also think like we said in a previous episode, she’d just hire somebody.

Riese: But even that is a stretch.

Carly: Yeah. She wouldn’t like—

Riese: Even that is a stretch because she wouldn’t want to mess up her own, she’s also pragmatic enough, she wouldn’t want to mess up her own life or her child’s life by putting herself at risk of going to jail.

Carly: Exactly. She’d only somehow be involved in someone’s murder if she knew that there was no way it could be traced back to her and then she would just live with it until she confessed to Tina and Kit and Alice and Shane and God knows who else.

Riese: And also we know two things. One is that they had already planned a spinoff of the show called The Farm, which was about prison. And in that they have Alice going to prison for Jenny’s murder.

Carly: They shot the pilot for that before this episode came out. The script for that, the plan for that was in place, I think when season six was being written at some point, that became a thing because I believe they shot the pilot in December of 2008 and this aired in March of 2009. So — and they had announced it, they announced that there was a spinoff that was in development about a women’s prison, starring Alice, that Alice would be the only character continuing on. So by virtue of that amount of press and marketing and whatever, we already knew essentially how the season would end kind of like that.

Riese: Right, that it would be Alice, or it would seem, it would either be—

Carly: It would seem like Alice.

Riese: Yeah. Right. Which also again, doesn’t really track.

Carly: No.

Riese: Alice is not a fucking murderer. There are so many ways — the things that Jenny has done wrong in this situation that they’re trying to build up for people, you know how this could be resolved? Obviously Jenny is, I mean, if we want to stick to any type of reality, Jenny needs help of some kind, she’s obviously psychologically not doing well because she’s acting like a psychopath and that’s not who she is, I don’t think.

Carly: Yeah.

Riese: And then there’s also the possibility of them just not being her friend anymore.

Carly: Yeah. Sometimes you can just not be friends with people anymore and not murder them and I think that that’s a much more chill way to go through life is, I wouldn’t even murder your enemies.

Riese: No.

Carly: I don’t think you should do that. And maybe that’s a hot take, but I just don’t think it’s necessary. Also I would argue that everyone on this show needs extensive therapy. All of these characters need to be in therapy. And as far as we know, they’re not kind of in therapy at all. And I think that them using these police interrogations as a way to get free therapy from Lucy Lawless is really weird.

Riese: It is really weird. Yeah.

Carly: It doesn’t track.

Riese: She’s a warrior princess, okay, she’s not a social worker.

Carly: Not a therapist. Yeah.

Riese: So then Shane starts talking about how she likes her freedom and she hates the term “we.” Again, this is, I don’t see how any of this is relevant to the investigation.

Carly: It is not.

Riese: And then we do a flashback to Jenny. So Jenny is making a tribute video for Bette and Tina leaving.

Carly: Yeah. So all of a sudden Bette and Tina have a for sale sign in front of their brand new, newly renovated, I guess it’s finished, home. I guess they gave up on that baby thing pretty fast after Marcy didn’t show up. They’re like, I guess we’re good.

Riese: Oh, well.

Carly: Oh boy.

Riese: So it’s basically Jenny is being a tribute video. She’s like, we, we, we, we, we, about her and Shane, and she says that her and Shane will take Bette and Tina’s place. No problem.

Jenny: You guys were this supreme wonderful beatific couple, and now we’re going to take your place because we’re the only ones left. So this is really, really exciting. So I give you my word that we’re going to make it.

Riese: Which, what?

Carly: Yeah, their place as the strong couple that the group looks up to or whatever, like hashtag couples goals, I guess because that was not a thing in 2009, but if it were, I think Jenny would have said that.

Riese: Mm-hmm, neither was iPhone videos, so.

Shane and Jenny sitting on the porch filming the video, Jenny saying "we're going to take your place"

Carly: Yeah, well. So no theme song, just a title card.

Riese: They need to pack it a little bit more. I know they had this really somber music, that you would have sort of, if you’re making something good. You know?

Carly: The score is like, [singing] intense drama music…

Riese: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And then it’s like, okay, here we are at guess where?

Carly: Oh, good. We’re back at The Planet for the world’s most awkward brunch. I really want to know why they could not have had this fight at home.

Riese: Anywhere else! No one is at risk of violence, so there’s no need to do it in a public place.

Carly: Right.

Riese: They’re just ordering. I mean, at first they were just getting lemon waters and I was like, come on, you guys, get out of the restaurant.

Carly: Then they got—

Riese: But then eventually some food was—

Carly: Potatoes.

Riese: Potatoes, yeah, that was also weird.

Carly: And then like smoothies.

Riese: I thought they were maybe Thai iced teas.

Carly: They looked like smoothies. Maybe they were Thai iced teas.

Riese: I don’t know but have this at home. Other people could hear you.

Carly: They got loud. Alice got loud.

Riese:Yeah

Carly: And how did Kit or Helena not throw them out?

Riese: The Planet?

Carly: You’re creating a huge scene at brunch. Brunch is the busiest time of day.

Riese: Why are you doing this at The Planet?

Carly: This made me so uncomfortable. The second problem is that—

Riese: Tasha’s collar was weird. Oh, sorry. You had a different problem.

Carly: Yes, but the big problem here is of course the theme of this season, the lighting. So somehow they have positioned Alice and Jamie at the seats of the table that get what we would believe is the natural light coming in from the outside. And somehow Tasha is sitting in darkness. And as a person who has made things with cameras, moving images with cameras, one of the things that you always do aside from lighting the people on camera correctly so you can see their Goddamn faces, is that if you are in a situation where there are multiple seats and some are just not getting enough natural light, you don’t put the person with the darkest skin in that seat because you won’t be able to fucking see them. So everything about this is wrong.

Riese: Ilene doesn’t see color.

Carly: You’re right. She doesn’t. And therefore we can’t see Tasha’s expressions in this scene at all.

Riese: No, nor could I figure out, is one of her collar, one side of her collar was popped, but then the other side was down.

Carly: I couldn’t tell if it was a flannel shirt or if it was a jacket, it was really hard—

Riese: It was very confusing.

Carly: We never saw the whole garment. I would love to see the garment. I love a garment.

Riese: Yeah. Also this is, again, the writing has gotten so lazy. I don’t even think that they noticed this when they were writing this, but what were they talking about before the camera arrived? Because they start the conversation at that moment. Did they drive there in silence? Walk in in silence?

Carly: They got the menus, read the menus, ordered the food, complete silence.

Riese: And then was like, what’s happening?

Carly: And then they were like, action, and Alice was like, I’ve called you both here today to discuss something very important to me but what happened maybe several months ago? Riese, do you want to talk about an investigation you’ve been working on?

Riese: Okay. Let’s talk about time. Let’s talk about time.

Carly: Riese has been conducting a season six time investigation and she is ready to present her findings to the audience.

Riese: 601. We know where 601 begins, that begins at the end of episode 512 the day after the party where Shane fucked Nikki on the balustrade at Yamashiro.

Carly: We all remember.

Riese: Which, by the way, was recently fined for COVID violations.

Carly: Well…

Riese: Watch out.

Carly: There we go.

Riese: So that all takes place in one day then there’s the next day, Jenny wakes up with Nikki, everyone’s at The Planet the next day, Jenny and Shane stare at each other. So two days of 601.

Carly: Two days.

Riese: When we open 602, the opening is Nikki getting really pissed about what Jenny’s told her. So that is either the same day as the last episode ended or the next day, it’s at least within two or three days of where we left off at the end of 601. 602 is actually kind of confusing. At most it could have been, again, a two-to-three day episode, because we are bouncing back and forth between Alice and they’re at The Planet and then they go to therapy with Dan Foxworthy, and Bette has her art meeting. The thing that’s confusing about this is that somehow Max goes to the doctor for the top surgery consult, and finds out that he’s pregnant. And then if we’re assuming that everybody exists in the same time existence, right?

Carly: Which we’re not sure that they do.

Riese: And he’s wearing the same shirt. Which we’re not sure they do. And then he goes to that other doctor to get an abortion. He’s in the same shirt he was wearing earlier. We’re still going back and forth with scenes that are all happening in the same day. So he’s somehow—

Carly: In theory, this is all the same day. Yes.

Riese: He’s somehow had his top surgery consult, find out he was pregnant, got an appointment for an abortion or a checkup or something at Planned Parenthood or wherever they went.

Carly: Do you just do a walk in at Planned Parenthood or do you have to make an appointment?

Riese: No, if you make an appointment, you’re going to be sitting there all day. So walking in, I don’t think is, I guess that could be same day if he was not, but he had an appointment. He said he had an appointment.

Carly: So somehow he got a same day appointment.

Riese: Somehow he got a same day appointment. Yeah.

Carly: All right. Let’s just assume that that’s possible. Sure.

Riese: Yeah. Bette has her art meeting, Joyce and Phyllis. So this is all, takes place, based on the outfits and the events of the thing. This all takes place within two or three days. So now we have, the series so far has taken somewhere between three and six days have passed.

Carly: Cool.

Riese: So far. 603, again, is either a one or two day episode.

Carly: Do they ever say how far along exactly Max is or just that he’s in his second trimester.

Riese: Just that he’s in his second trimester.

Carly: Okay. So he has at most six months until the birth, but potentially less because it would be what, three days into the first trimester, the second trimester? They’re like, you missed it by three days, sorry.

Riese: Because 603 opens the day after 602, because it opens with Shane and Jenny in bed, which had started the night before. And that whole story takes place over the course of one day. It is possible that there is a break mid-episode of a day between those events and the day that Alice is on The Look and reads the letter — or after she’s on The Look and reads the letter. But then the way everything happens from there, again, 6-03 is at most two days, two or three days.

Carly: So we are barely scratching a week.

Riese: Yeah. Now there could be a time jump between 603 and 604, possibly.

Carly: Right, because in 604, we know that she doesn’t have a job. Alice doesn’t have a job anymore, but we don’t know how quickly she was fired and how long it’s been since she was fired.

Riese: Right. I mean the end of 603 is when she goes to the LA LGBT center. And then they go to the club and everybody is laughing about Shane and Jenny which again is more evidence that that’s the same day or the next day. But then in 604, we have the thing where they’re at The Planet and everyone’s misgendering Max and all that stuff. But it’s also like, and then Dylan sets up a meeting with Tina. Again, you don’t really get the sense here that it’s been more than a few days since the last thing. But I would say if we’re being really generous, it’s been a week.

Carly: Let’s, for argument’s sake, give them a week.

Riese: And 604, again, takes place in three days. And then we have, then they really fucked up here, because at the end of the 604, Helena invites Dylan to dinner on Saturday night.

Carly: Dylan to dinner.

Riese: So 605, we open, she says that she’s going to dinner with Dylan on Saturday night, we find out through the scheming with Dylan and her confirming her plans with Helena, that that whole, the Hit Club shenanigans, happened on Friday. So actually all of 605 happens on one day, which is a Friday. And it, again, we’re at most, a few days after the events before.

Carly: Okay. So at the most, at this point, we are only two weeks removed from the Lez Girls party.

Riese: Uh-huh.

Carly: Great.

Riese: Then 606, we open at the baby shower. At the baby shower it appears to be, this is the first time that Jenny has seen Dylan since the Hit Club scheme.

Carly: Fiasco.

Riese: Based on, she’s like, “Oh, you did such a good job.” So this is the first time that they’ve all been together as a group since then. So again, a week max.

Carly: Yeah. I feel like it couldn’t have been that, much longer than that. Why would Jenny make such a big deal about, I mean, they made her character completely unreliable. So I guess it could have been a month and we wouldn’t know, but I feel like it wasn’t. That seems a bit much.

Riese: Yeah, it seems a little weird. That’s the end of 606, 607, it all takes place in the same day. That’s “The Last Couple Standing.” And again, 607, beginning of it, Jenny asks Bette about the Kelly situation, as if it just happened and Tina tells Bette that she got a job offer in New York, which means she got — must’ve gotten home that day or the day before.

Carly: How did she not tell her life partner about this via phone text or instant message.

Riese: Really good question.

Carly: You know Bette loves instant messages.

Riese: So, in conclusion, the entirety of season six, which involves all kinds of things like a full pregnancy, like an adoption thing that goes wrong, like a screenplay that was written overnight.

Carly: Overnight, sold, we already did the math for that and it totally checked out, where she developed, wrote, sold the screenplay, got new agents and everything in a couple of days.

Riese: So this is a month.

Carly: Which is totally normal, very Hollywood. Now, is it possible that there was a large time jump before 608? And the question is what takes us to this scene really, which is that Alice, Tasha, and Jamie are discussing the events of the morning after the dance marathon as if they just happened a day or so ago at most. So Bette and Tina’s addition, complete home remodel is suddenly finished. Max, who went off testosterone because of the pregnancy and is still pregnant, hasn’t had the baby yet now has a full Doc Holliday mustache.

Riese: Yeah. It’s like the guy in the QAnon documentary who had the — you know who I’m talking about?

Carly: Yes.

Riese: It’s so bad.

Carly: So either Bette and Tina’s reality of time is different than everyone else’s, Alice’s is different than everyone else. I don’t, also Jenny’s talking about this video and all these people sending in these tapes.

Riese: Which again, why would someone who lives in France want to—

Carly: Care that you’re moving to New York?

Riese: Do a video for you for you moving, you already don’t, you’ve already gone away. The going away has happened.

Carly: Riese. I think what we need to acknowledge here is that Bette and Tina moving to New York City is a metaphor for this show ending. Because the videos were like, you guys changed my life. It was so great to meet you. So great.

Riese: Just have it be—

Carly: Okay, look, we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

Riese: Okay, sorry.

Alice saying "when we have sex, I don't close my eyes"

Carly: But basically, the scene at The Planet, which should only have happened at home and not at The Planet, this is so inappropriate, is completely incongruous with the timeline of everything else that’s going on.

Riese: And I was like, have you fallen in love with Tasha? And Jamie’s like—

Jamie: Yeah, I think I have fallen in love with Tasha.

Riese: Which really? But also—

Carly: I was like, for real? That fast? Maybe you just have, you could just say you have a crush. Maybe you have a crush, maybe you just have a crush. Why don’t you just say you have a crush and that you guys want to kiss and that’s cute. Also, Alice is being an asshole.

Riese: Yeah, because also, she asked them this question and then she yells at them — and yes, obviously this situation sucks. And of course she’s mad, but it’s just, everything just feels, this situation is the worst. It’s the worst.

Carly: It’s the worst.

Riese: It’s the worst possible thing that could happen to your relationship. It’s terrifying. It’s terrible. It’s hurtful. But the way that she reacts to these confessions that she gets is weird.

Alice: And fuck you.
Jamie: God. I am so sorry, Alice.
Alice: Fuck you.
Jamie: You got to believe me. This is the last thing I ever wanted to happen.
Alice: Go, you’re free.
Jamie: No, no, no. God, please do not break up because of me.
Tasha: We’re not. Don’t do this.
Alice: When we have sex, I don’t close my eyes and imagine someone else naked in the shower.
Tasha: Fuck you.
Jamie: You guys, please don’t. You love each other, just get me out of the equation and everything will go back to the way it was.
Alice: Will you shut the fuck up please? Just shut the fuck up!
Tasha: Alice—
Alice: Save it, shut up.

Carly: It’s like, Alice, you asked us out to brunch to yell at us?

Riese: And also the ordering of the potatoes.

Carly: Oh my God.

Riese: Oh God, you both got the same drink and you got the same potatoes so obviously you’re soulmates! Everyone likes potatoes.

Carly: Alice’s whole thing about how they’re the same is so weird because I think it’s really just she’s projecting that she and Tasha are so different that she forgot that sometimes people can have things in common or like similar things. Doesn’t she like similar things to her friends? Hasn’t she ever experienced having things in common before?

Riese: Salads.

Carly: Also, as you said, everyone likes potatoes. That is a fact. And then at the end of the dance marathon, Alice seemed to be really coming from a good place. Wanting the best for Tasha, wanting her to be happy when she asked her what was going on, and so now to have flipped and she is publicly shaming them — in the middle of brunch — is kind of a lot.

Riese: Yeah. I understand her reaction because how can you control your emotions under something like that.

Carly: Of course.

Riese: But it just felt — the velocity of all of it, it just felt a little off.

Carly: Yeah.

Riese: Because also they haven’t done anything is the other thing. They haven’t, she hasn’t cheated. They haven’t talked about their feelings with each other, nothing has happened and you can’t control your feelings for someone else. You know what I mean? You can’t get mad at Jamie for having feelings for Tasha. You can get mad at Jamie for acting on them, which she hasn’t done.

Carly: Right, and Alice keeps talking on Tasha’s behalf, which is so annoying and rude, and she makes all these assumptions and is just behaving very poorly. And again, they are in public. I can’t believe Kit or Helena didn’t come over to be like, can y’all leave? You’re going to need to leave. We’re going to get these potatoes to go.

Riese: Yeah. Someone just comes over to the table and dumps their potatoes into to-go containers, and they’re just like, “thank you so much for coming.” Pours the drinks into a little go cup.

Carly: They get the giant hooks that pull muppets off stage.

Riese: “Thanks, ladies! Have a great afternoon!”

Carly: “Bye!”

Riese: Bye. So really, Alice says they’re free, she wants them to see how they feel about each other and then Tasha can let her know. I’m glad she did this because it really drives home the fact that this entire episode takes place over the course of two days at most. Right?

Carly: Yeah. She also says, if you don’t call me at the same time tomorrow, then I’ll know that you made up your mind about what you want. Is she like—

Riese: I don’t know.

Carly: Does she think she’s in a romantic comedy?

Riese: Yeah.

Carly: You have to agree that there’s going to be a thing that you do at a certain time on a certain day to prove if you love each other or not. You can’t just shout that at someone, what if Tasha has plans at the same time tomorrow?

Riese: Yeah, hello? Police Academy.

Carly: Yeah. She probably has work, she is police.

Riese: She has to iron her sweaters. Then we go to Alice’s interrogation where, for some Goddamn reason that escapes me, she’s talking about how she — the only person she loved as much as Tasha is Dana Fairbanks. Okay. Who killed Jenny? I don’t know.

Carly: I wish Lucy Lawless was like, I wish Lucy was like, “The tennis player?! The famous tennis player?”

Riese: “Oh the famous — she was gay? I didn’t know!”

Carly: “I was such a fan of hers. I thought she might be gay because of that Subaru ad. I thought that tagline was kind of queer.”

Riese: That was, that was a little bit gay.

Carly: “I wasn’t sure. I didn’t want to assume.”

Riese: “Yeah, I didn’t want to make assumptions, but that’s interesting. It’s interesting. Her and Billy Jean. Huh?”

Carly: Huh? Wow. Sorry. You were saying?

Riese: So I made a L Word parody of the Succession credits, like, two years ago, and I used a lot of footage from the Helena and Dylan situation in it. Have you seen Succession?

Carly: Yes. I love Succession.

Riese: Okay. I’ll send you… I don’t know if you saw the video I made, but it’s pretty good.

Carly: I’m sure I did, but I need to see it again in the new context of having just re-watched this series.

Riese: Right, because also I tried to match as close as I could, one for one, the clips in Succession with similar clips in The L Word, and a lot of them came from this, because it’s a huge house, a lot of staring at nothing, it’s very cold, you know what I mean?

Carly: Mhmm.

Riese: Also, honestly I didn’t like anyone’s interior design in this episode, I’m just going to say that.

Carly: Yeah.

Riese: Dylan is wearing a sweater that’s arms and a cropped back, but then a full beginning, and it’s just like Talbot’s got eaten by a lion.

Carly: She’s also wearing flip flops with baggy jeans and it’s making me upset. The proportions are wrong. It’s weird, it’s too weird.

Riese: So Dylan got booted from her sublet and Dylan and Helena are fighting because Helena didn’t offer Dylan to stay at her house.

Carly: But Helena thinks that Dylan assumed that she would move in, but Dylan didn’t think that. But anyway, Jenny’s here with her camera.

Riese: Because she’s shooting a tribute video for Bette and Tina, and she’s like, “Dylan, you should be in it.” But why would Dylan be in a… what?

Carly: There’s so many people in this video where I’m like, “Why are you in this video?”

Riese: Dylan barely knows Bette and Tina, besides that she lawsuited Helena when she was working with Tina.

Carly: Law suited?

Riese: What? Had Bette and Dylan ever had a conversation?

Carly: Dylan involved Tina in a lawsuit. Why would she want to see her face in the… okay. Jenny is like—

Riese: They’re drinking.

Carly: They’re drinking. Jenny’s like, “tons of people have sent me tapes.”

Helena saying "it's never too early for a drink" with Dylan lurking in the background

Riese: Again at most — and this is assuming Bette… if Jamie, Tasha and Alice have not spoken of the situation at all, this could be at most a week, and that would be insane.

Carly: Right. Also, that means that the house was finished being constructed, and they put the house on the market. And I would like to think that they didn’t list their house on the market before they found a place to live in New York, which means all of that happened in a week. Also, I’m just going to say this, that most film studios have offices in both New York and Los Angeles. I know that Focus Features has an office in Los Angeles. I cannot imagine a situation in which a film studio would require you to work out of New York City. I could see you having to travel frequently, but there is absolutely no reason Tina would have to relocate for that job. Sorry.

Riese: Yeah. Unless her short got into the Tribeca Film Festival, then she might want to move.

Carly: And then of course she would relocate to New York for the short, obviously. Also, can you imagine Jenny getting in touch with people like Marina and Tim, asking them to send videos because Bette and Tina are moving to New York? Why did any of them even take her phone call or text? How did that happen?

Riese: How does she even know how to get a hold of Marina?

Carly: Yeah. How did she know how to get a hold of her? How does she find Carmen?

Riese: Also, I feel like Tim — I mean Tim sucks, but wouldn’t he have written back, “No heart emoji” to her request for a video?

Carly: That’s what he should have written. That’s what they all should have written. Also Bette and Tina don’t like Jenny, why is Jenny doing this? I mean we know why she’s doing this, because she has to insert herself in everything.

Riese: And she wants to endear herself to everybody.

Carly: Also, Jenny tells them to stand in front of the window so that you can see the pool. Have you ever shot something into a window before? Do you know what happens? You can’t see the people’s faces because the window is blown out. You don’t shoot into a source of light, you shoot so that that source of light is behind the camera or to the side of it so that it can illuminate the faces of the people you are filming.

Riese: Why would you want to see the pool?

Carly: Yeah. She’s like, “So we can see the pool.” Why, do Bette and Tina love that pool? Have they ever been here? Where are we?

Riese: I thought we were in Malibu, although that gets a little bit confusing later.

Carly: Also, didn’t she have to get rid of the beach house after the whole thing, and look, I don’t—

Riese: I hope everyone who’s thinking, “God, how long is this episode going to be at this point?” knows that we have at least another two hours of material to cover. So buckle in this is an all day podcast listen, okay?

Carly: Just start driving around, or maybe take a walk, like a long walk.

Riese: Got to go visit your family? Finally got vaccinated? You’re driving back to Indiana? Turn this on, we’re here all night.

Carly: This would be a great thing to listen to, it’ll take up most of the trip.

Riese: Max is in the interrogation room.

Carly: He seriously looks like Doc Holiday or Wyatt Earp or one of those old timey guys. He says—

Max: After a while I realize that it’s not that they were total snobs, it’s just that they’re insular, tight, kind of, you know? And as we’ve gotten to know each other, I realized they’re pretty amazing people, really special. I call them framily.

Carly: This is what I would call Stockholm Syndrome.

Riese: I was like, “You poor thing!” What?

Max is saying "I call them 'framily'" in the interrogation room with his moustache

Carly: He has been abused so badly by this group of people.

Riese: This is your “framily”?

Carly: “Framily,” which is a very upsetting word that upset me.

Riese: So yeah, these are his friends who he loves and who have been terrible to him his entire life.

Carly: This is so upsetting. So… we go back to Bette and Tina’s.

Riese: The railing is not secured!

Carly: Oh my God, did you hear that Weezie the contractor didn’t finish the railing?

Riese: The railing? The upstairs? Where’s the railing?

Carly: So they were renovating the home and adding a second floor.

Riese: Renovating the home, okay.

Carly: And when they made the second floor, they didn’t finish the railing for the little balcony that’s off of their new master bedroom. And that balcony leads to stairs that lead to the backyard. And wouldn’t you know it, there’s no railing.

Riese: So what you’re saying is, it’s dangerous to be up there.

Carly: I would say that, yes, it does present an element of danger. That for a group of adults, shouldn’t be a huge issue, but just something to be aware of. But this is our first mention of it. And we are threatened immediately with Weezie coming back, potentially.

Riese: Yeah.

Carly: I was immediately horrified that I might have to see that character again.

Riese: That character again and that joke. First of all, the whole situation has never looked more like a set than it does on this day. It is like this is the set!

Carly: It is, this is a set. Hello, welcome to our back lot, it is a stage.

Riese: Maybe you should have kept it one floor, because as soon as you got the sky involved, we were out of our — Kit is like “Why don’t you just adopt Max this baby?”

Carly: And then we cut to a shot of Max through bushes. This show does not waste a single opportunity to make fun of Max. They have him with his mustache, his pregnant belly sticking out, his pants are ill-fitting.

Riese: His t-shirt’s too short. It’s the same way that they make poor people who are pregnant look in movies that hate poor people. It’s this idea that you’re just bodies hanging out of your clothing, you’re just grilling or whatever the fuck.

Carly: Yeah, you’re gross or something. And he’s grilling or he’s cleaning the grill, I don’t even know what he’s doing with the grill. But the point is that the show hates him, there is such hate in this shot.

Riese: And you know who else hates him apparently? Bette.

Carly: Bette? So Kit’s like, “Hey, there’s a baby next door that you could adopt.”

Riese: And Bette of course, as we were all thinking says

Bette: We’re not talking about fucking used cars, Kit.

Carly: I really wish that her argument was instead, the argument that we made, which is that — or that John made in 606, which is that we know from Season 1 that Bette and Tina wanted a baby that would reflect both of their backgrounds. And so that’s why they wanted to have a biracial baby. And so if she had just said that, instead of being a complete fucking asshole, that would have been pretty cool. But no, instead she refers to Max and his baby as a used car.

Riese: I think what she’s trying to say is that she wouldn’t take Max’s baby, but if he was a used car salesman, she’d probably buy a used car from him.

Carly: Okay. She also assumes now that Max is ready to be a father, she’s just putting that on him. Have you spoken with him?

Riese: Obviously not, no. It’s just so…ugh.

Carly: Don’t you think it could have been cool if the show had spent time with Max and this experience that he’s going through, which is such a unique experience, one that we had never seen on scripted television before, and something that we see later at the party, that there is some acceptance or something in him. He’s come to terms with some stuff, but we don’t get—

Bette outside with Kit saying she wants Jenny Schecter to mind her fucking business

Riese: Changed his number like a total psychopath.

Carly: Changed his landline. How come Tom wasn’t in the video? Jodi’s in the video, fucking Jodi’s in the video and not Tom.

Riese: Jodi’s in the video and not Tom.

Carly: I can’t believe Jodi agreed to be in this video also, but whatever, we’ll get to that.

Riese: I love that, that was a power move.

Carly: Yeah, totally was.

Riese: So apparently, this Kelly thing is still unresolved, and Bette apparently still hasn’t talked to Kelly about it. Jenny’s still telling people about it. And now we find out the reason that Bette hasn’t told Tina about this is because she didn’t tell Tina that Kelly came over that night, but why wouldn’t she tell her that Kelly came over that night?

Carly: Why would you not tell her that? You’re not interested in Kelly?

Riese: No one’s interested in Kelly.

Carly: No, and Tina already knows how Kelly is, and is aware of Kelly’s ridiculous over the top flirtation with Bette. So if you’re like, “Oh my God, Kelly came over and totally hit on me and then broke one of our glasses.” I guess they haven’t had champagne since… they didn’t have a toast for Tina’s new job and realize that a champagne flute was missing because it broke?

Riese: Well, maybe they had several.

Carly: Sure. Also why at no point in this episode does Bette mention that she was cleaning up a broken glass on the floor. Why does she not explain the physical… the reason the video is suspect is that she is bending over and her face has vanished behind Kelly and it’s obviously over the top in every possible way. But the reason she is bending over or kneeling on the floor is because Kelly broke a glass and she is cleaning up the broken glass. So why does she not just say—

Riese: [Singing] Feels just like I’m walking on broken glass.

Carly: [Singing]Walking on, walking on broken glass.

Riese: [Singing]Broken glass. What if Tina got glass in her foot? And Bette was like, “I don’t know how that happened.”

Carly: What if Angelica was crawling around—

Riese: Stepped on glass!

Carly: That is so fucked up, you’re endangering your child, I hope you vacuumed, Bette, and didn’t just pick up the big pieces.

Riese: Then Bette says, she’s excited to get out of LA.

Bette: However, I am happy to be getting out of this little incestuous hotbed of lesbian, inter-fucking-connectedness.

Riese: Which, I understand that emotion, but also I still have a pending court case against Bette regarding the used cars comment. So I can’t really speak anymore on this at this time.

Carly: Under the advice of your counsel.

Riese: Yeah. Yeah. It’s going to be a probably drawn out lawsuit, but hopefully we’ll get a win for our client, Max, and everyone can buy themselves a new car.

Carly: I think that if anybody can help Max here in this situation, it’s you.

Riese: Thank you so much. Maybe Joyce, but—

Carly: Well, we’ll see what Joyce is up to in a minute, and by a minute I mean three hours. So, also, I just want to say that I think everyone is really giving Jenny too much power in all of these conversations that everyone is having about her that don’t involve her. Everyone is really… They have built her and her persona and what she’s able or capable of doing up to such a degree that she sounds like an Avengers villain. “We have to leave Los Angeles because of Jenny, because if she snaps her fingers, 50% of us will vanish.”

Riese: Exactly, exactly!

Carly: That’s how they’re treating her and it’s like, what if, here’s an idea, what if you just stop giving her all the power? And fucking own your shit, communicate better with each other.

Riese: Deal with your own lives, move her out of it, you don’t have to be friends with her.

Carly: So now Kit’s being interrogated, and all she’s talking about is how they all love each other so much. What is this?

Riese: They love each other more than 1, any other army, 2, an assembly of God. That’s love.

Carly: That’s big love, that’s really intense love. That’s big love. And if there’s one thing we’ve learned over the course of these six seasons, it’s how much these people love each other.

Riese: Especially this episode.

Carly: Despite all evidence to the contrary.

Riese: They are tight.

Carly: Tight knit group.

Riese: They’re not that tight, because if they were tight, they would be like most queer social groups are, and all decide to shun Jenny and not listen to her and just kick her out and make her feel terrible, which is kind of what they already did and this has been spiraling all along.

Carly: I feel like my brain’s melting.

Riese: Alice’s bed.

Carly: Alice’s bed.

Riese: Shane and Alice are talking and Shane says she’s afraid to dump Jenny because she’d die if Shane dumped her.

Carly: Yes. She feels a sense of honor or duty, and Alice is like, where did this come from?

Riese: She’s like, ‘“When did you become so honor-bound?” She’s not, she fucked Niki last week.

Alice lying in bed saying "I just don't understand when you became so honor-bond"

Carly: Yeah. She’s been fucking Niki this whole time. She threw up in the studio because of how much she was fucking Niki.

Riese: Right. And Alice is like, “she’s not even a good person.”

Carly: Shane refers to Jenny, her girlfriend, as a lost child. That’s healthy.

Riese: It’s going really well.

Carly: And that Shane looks at their relationship as:

Shane: I was given this opportunity to be responsible for somebody else’s feelings.

Carly: I have a lot of questions. Number one, that’s upsetting. Number two, any relationship with anyone is an opportunity to have some — responsibility is not the right word, everybody is responsible for their own feelings and their own actions, you cannot control other people. But like any relationship, friend, lover, whatever, if you care about that person enough to be their friend or date them or whatever, then you should care about their feelings to some extent, you don’t want to hurt them I would imagine, what is she talking about? The first time in her life she’s ever cared about anyone’s feelings. Alice is like, “I thought I’ve been your best friend for a million years, but okay.”

Riese: Yeah. It’s bananas and then Alice is like, “she’s not even a good person. She stole my thing.” And then she tries to show Shane her treatment, which we know is handwritten.

Carly: But she grabs her laptop.

Riese: She grabs her laptop. If it existed on her laptop with the time stamp or whatever she says all this time. Why hasn’t she brought this out sooner? And also why did she deliver a handwritten one to Jenny?

Carly: Great questions. All great questions. It smash cuts to Alice being interrogated saying:

Alice: Women drive me crazy.

Riese: Why?!

Carly: Remember when Alice was bisexual? She doesn’t.

Riese: And that seemed she was going to talk about here.

Carly: I thought she was too, I totally did. I thought she was going to be like, “Women driving me crazy, I fall really hard for women, and I’m bisexual and I have very different relationships with men,” and that was not it at all.

Riese: As you do in a police interrogation for your friend’s hypothetical murder. That’s what I do every time I’m interrogated. I’m like, “well it’s complicated.”

Carly: Sexuality is really complicated and attractions really, it’s complicated I guess.

Riese: Yeah. Back to the bed.

Carly: Back to bed.

Riese: Shane says she won’t dump Jenny because she doesn’t want her going off the deep end. Ha ha ha.

Carly: And she says that by doing so, she is making the choice between her happiness and Jenny’s. This martyr thing is very — not a good look for Shane.

Riese: None of this makes sense. I mean it’s really weird. We go back to Helena’s. Dylan is on the phone and Helena is like, “Who are you talking to?” And Dylan’s like, “Nobody.”

Dylan: Just a friend.

Riese: Dylan.

Carly: Dylan, Dylan, Dylan, Dylan. Just say your mom, everyone knows just say your mom.

Riese: Say something, you can’t build trust. No one has ever said nobody.

Carly: We saw you on the phone. You were talking to somebody. So either you’re talking to yourself and doing the whole bit where you were pretending to be on the phone, which why?

Riese: And that’s crazy. We’d have to talk about that.

Carly: Yeah. Or you were talking to somebody and somebody is not nobody because they are a person you were talking to. And we will find out later that that person, I guess, was Jenny?

Riese: God, kill me.

Carly: Maybe?

Riese: I want to die by the end of this, I want one of them to kill me and go to the interrogation room to talk about themselves.

Carly: This is just the worst. So Dylan is like, “Am I going to be under suspicion forever?”

Riese: Yeah.

Carly: I wish he could have said something really cool after that. Like, “Am I going to be under suspicion forever? I did pass that test at Hit Club.”

Riese: Hello, haven’t we been through this?

Carly: I thought we did this bit already. We’re doing the same plot again.

Riese: Surprise.

Carly: So then we go to Helena’s interrogation, where she says, “Being rich is a curse, you don’t know what it’s like.” All right, whatever.

Riese: Okay. Sure. Relevance, your honor.

Carly: I wish I had rich people problems instead of regular people problems. They sound much more chill.

Riese: You never know if someone really cares about you or just wants your money. I would be fine with either one, just as long as they’re not mean to me.

Carly: Because I would still be rich.

Riese: I just want people to like me, even if they’re pretending, I’d rather have someone pretend to like me than openly dislike me.

Carly: No, I just don’t care about any of the people part, I just would be like, well I’m rich and so I don’t have to be concerned about money. So I don’t have the same problems I used to have… I don’t know, this is silly. This is very stupid, we have no sympathy for you, Helena, sorry. Anyway, back to the house, Dylan gets her keys and storms out and Helena chases her and suddenly is like, “whoops, sorry, I’m going to try to stop making you pay for this all the time. But I would like to point out that you did sue me for sexual harassment and super ruined my life for a period of time. So it’s going to be a little hard, also I have trust issues.”

Riese: Yeah. I mean I do feel like they could work through it because—

Carly: I would advise them to do that with a therapist, but that’s just me.

Riese: Yeah, they should. Because also, I mean as much as I hate Dylan and have really harped on this, that she was in this relationship with this guy and who knows what his role was at any of this, but they don’t give us that. That would have been a lot more interesting, if Dylan had been like, “yes, I know that I fucked you over. I was in this terrible, abusive relationship with this guy.” Like, get into that.

Carly: Right. It seems like that guy was really coercive and manipulative and really abusive to her. And why are we not talking about that part of it? They’ve both been hurt, like Dylan hurt Helena, but Dylan was being hurt by Danny — was that his name?

Riese: Yeah, I guess, and she even ripped up the check anyway. I think that whoever wrote this Helena stuff, thought they were being really deep because it’s a lot of long silences and angles.

Carly: A lot of looking at each other and staring out the window. So we go back to Helena interrogation moment and she says that she never knew how to be with people before, she just bought and sold people. And that’s upsetting, I don’t think you should be buying and selling people. That doesn’t sound good, I don’t like that, that sounds very bad. So we go back to the house, they’re now kissing on the stairs and wouldn’t you know it, things escalate very quickly.

Riese: They sure do.

Carly: Where the fuck did this come from?

Riese: First of all — so first, Dylan lifts her, but doesn’t lift her in a normal way, lifts her sort of — so Helena is still standing up, you know what I mean? It looks like Helena tried to run up and they were going to do the Dirty Dancing thing, but then Helena—

Carly: Yes, that’s totally what it looks like.

Riese: Helena freaked out the last minute and so Dylan’s just holding her straight up?

Carly: Remember when people are doing that plank challenge, where you had to leave your body perfectly flat and then lay face down on random objects? It’s like she’s doing that, but vertically.

Riese: Absolutely.

Carly: And Dylan’s holding her around her knees or her thighs.

Riese: Yeah, this is dangerous.

Carly: So, so weird. Well, it’s about to get a whole lot more dangerous, Riese.

Riese: Do you trust me? Okay. Well maybe? I don’t know.

Carly: I don’t know, I really feel like the conversation we were just having a minute ago was about how Helena doesn’t trust you.

Riese: Yeah. Get a knife though. Put her on the counter, get out a knife. That’s how you find out if someone really trusts you, a knife.

Carly: I think that jumping from an argument to knife play is a great idea and that having zero discussions about that before entering into that situation, I think that’s totally fine and there’s nothing wrong with any of this.

Riese: No, just lay her down on the kitchen counter, hold a knife to her throat. And also, you can trust someone not to kill you with a knife, but still not trust them with your feelings.

Dylan mounting Helena on the kitchen counter, holding a knife

Carly: That’s a really good point, it’s a different type of trust.

Riese: That said, it is hard to find — at least for me personally, and I know that I’m not the same size as Helena — but it’s hard to find a bra that fits really well. It’s not like you can just do it really easily. And if someone came over to my house and knifed my bra off my body, I’d be like, are you going to fucking replace that?

Carly: Do you know how much bras cost? I forgot because I don’t need them anymore.

Riese: You don’t have to worry about it anymore.

Carly: I immediately forgot about bras, once I didn’t have breasts anymore. No, that was probably a very expensive bra.

Riese: I guess Helena has a lot of money, so it’s fine.

Carly: We cut from this to Jenny editing the video, we are watching Helena footage and Helena has a lollipop.

Riese: It must be a weed lollipop. Right?

Carly: I know, right? And then say something about how she didn’t like Bette because of how much her mother admired her. And I’m like, wow, Bette’s going to love this. Why don’t you talk all about fucking Tina too while we’re at it. Then she’s editing, and it cuts to Phyllis and Joyce who were — so Helena’s in her kitchen, Phyllis and Joyce are also in their kitchen. Okay. And Phyllis is like, “Bette, you were so hot in your power suit,” and Joyce is like, “now that you’re moving, my business is going to take a hit.” Oh, you can’t represent them from afar… Okay.

Riese: I’m going to miss double billing you ladies, honestly this little clip is maybe the highlight of the episode.

Joyce: Oh Bette I miss you so much, I’ll never forget the first time I saw you at CU, it was a lecture and you were one of the panelists. You looked so hot in your power suit.
Phyllis: And I’m going to miss double billing you ladies, my business is really going to take a hit.
Joyce: Oh, we miss you.

Carly: Yeah. I don’t know why everyone’s filming in their kitchens, but sure.

Riese: You know what it looks like, also though, that what I thought was weird, Carly?

Carly: Tell me.

Riese: It kind of looked like Jenny had purchased a lot of video editing equipment.

Carly: You know what’s so funny is that it did look like that. It looked like she had a full computer, probably a desktop computer with multiple monitors. And what very clearly was an early version, earlier-from-now version of Final Cut editing software.

Riese: Yes.

Carly: Just put a pin in that real quick.

Riese: Put a pin in that maddeningly distracting situation.

Jenny in the editing bay, Phyllis is on a monitor saying "you looked so hot in your power suit"

Carly: Yeah. We cut from this to somebody, I can’t tell who because the lighting is so nonexistent, having a very intense orgasm. As it turns out, it’s Tina.

Riese: Tina, that’s Tina.

Carly: It takes a minute or two of that scene to really actually realize who was in the scene because of the lighting. Tina’s so worried about the railing, Riese did you hear about the railing?

Riese: Is it on their house?

Carly: Yeah, something about that railing, it didn’t get finished, or—

Tina hanging off the edge of her bed after having an orgasm, pondering that the railing needs to be fixed

Riese: You know what I always say is like, get a railing, don’t get a railing either way you have stairs. Anyway, this is our, this is little bit is sort of our goodbye to Bette and Tina, where they have hot sex, they light a bunch of lesbian candles, they kiss.

Carly: They roll around.

Riese: They roll around, they fall asleep looking at each other, they fall asleep on top of each other and—

Carly: Sade is playing.

Riese: That was a nice touch.

Carly: That was a nice touch. I do like that song quite a bit.

Riese: Bette says she wants to marry her when they get to New York, which is great because it’s not legal, you can’t marry anyone in New York at that time.

Carly: Yeah. Did you get a sense that as Bette was — right after Tina came and they were, they started to kiss and then Bette kind of looked like she was thinking about something, I totally thought in that exact moment she was going to be like, “I have to tell you something happened with Kelly the other night.” And I was about to be like, Bette, this is like neither the time or place.

Riese: Not the time.

Carly: But instead we get this beautiful fan service, fan YouTube video of them.

Riese: And that’s nice.

Carly: The candles and good for them.

Riese: I thought it was a sweet little nice thing that was given to some of the show’s most loyal fans, which are the Bette and Tina fans. So, brava. Then we go to Bette being interrogated. What about Tina? Why would anyone ask Bette what about Tina in an interrogation?

Carly: After Jenny has just found — turned up dead in Bette’s pool? I don’t know. I’m not a police officer, Riese, so I don’t really know how these things normally go, but I am a person who has seen a lot of true crime documentaries and I can tell you that they have never talked about Tina in any of them.

Riese: Yeah, you’re right.

Carly: It was at this moment in my notes that I realized that the episode was not even halfway over yet and I began to panic.

Riese: I know. It took me like a whole day to watch this episode. Then we have another cute little situation, which, it’s sort of like a throwback to the pilot episode where Shane is like running her hands through the foliage. She’s wearing a normal outfit and stuff, the weird leather shirt, she comes around and she sees Bette and Tina glowing on the porch. She knows they had sex the night before, they’d give each other knowing looks and it’s very cute and then they sort of talk about Jenny and — is it Bette who says, “I think her heart is in the right place but I think she just misplaced her meds”?

Carly: Yes.

Riese: And Shane’s like, “maybe.” And I’m like, did she?

Carly: Were there meds to have misplaced?

Riese: Yeah. Are there? I get that this is a joke, but is it?

Carly: Is it a joke?

Riese: It’s not funny.

Carly: They also mention, again, that Weezie is coming to fix the railing before the party. That’s something I think that’s really important to note.

Riese: Terror building up inside you.

Carly: This is the third mention of there’s no railing and Weezie’s coming to fix the railing. Also Shane said that she spent the night with Alice because she was upset about the whole thing with Tasha and that girl Jamie, they all know who… you don’t need to say that girl Jamie anymore, you guys went to a dance competition with her. You’ve spent time with her. She was at the baby shower. I think you could just say Jamie, I think we all know who you’re talking about.

Riese: Yeah. We all know.

Bette and Tina on the porch, Bette saying "I think she's just misplaced her meds"

Carly: And then Bette has some real theories about why did Jenny even give Shane the studio? If Jenny is now using the studio to edit the video, then who’s studio is it? And that’s a great question because Jenny’s name is undoubtedly on the lease. So really it’s hers, and maybe Shane has some photographing to do, but I doubt it.

Riese: Yeah. Shane, as we all know, Shane has taken one photo. She already developed it, and scene.

Carly: Exactly. We go back to an interrogation. This time, it’s Tina Kennard, and for the first time in this episode, we actually see Lucy Lawless’s face.

Riese: Tina is talking about Kelly, which is again, very relevant to the case.

Carly: So relevant. Kelly’s not even in this episode.

Riese: She calls Kelly a bombshell. A bombshell predator type.

Carly: False.

Riese: Okay.

Carly: Helena watches Dylan through the window of the house. She’s on the phone. She gets off the phone. She gets in the car. She leaves.

Riese: Unbearable Betty music is playing.

Carly: Yeah. It’s some of the worst. We go back to Alice who is at home eating Red Vines, which is the most relatable thing that happens in this whole episode.

Riese: Yeah. Although she does look at it and says, “140 calories? That’s crazy.”

Carly: We are a Red Vines household, as opposed to a Twizzlers household, and I feel like that is a really divisive topic amongst people in the community, in the candy community and I just wanted to state that I live in a Red Vines household.

Riese: Okay.

Carly: And whenever Robin is stressed out, I usually buy her Red Vines.

Riese: I don’t really eat a lot of licorice.

Carly: No. And I don’t really either, but Alice is stress-eating the Red Vines, and that’s so relatable to my life too. Shane’s eating a bowl of cereal and then I wanted a bowl of cereal, but I don’t have any cereal in the house right now so I had to just kind of sit with those feelings. And then Alice does this weird impression of Tasha and Jamie, she does the voice… I was like—

Riese: She’s like—

Alice: You like when I touch you like that? Because I like it when you touch me like that. I know, I was just saying. Oh my god. I can’t believe your nipples got hard when I licked them, because mine got hard when you licked mine.

Carly: I really think Alice doesn’t know that people can have things in common.

Riese: Then Jenny comes home and she’s so stressed out.

Carly: And Sounder! Sounder’s here.

Riese: Oh thank god. A little dog. She’s so stressed out about all the things she has to do. And all the things that you decided to do for literally no reason, but okay.

Carly: None of these are things you have to do, because one of them is getting your lunch.

Riese: Yeah. Just skip lunch, eat a Red Vine.

Carly: You could just eat something in the house, get lunch anywhere, there’s at least cereal in the house, we know there’s cereal. So Jenny is spiraling and she’s like, “Three more people have FedEx’d their tribute videos and I have to go pick them up and I have to go to the Grove to buy editing software.” And hang on a second, what were you using to edit in the last scene?

Riese: Final Cut, you bitch! It was there. We saw it!

Carly: We saw it. It was Final Cut.

Jenny looking exhausted while pondering that she has to go to The Grove

Riese: Also, why didn’t we get a scene at The Grove?

Carly: I know. I want to go to The Grove right now. The thing I miss maybe the most in this over a year now of not going places, is malls. I miss malls so much. And I know that The Grove is an outdoor mall, but I still don’t trust all of the citizens of Los Angeles to behave, because The Grove has been quite crowded all throughout this whole situation, which is very upsetting.

Riese: It has been, yeah. Mm-hmm. It has been.

Carly: So yeah, she’s spiraling and Shane’s like, “Hey, why don’t I just do the shopping part and you go do the editing part? Even though I’m going to go buy the editing software, maybe I’ll buy a time machine and I’ll just meet you at the studio.”

Riese: Yeah. I’ll see you in—

Carly: And Jenny’s like, “Oh, my God, what a relief.”

Riese: So, now we go to Bette and Tina’s renovated kitchen, and Kit and Sonny come home with Angie. They took Angie to the zoo. So, they’re in a full relationship at this point.

Carly: Apparently. Even though the last time we saw them, Kit was yelling at him for being a liar.

Riese: Right. And then Bette is upset that he is going to use their new bathroom because he’s a man? What?

Carly: This is so weird. He’s like, “I have to change to go to work.” So then, he needs to put on his drag. Also, he was not gone nearly long enough to have done the transformation that he did. Not even close.

Riese: I mean, he’s a bad drag queen, but.

Carly: Sure. But you need a little bit of time to put on a face of makeup. So, Bette’s like, “You can use the powder room, because you’re a man,” and Tina’s like, “That’s not a lot of room. And what if he wants to practice his routines and his choreo? Why don’t you use our brand new, newly built master bathroom upstairs?” And Bette? Whew. Not happy about that.

Riese: How much longer is she going to even be living in this house?

Carly: She says she hates men, and then says that she’s not a man-hater in the same scene. Her words, not mine.

Riese: And then, James comes in.

Kit: How do you put up with her? Tell me, somebody?
Bette: He never pees in my bathroom.
James: No, never.
Bette: Right? Ever.
Kit: Well, where do you pee?
Bette: Powder room. Right?

Riese: He knows his place.

Carly: I hate “powder room.” Just call it a half bath. Come on.

Kit, Sonny and Bette in Bette and Tina's kitchen. Sonny holding Angelica. Talking about seeing baby lions and rhinocceroses.

Riese: Yeah, call it a half bath. Say, “Go to my half bath.” But also, I don’t know. Are they maybe happy for Kit that she’s in this relationship with somebody who seems like a nice guy? Or is it no, it’s just, just get him out of the bathroom?

Carly: No. Bette’s really concerned about the bathroom that’s in the house that she just put up for sale. So we fast forward to Shane has already run all the errands, and she’s arriving at the studio, and she’s like, “I’ve got your food and I’ve got your Final Cut,” even though we see on the monitor in the same moment that she’s saying the words, “I brought you Final Cut,” that Final Cut is open and functioning on the screen in front of Jenny.

Riese: She’s like, “What would I do without you?” Also, Shane’s like—

Shane: They didn’t have pesto, so I got you fried chicken.

Riese: Okay. And somehow Jenny’s like, “I’m going to kill myself, but I’ll leave everything to you. And then she’s like, “Do you want to see this video from Carmen of Carmen dancing?”

Carly: And then, Shane just leaves.

Riese: Yeah. She’s like, “No, I don’t want to see it.” And that’s great because apparently we didn’t get to see it either, because later we do see the video of Carmen, and there’s no dancing.

Carly: She’s not dancing. And that’s rude to the audience.

Riese: It sure is.

Carly: We’ve seen her dance before, and to tease us with that is quite rude.

Riese: It is. And then, Dylan shows up. Cool.

Carly: I’m sure this is going to be a normal thing that will happen, normally.

Riese: Yeah. That’s going to make sense. Then we go to Bettina’s. They are like, “James, have you ever thought about moving?” And he’s like, “Oh, I haven’t been offered a job.” Because now Bette doesn’t have a job. We have no idea. As of last week, she was going to work long distance or whatever for the gallery. That’s what she talked to Kelly about, so somehow that has changed.

Carly: She hired James to work with her at the gallery. But you know what? Bette’s going to flip the script. She just doesn’t even want a job anymore. She actually just wants to stay home and take care of the kids, and Tina can support her. And there’s a beat, and then everyone in the scene laughs hysterically. And this was one of the only palatable moments of this episode, because of course, Bette is completely unable to not be working, and then acts like she doesn’t get it. “Whoa, why are we laughing?” Sunset Boulevard appears from the stairs of the new bedroom and bathroom area. And once again, his makeup is very bad.

Riese: Horrible!

Carly: So, I guess maybe it is realistic that he did it in 10 minutes, but whatever. He kisses Angie goodbye and she says, “Bye, daddy.”

Riese: They just met.

Carly: And they all just stare at each other for an hour and a half.

Riese: And that’s the episode.

Carly: And that’s the episode. Could you imagine if that was the season finale?

Riese: They just met. How long has Angie known this man for? A few days?

Carly: How much time has passed? Why can no one tell us anything about the time? What is going on?

Riese: Alice is on the phone with Helena. She tells Helena that Dylan is at Jenny’s studio.

Carly: And that like, “Oh, she must be helping the edit.”

Riese: Okay.

Carly: No.

Riese: Of course not.

Carly: So, Helena gets off the phone with Alice. We go back to the studio where Dylan is pleading with Jenny to not tell Helena something. What is the thing? We eventually learn the thing.

Riese: Straight up exposition.

Carly: The most exposition is that she recognized Jenny’s voice when she called to pretend to be Niki’s manager, right? That’s who she was impersonating?

Riese: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Carly: When she set up the meeting. And so, Dylan knew all along that it was a setup and she totally went through with all of it, gave an incredible performance as a person who thought this was a job interview, and then a second riveting performance as a person who storms out of a baby shower.

Riese: The second riveting performance is the one that I actually find deeply disturbing. However, that is not the issue that if it’s eventually sort of honed in on here, because then Helena shows up. It has been at most 10 minutes.

Carly: Dramatically. She just appears and says something, and they’re like, “How long have you been standing there?” It’s very dramatic.

Riese: Yeah. And so, she got there from Malibu. Malibu to West Hollywood in 10 minutes.

Carly: Sure.

Riese: They just want Helena to be really mad at Jenny.

Carly: It’s physically impossible. Yeah. They just need to set up more people that want Jenny dead.

Riese: Yeah. And she’s like, “Fuck you, Schecter.”

Carly: Except the show is confusing being mad at someone with wanting them to be dead. Those are two extremely different things. I get mad at people all the time. I’ve never wanted to murder anybody.

Riese: Right. And this is not that kind of show.

Carly: They’re just very different things. No, it’s really not.

Riese: I know that this is obviously supposed to be like who killed JR or whatever, but that was a completely different type of show. A completely different kind of show.

Carly: Completely different type of show. This is not a universe in which crazy shit like this happens. This is a pretty grounded show. And for this to be the way they want it to go out and to change the entire tone of the show and the format of the show in the final season is very confusing and potentially misguided. Anyway, Fuck you, Schecter.

Riese: Yeah. This is so dumb. So, they go outside. Helena and Dylan and go outside and they’re yelling at each other, and Helena’s like, “I’ll never know for sure that you would have rejected Niki.” What? That’s not the issue.

Carly: This isn’t the issue. None of this is real. This is so pointless.

Riese: Was she worried about Dylan hooking up with someone else for an opportunity? Like, that was what she needed to know? Helena didn’t even want to do that whole thing.

Carly: Yeah. I think if anything, you should test out, if Dylan will sue you or not. If Dylan will entrapped you and sue you.

Riese: Yeah. Do something suable, and then see if she litigates. What Dylan, I think, in my opinion, did wrong here is Dylan storming out of the baby shower in outrage over something that she actually already knew about. That is weird and crazy, because that shows that she’s fine with causing Helena emotional distress. She got mad at Helena. She yelled at her at the baby shower, like, “How could you do that?” even though she already knew about it. And then, she ran off. That is bananas. That’s mean.

Carly: That is so intentionally mean. Yeah.

Riese: Yeah. Whether or not Helena knows if she took up with Niki, who gives a fuck?

Carly: Dylan knows Helena has trust issues, which are mostly caused by Dylan herself, and that she claims to be completely in love with Helena, and yet made her feel like shit and stormed out of the baby shower.

Riese: Yeah.

Carly: I get it. None of us wanted to be at that baby shower. But you were already committed to it.

Riese: You could have just said, “I need a minute.”

Carly: Or you could have been like, “Actually, you know what, guys? I wasn’t going to say anything, but I totally knew this was the setup because you’re all really bad at this. And so, I’m flattered that you put that much effort into my whole thing, but Helena, I love you.” Anyway, this is a nightmare. I hate this. Also, you can totally see the traffic lights in the reflection behind them and they are painted yellow, and there are no yellow traffic lights in Los Angeles. So, it’s a very deeply Vancouver moment.

Riese: Good eye!

Carly: Thank you. It actually took me out of the scene, although I feel like I was looking for a way to get out of the scene because I was like, “This is so nonsensical and I hate it.” And then I was like, “Yellow traffic lights? What is this, New York City?” And then I was like, “No, they’re not filming in New York City.” I’m like, “Oh, I guess Vancouver has …” Anyway.

Riese: Then we go to the MoMA store or whatever, where—

Carly: Where Shane has decided—

Riese: To give her friends who are moving across the country, a large—

Carly: A gigantic, breakable item.

Riese: A glass bowl.

Carly: I cannot think of a more inconsiderate gift in this situation.

Riese: And also for someone who has very specific taste about art.

Carly: Oh, my God. I know. Come on.

Riese: You know what I mean?

Carly: You know that Bette would take one look at that and find something wrong with it.

Riese: You know that people, they have their specific taste of what they like about things. You know what I mean? I would not take that kind of risk.

Carly: Maybe buy them a champagne flute that matches the one that broke. At least it’s a small breakable item.

Riese: That’s what Kelly should have done. She could have put a champagne flute, wrapped it up, and sent it in and been like —

Carly: Oh, my God. Why didn’t Jenny get Kelly to be in the video?

Riese: Right. I know. She could have been sitting there and been—

Carly: It seems like something she would have done.

Riese: She could have limped in because she has a shard of glass in her foot, and been like, “Hey, I’m going to follow you to New York and seduce you.’

Carly: “We didn’t hook up at all. Instead, I got glass in my foot. I can’t get it out. It’s been like this for days or weeks or months, I’m not sure.” So anyway, we’re at the MoMA Store or whatever, and guess who’s here? It’s Molly.

Riese: She got a haircut. She’s gay now.

Carly: She’s got a girlfriend.

Riese: Mm-hmm, got a gay girlfriend and a gay haircut.

Carly: And she’s like, “Hey, I heard about you and Jenny, and I was actually pretty surprised, given the whole thing with the jacket. When I brought your jacket, and how that letter was in it, and obviously she gave that to you and you read it. And then, you didn’t say anything about it. And I just thought that was really interesting. Anyway, I fell for you, I survived, and I wish you guys the best.”

Riese: And Shane stands there, obviously shocked out of her mind, truly. And Molly does not take note of this reaction. Shane does not expand upon it.

Carly: No.

Riese: This happens a lot in this show.

In the art museum store, Molly gesturing towards Shane saying "that's a big bowl" Molly wearing a green t-shirt, Shane in the shadows

Carly: Yes. And that’s not how normal human interaction works. If you talk to someone and they look really confused, you would say something. You’d be like, “Wait. Did she not give you the jacket? Oh, she gave you the jacket. There’s a letter in the pocket. Did you not look for the letter? Oh, she didn’t give you the jacket. Oh, you don’t know where the jacket is? It’s so weird that you’ve been missing a jacket for so long, considering you own four pieces of clothing? But wouldn’t you have noticed that that had gone missing?”

Riese: See, you just wrote the whole scene for them.

Carly: God, I’m so good at this. Anyway, Shane is clutching this bowl to her body that is bigger than her.

Riese: Yeah. She’s going to put herself in that bowl and put herself in the Nile River and just go out.

Carly: Just sail away.

Riese: Sail away. Sail away, sail away.

Carly: She leaves, doesn’t buy the bowl. I think not buying the bowl is the right move.

Riese: Yeah. Shouldn’t buy the bowl.

Carly: Yeah. I think Bette would have been like, “What the fuck am I supposed to do with this?”

Riese: Break it, clean it up. Clean it up between Kelly’s legs, step on it. Champagne bowl.

Carly: Yeah. Maybe I can drop this in front of Tina’s crotch this time.

Riese: Yeah. Or you could put a baby in it. Max could have the baby in that bowl.

Carly: At least one baby. If not, two. It’s a large bowl.

Riese: It’s a very large bowl.

Carly: Guess what? It’s time for the big party.

Riese: From here on out, we can’t see a Goddamn thing.

Carly: It is so dark. And guess what? It’s dimly lit. Alice arrives, I think.

Riese: Alice has been drinking since 11:00 AM. That’s funny.

Carly: Bless her heart. Bette calls Dylan Maleficent. And Helena calls Jenny Kali, the goddess of destruction. And I just really want to commend the writers on what’s happening in this scene.

Riese: They thought, “Maybe no one will know we know things when they read this. So, let’s add something that showed that we’ve read a book.”

Carly: Look at us referencing things. And then, Max says the greatest thing Max has ever said:

Max: Maybe Shane threw a bucket of water on her and she melted.

Riese: Yeah.

Carly: And Alice is like, “Oh, my God. That’s the meanest thing you’ve ever said. I love it.”

Riese: “I love when people are mean.”

In the backyard everyone having drinks and Max saying "maybe shane threw a bucket of water on her" regarding Jenny

Carly: Is this the scene where Tina mentions that Wheezy blew them off and it did not show up to fix the railing?

Riese: If it was, I did not take note of it.

Carly: I also didn’t write it down. It’s either this scene or one of the next several scenes where Tina lets us know that Wheezy bailed on them. Maybe she had to go meet some more hot men at an art gallery opening in West Hollywood. And you know what? They just put up some brightly colored tape where the railing would be.

Riese: Yeah.

Carly: Don’t worry. We will get mention of the dangerous nature of this 18 more times before the episode ends.

Riese: Thank God. Then we go to where Max and Tara bang, where Max says that Jenny saw him. Max says that Jenny saw him for who he is. And that, my friends, is not true. She did at first, but then she really didn’t.

Carly: She really, really didn’t. She was horrible to Max. She was absolutely horrible to him.

Riese: Yeah. This season.

Carly: My heart breaks for Max in a very intense way. It just doesn’t end. Seeing him interrogated in this episode and talking about the other characters with such reverence, and fondness, and love is so heartbreaking.

Riese: Yeah.

Carly: That’s the real story of the finale.

Riese: And also, that mustache does not stand up to a closeup. No one put that on with ideas of an interrogation closeup.

Carly: No. That mustache is running out to the wild west in a Gold Rush situation.

Riese: Yeah. We’re doing a wide. We’re doing a pan out. We’re doing a full sunset. Yeah, we’re doing a desert landscape.

Carly: We’re doing a desert.

Riese: Yeah. We’re not doing a closeup.

Carly: Back to the party. Alice decides that she’s going to make up with Jenny tonight for Shane’s sake, and Bette’s like, “Let’s all give it a try.” And they toast. And somebody, I think it’s Alice or Bette is like, “Yeah, like a mass try.”

Bette: Let’s all give it a try. Why not?
Tina: Yeah, come on. We can do it.
Alice: Like a mass try.
Bette: She can’t help herself.
Alice: Okay. Oh. There you go.

Riese: That was kind of cute.

Carly: And that was so random and ad-libbed, and I enjoyed that.

Riese: Yeah. And this is my favorite of all the interrogation clips, actually.

Carly: This is also mine. This one is somehow — Okay, go ahead.

Riese: We go, and Helena just names — she goes, “Tina, Bette, Kit, Max, Alice, Jen—” No, no, she doesn’t say Jenny. “Shane.”

Carly: Doesn’t say Jenny.

Riese: She just reads—

Carly: Max, Tasha. Paige, Carmen, Papi.

Riese: James.

Carly: Peggy. My mother, Peggy.

Riese: Dan Foxworthy. The guy, Dax, from the car repair shop. Marina.

Carly: Who’s the guy that owned WAX with Shane?

Riese: Cherie Jaffe.

Carly: Cherie Jaffe.

Riese: Cherie Jaffe. Billie Blaikie.

Carly: Billie Blaikie. We were talking about that.

Riese: Angus. Mangus, the nanny. Hazel, the other nanny. Marcus Allenwood.

Carly: Tim.

Riese: Tim. Tim. Good old Tim. Trish on Tim’s swim team. The best swimmer on the swim team. Annette, Jenny’s college roommate.

Carly: Marina, a person who ruined Jenny’s life, and Jenny has never recovered from, clearly.

Riese: Adele. Stacy Merkin. Lindsey, the veterinarian.

Carly: William, Tina’s former boss.

Riese: Shay. Shay. Shane’s little brother, Shay.

Carly: Kelly, the woman that Bette did not sleep with.

Riese: Shane’s parents. Carmen’s parents.

Carly: Dana Fairbanks.

Riese: Dana Fairbanks. Dana’s parents. Dana’s brother. Dana’s gay brother, Howie.

Carly: Dana’s parents. Gay Howie.

Riese: The girl with the clipboard. The nun. The nun who ran away with Peggy Peabody. The sous-chef.

Carly: The girl with the clipboard. The girl with the clipboard’s my favorite. Girl with the clipboard at Pride.

Riese: Yeah. Uh-huh (affirmative). Yeah.

Carly: The person with the whip at the Stations of the Cross.

Riese: Absolutely, yeah. The naked woman who was in the picture that was in the art museum. The girl who was getting fucked by Jesus in the art museum exhibit. Oh, my God, Yolanda who they met at the parenting group. The guy they met at the parenting group who led the parenting group, who then was later cast in The Farm. Is that everybody?

Carly: Famke Janssen, who was also cast in The Farm. Melissa Leo who was on both shows.

Riese: Melissa Leo who played Winnie.

Carly: Francesca.

Riese: Francesca.

Carly: Oh, no. Winnie. Who was Francesca? Oh, what’s her face?

Riese: Marina’s ex, Francesca. Or Marina’s—

Carly: No, but who played her? It doesn’t matter.

Riese: Oh. A cylon, right?

Carly: I don’t remember.

Riese: They look similar to me.

Carly: Anyway, the point is she names everyone under the sun except Jenny. And then the detectives are like—

Detective: What about Jenny?

Carly: And Helena makes the most insane face. She looks shocked, insulted, hurt, angry. And she could either burst into tears or run through the wall Kool-Aid Man style at any moment. She looks like the name Jenny is shocking to her, despite her being interrogated because Jenny just died.

Riese: Did they just ask, “What about Jenny?” Were they talking about other stuff, and then they were like, “What about Jenny?” And she was like, “Ooh, another vampire. The girl who went on two dates with Max.” The guy who told Max he was neither fish nor fowl.

Carly: The red headed guy, yeah. Who is Shay’s friend that was Paige’s kid?

Riese: Oh, yeah. Jared.

Carly: Jared.

Riese: Jared. Don’t forget Jared. Oh, Gabby Deveaux.

Carly: Gabby Deveaux. How could we forget Gabby Deveaux?

Riese: Tonya.

Carly: Oh, Ton-Ton.

Riese: Ton-Ton’s parents. Bette’s dead dad.

Carly: Annie Sprinkle from the cruise.

Riese: Annie Sprinkle from the cruise. Betty, the band. Elizabeth Ziff. Everyone who meat tagged Bette.

Carly: The staff of the Planet.

Riese: The blonde woman that Papi fucked at the poker place. The girl who made that weird face when Jenny was ordering a latte in season five.

Carly: The French girl that Jenny fucked on the ski trip.

Riese: Yes. Claude. Claude. The entire cast of Lez Girls.

Carly: Shane’s terrible dad.

Riese: Oh, boy.

Carly: But the name Jenny is so offensive to her and shocking to her.

Riese: “What about Jenny?” “Oh, yeah, Jenny. I already forgot about her.”

Carly: “Haven’t heard that name in years.” She died an hour ago.

Riese: Back to the party.

Carly: Okay.

Riese: Who should arrive, but Jenny? And she arrived. She’s like, “Oh, it’s so beautiful and fancy.” I can’t believe they remade this entire set just for the last episode, after literally $5 on everything else for the entire goddamn season.

Carly: I can’t breathe. It’s so funny.

Riese: And Kit’s like, “Stop it with this Kelly thing. Stop trying to hurt Bette and Tina.” And Jenny’s like, “I can’t. I don’t want to be involved with this.” And she’s like, “Do you have proof?” Who would ever ask that? Do you have proof? What is she talking about?

Carly: Maybe if Jenny is a person that you spend a lot of time with, you would ask, “Do you have proof?”

Riese: And then, she wires her iPhone video to the TV so she can watch. So now, it’s a blown up picture. And Kit looks at this picture of two people, women with their clothes on, one of them cleaning up glass on the ground in front of the other one, and it’s like, “Oh my God, Bette is giving her oral.”

Carly: Kit is shocked. She is truly shocked. She is distraught. Her mind is blown. Somehow blowing this first generation iPhone video, which shouldn’t have existed, has still kept the quality perfect.

Riese: Yeah. And I think what’s good about that is it doesn’t show anything.

Carly: It doesn’t. Also, in the scene, Jenny says that she sees that she’s making everyone uncomfortable and that her friends don’t want to be around her anymore, and she insists that she’s not a liar. So, why did the show feel the need to have her? She seems to be displaying a complete lack of self awareness throughout this whole season, so for her to say that is very confusing.

Riese: They suddenly are like, “Let’s try to make her sympathetic.”

Carly: Yeah.

Riese: You know what they are doing really well, actually, is building up to someone who’s about to kill themselves.

Carly: Big time. Yeah. “Oh, my friends hate me.”

Riese: “No one wants me around.”

Carly: “I’m causing all these problems, even though I’m not trying to.”

Riese: Even though you have been trying to. This whole season, you’ve been trying to.

Carly: You’ve been talking about this Kelly thing to anyone who will listen.

Riese: Yeah.

Carly: Michelangelo, the guy that built the house in the woods.

Riese: Yes! Oh, Jodi’s ex, Amy.

Carly: Jodi’s stupid friends.

Riese: Yeah. Tom! We forgot about Tom! Tom. What? That girl who dated Max — Grace! Grace with the profile on MySpace.

Carly: With the profile of the jumping.

Riese: The woman with the hair from The Look.

Carly: The OurChart.

Riese: Melanie Lynskey in her little school girl outfit.

Carly: Melanie Lynskey’s character.

Riese: Yeah. Okay. So, we go to—

Carly: And Sunset Boulevard!

Riese: Sunset Boulevard. We go to Bette’s interrogation tape. And they say, “Jenny Schecter.” Is that not already the topic of the conversation?

Carly: So, what Bette’s about to say, you’re going to hear this again in a few minutes.

Riese: Yeah. Don’t worry.

Carly: Yeah, don’t worry if you didn’t get all these descriptors. “Jenny is complex. Jenny is talented.” That’s incorrect. She is self-destructive. Sometimes very generous, but complicated. We go back to see Shane frantically rummaging through her house, trying to find this jacket.

Riese: They have a lot of hat boxes in this house.

Carly: Who owns this many hat boxes? I don’t know.

Riese: Jenny has worn some controversial hats.

Carly: That’s fair.

Riese: Maybe it’s for Shane’s fedoras.

Carly: Oh, my God. So she looks up, sees the attic. And this was a real Arrested Development moment for me, where she was like, “Perhaps an attic I shall seek.” I don’t know. I think she figured this out a little too quickly, but sure. She opens the attic. She climbs up stairs. Now, if you recall, Jenny took the jacket, climbed the stairs, placed the jacket directly at the opening of the attic.

Carly: She placed it right next to the attic, and then immediately shut it and walked away. So what this scene tells us is that at some point, Jenny went back into the attic and moved the jacket into a box. She did nothing else to hide the jacket, but she did take a moment to go back up there and put it in a box.

Riese: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Carly: So anyway, Shane finds it immediately.

Riese: And reads the letter and is like, “Oh, my God.”

Carly: It’s lengthy. It’s multiple pages.

Riese: Yeah. Yeah. We already heard it, I think in the first episode, but that feels like a lifetime ago, even though, as aforementioned, it’s three weeks ago in the lifetime of the show.

Carly: And the lighting is really bad, so I think Shane’s upset or shocked or something, but it’s hard to tell because you can’t really make out her facial expressions. And then, Shane and her 14 necklaces turn around and find the Lez Girls negatives.

Riese: The Lez Girls negatives. I’m going to say it right now because Jenny did not steal those negatives. We’re going to find this out later, but she didn’t do it. She was framed. She was framed.

Carly: No, she did not. She was framed. Somebody actually thought about this, that means. If you want to frame someone for something that means you’ve put thought into it. So, someone put thought into stealing the negatives and putting them in Jenny’s attic. But we’ll get to that when we do the interrogation tapes, won’t we?

a stack of the "Lez Girls" negatives in the attic covered by a sheet

Riese: We sure will. So obviously, Shane is now really upset. I would wonder, if I was Shane, “Is Jenny okay? What’s going on?” Because this is profoundly deranged behavior.

Carly: This is a lot of lying, purposefully lying, hiding things. Yeah. We see Tina in an interrogation and all she talks about is that everyone pronounced the name of the film differently.

Tina: It workshop called Lay Girls, or Lez Girls. Everybody pronounced it differently.

Riese: I loved this.

Carly: That’s the whole scene.

Riese: Some say Lay Girls, others say Lez Girls. Okay.

Carly: Great.

Riese: Cool.

Carly: Okay. Back to the party.

Riese: Be careful about the railing!

Carly: The railing isn’t there, you guys. We never got that railing, but there is brightly colored tape where the railing should be. And also, you’re adults with some semblance of spatial relations to understand where you should stand and where you could fall. Just a thought.

Riese: Yeah. What about that babysitter? The babysitter that Bette tried to underpay in that one episode? Remember her? What about the mean nurse at the hospital?

Carly: What about the social worker in the wheelchair who was really mean?

Riese: Yes, the social worker who was really mean? Yeah. What about Kate Clinton as a therapist with the clown nose. All these people should’ve come up.

Carly: Greatest hits. Also, the thing I noticed is that their house is remarkably uncluttered for a house where a toddler lives.

Riese: And where people are packing to move.

Carly: To move. Have you ever been to someone’s house when they have a small child? There’s shit everywhere.

Riese: Yeah, there is.

Carly: Kitchen. Even if you are a neurotic person like me and you’re like, “I’m going to make sure I put all this stuff away,” there is still evidence that a child lives there. I know that Bette has a very particular way she likes to move through the world. I respect that as a Taurus. I do. But there is not a single brightly colored child’s toy or puzzle anywhere. It’s shocking. And then, the boxes. Why had they not started packing, if they’re selling the house??

Riese: Yeah. Also, why did you renovate your house to make it look worse?

Carly: Truly.

Riese: Whatever they did, it’s more minimalist, I guess. But it’s not. It’s aggressively stylized minimalism.

Carly: Because before it was a craftsman, so it had some charm to it.

Riese: Yeah, exactly.

Carly: And it wasn’t completely sterile, but a glass staircase railing is something that would not be in a house like this. It’s very confusing. It would be in Helena’s beach house, not a craftsman that has probably been there for 50, 60, 70 years or something.

Riese: Yeah. I’m assuming they are not changing the outside. No one’s going to walk into that house thinking, “This is what it’s going to look like.” And the people who would want a craftsman are not going to want a house that’s been, in my opinion, ruined. And also, if you’re going to have a child in your home, you don’t want to have a railing like that, because they didn’t know they were moving when they got this. She’s going to have to learn how to walk upstairs. She’s going to one day be four, and that’s going to be her height, and she’s going to be walking up the stairs, and she’s, “What?” That’s bananas.

Carly: No, Nope, no, no.

Riese: I do like their bathtub though. Their new bathtub.

Carly: Bathtub was cool. Tasha’s now being interrogated, and says that Alice has a big heart and takes risks.

Riese: And is a great person. Okay.

Carly: Okay. Back on the bedroom slash bathroom tour. I think it’s someone, I think it might’ve been Max, is like, “I can’t believe you guys aren’t going to get to enjoy this place.” And Bette’s like, “Oh, we already have.” Very Samantha Jones of her. “Honey, we’ve been enjoying for three days.” What did you say?

Riese: I said I liked Alice. Alice was just making random commentary here and there that I enjoyed. She’s just sort of drunk and seemed a little bit ad-libbed.

Alice in the shower saying "I would spend my life in here"

Carly: Yeah.

Riese: And then, Kit.

Carly: Kit has been hiding on the balcony, which again is a very dangerous place to be hiding.

Riese: Yeah. I don’t think the railing’s finished.

Carly: I just don’t really trust any balconies, but this one in particular is covered in masking tape and has no lighting on it, because Kit walks in from it and is completely unrecognizable.

Riese: Which is too bad because also she looked incredible this whole episode, and it was too bad that it was in the dark.

Carly: So, she went to have a little chat with her sister. And so, Bette sends everyone downstairs. And this is the moment where I was like, “Where’s Jenny? Where is Jenny?”

Riese: Right. So, Bette and Kit are screaming at each other and Kit’s like, “Jenny has a video of you and Kelly.” Bette’s like, “I don’t know what you thought you saw.” But also wouldn’t Bette be like, “What’s on the video? What is the video? Can you explain it to me? Because I didn’t have sex with Kelly. So whatever the video is, tell me about it.”

Carly: Is it CGI? Is it bad computer generated Bette and Kelly fucking?

Riese: Is it a Final Cut trick?

Carly: This is another great moment to mention, that a glass broke and she had to pick up the … What is wrong with everybody? And Kit has no trust in Bette at all, which I guess is warranted on some level, but come on. This is ridiculous.

Riese: Yeah. Everything is just so empty. It just feels like everything that they decided to put into this season to build up to this death that they did not even give us the payoff of, of telling us how it happened because they didn’t even fucking know how it happened, which is not how you write a goddamn story, that every thing they put together to build up to this is so weak.

Riese: The Dylan and Helena thing is weak. The Shane and Jenny thing is really bad, but it’s also confusing because this is a complete retcon of how their relationship was or how it would be. I’m not saying it would be great, but it wouldn’t be like it is. And that stolen negative thing is completely bananas and has been from the beginning. They could have done a little bit better, I guess. Maybe. But actually, they couldn’t have because there’s no way to make these characters into potential murderers. There just isn’t.

Carly: No, there’s not. No. And instead of spending eight episodes on a murder storyline, which is what everything else was contrived to get us to, they could have spent eight episodes actually tying up the storylines of the past five seasons. What an interesting choice.

Riese: Yeah.

Carly: It was a choice.

Riese: It was a choice.

Carly: They made a choice. It was a choice

Riese: Shane finds Tina and takes her away, so we know where that’s going. Then we go to Nikki in the interrogation room asking for a lawyer.

Carly: And you might be asking yourself, “What’s Nikki doing here?” Don’t worry. We’ll get to that later. And Lucy Lawless tries to scare Nikki into thinking that they’re all going to pin this on her, because they all look out for one another, and they’re tight knit, and they trust each other. And none of them requested a lawyer. Jenny runs downstairs to tell everyone to it’s time to go adjourn to the media room to watch her three-hour—

Riese: Hour video.

Carly: … Bette and Tina tribute video.

Riese: However.

Carly: Three hours.

Riese: Three hours. First of all, why does it have to show, right? It’s just going to start airing?

Carly: It airs at 9:00 PM on PBS and they have to turn the TV on at 9:00 PM. They don’t have a DVR.

Riese: The whole conceit of the video thing felt like video art in an art museum where people just are able to wander in and out of the screening room.

Carly: Right. Because at one point it’s playing in an empty room later.

Riese: Right.

Carly: I think she already hit play when she comes in to tell them. I think she’s like, “It’s already playing. So you should maybe watch it.” What?

Riese: And later we’ll see some clips from the video. All of which are what, a minute each? Maybe a minute.

Carly: Oh God, which makes me wonder how is it three hours?

Riese: Right?

Carly: Yeah.

Riese: We see the beginning and end of several clips. Why did she get Final Cut or try to edit everything? Obviously — to make it three hours? You get editing equipment to make it last three minutes, babe.

Carly: That’s what editing is. It’s taking three hours of raw footage and turning it into a three-minute send off video. Also, we saw the goodbyes for most of the cast. So what was the other two hours and 49 minutes?

Riese: Yeah.

Carly: What was it? Do you think it was Jenny just reading her new screenplay? That’s all I can think of.

Riese: It was Helena listing all of the characters that’s ever been on The L Word.

Carly: That took hours.

Riese: It was just me sitting in a chair, staring at the screen with an unhappy facial expression.

Carly: Poorly lit, so we wouldn’t know.

Riese: Yeah. So Jenny’s like, “Where’s Shane? Where’s Bette and Tina? I don’t know.” We go to the attic. Tina looks at the negatives. She’s mad. I would think that she would call Aaron or something, but okay. Whatever.

Carly: She can’t believe her eyes. And I think that if this were lit better, she might’ve had an easier time with that.

Riese: Yeah. I know. She’s like, “Is that pizza boxes or is that a weight?”

Carly: “They’re round. Is that a hat box?”

Riese: “Are those weights? Is that a hat box? We do have a lot of hat boxes.”

Carly: We have a lot of hat boxes. Or weights for the barbell.

Riese: Yeah.

Carly: Okay, Shane, that’s good for you, but I don’t know—

Riese: Yeah, what’s all this about?

Carly: First of all, why are keeping weights in the attic? And second of all, why do you have to tell me now?

Riese: Yeah.

Carly: Then, so Jenny goes to the new upstairs master bed and bath at Bette and Tina’s house to look for Bette. And the shots are framed in such a way that we spend a lot of time looking at the tape where the railing should be. She walks outside, she comes back, Bette finds her, Bette tells Jenny that her family means everything to her and there’s nothing she wouldn’t do to protect them.

Riese: This is so contrived.

Carly: Jenny doesn’t want to hurt Bette and Tina. She loves Bette and Tina, and Bette says she will not abide anyone who threatens her family. Why?

Riese: What?

Carly: Again, she does not mention the broken glass. I just… I don’t know.

Riese: She didn’t do it. She didn’t hook up with Kelly.

Carly: Right.

Riese: You know what, honestly, this storyline would’ve made a lot fucking more sense if she actually did it, because there’s an option here.

Carly: Yeah.

Riese: Because obviously what they’re trying to do here, because they already decided that Alice is the one who’s going to be arrested for it. So even though they said that this episode wasn’t going to reveal who killed Jenny, but The Farm was going to reveal it, and that was going to be Alice. But, so this is just supposed to be a red herring, I guess, because we see Bette threatening Jenny and she says those things, but also another route for Bette here would be to say, “Can I see the video?”

Carly: That would be so simple. And then she could see it and say, “First of all, there’s nothing in this that…” Broken glass. Ugh. Also, I want to say what a bold decision to create a spin-off to your hit show and tell everyone the premise of the new show, the spin-off, which then spoils the ending of a season that hasn’t even finished airing yet. And then on top of that, you tell people that the central question of the final season of your show, your hit show, will be answered in a spin-off when it hasn’t actually been picked up to series yet. And in fact, it’s so bad that it doesn’t get picked up to series. Wow. What a lesson learned.

Riese: Yeah. Indeed. What a lesson learned. And then what happens? You give your show to someone else and they’re like, “Oh, she killed herself.” I think that this is the last time we see Jenny?

Carly: No, not yet.

Riese: No?

Carly: Oh, we see her on the video, sorry. This is the last time we see her at the party. Yeah. Yeah. We go back to the Bette interrogation, and again, says the exact same line from the other scene, except there’s one slight difference.

Riese: We see her roll up her sleeves in the beginning or something.

Carly: Yeah. They really, really, really want us to think that Bette did it.

Riese: Yeah. By having her say that Jenny is complex.

Carly: But she said it two or three times. And that’s how you know she did it.

Riese: Come on.

Carly: We cut to the media room.

Riese: Yeah. Cut to the screening room.

Carly: Where the film is just playing.

Riese: To an empty room. Did Jenny not even edit out Tim kind of like taking a dig at Jenny?

Tim: I want to take this opportunity to thank you. If it hadn’t been for you I might’ve ended up with that nutcase, Jenny. Ha, ha. Just kidding, Jenny. Come on. You know I love you.

Carly: She didn’t edit out anything. She could have just done this in iMovie, just to stitch these all together. What did she need two different copies of Final Cut for?

Riese: And why is Tim saying goodbye to Bette and Tina when he said goodbye to them three, four seasons ago?

Carly: He doesn’t live in LA.

Tim on the tribute video saying "it's so exciting you guys are going to New York"

Riese: He lives in Ohio. By the way, oh, we never mentioned this before, but Kenyon has a really great swim team and we were wrong about that.

Carly: Correction corner.

Riese: However, we’re still out on whether or not Oberlin does.

Carly: There you go.

Riese: Sorry about that guys.

Carly: Tina pops into the room to look for everybody and sees Tim wishing them all the best from the Ugly Betty set, and she’s so mad, and she says that she wants to put Jenny out of her misery.

Riese: Oh my God. Is Tina—

Carly: Whoa.

Riese: Tina has no conviction. She would never kill anybody.

Carly: No, she could barely make reservations for dinner. Come on.

Riese: Right? We go to the porch.

Carly: Alice and Shane are on the porch. They both look miserable. Alice tells Shane she’s decided to forgive Jenny and make peace with her. Why, you ask? “Well, I’m alone now and I need friends.” And Shane’s like, “That’s so funny because we are no longer together,” and does not tell her best friend any other information, she just says, “That was then.” Very mysterious.

Riese: So as we all know, the last time we saw Jenny was just now, right? Was recently?

Carly: Yes.

Riese: So I think we’re supposed to think she has died at this point.

Carly: Yes. Even though they are sitting on the porch that overlooks the pool.

Riese: Great.

Carly: 100%.

Riese: I remember at the time I looked at everyone’s movements throughout it, and there’s no opportunity.

Carly: There’s no opportunity for anyone to actually have killed anyone.

Riese: No. Unless Bette killed her then. But that’s also impossible because people were walking back and forth.

Carly: They all would’ve seen her plummeting—

Riese: They may have heard it.

Carly: From the second story.

Riese: They may have heard a sound, a splash.

Carly: Maybe a giant splash of a human falling from a second story into a pool.

Riese: Maybe.

Carly: Maybe. I don’t know.

Riese: Alice does interrogation. She says—

Alice: What does this have to do with who killed Jenny? I don’t understand, at all, these questions.

Riese: Good fucking question.

Carly: And then Lucy Lawless is like-

Lucy Lawless: So you think someone killed Jenny?

Carly: And that right there, that’s your turn right into the spin off.

Riese: Bette’s upstairs. Tina wants to talk. Says they’ll talk soon. They take a lot of time to talk about sweaters.

Carly: They’re both upset, but for completely different reasons. Everyone keeps asking where Jenny is. Yeah. Everyone’s cold. Max comes inside. He’s also cold.

Riese: Riveting stuff here. Max also is there for a sweater.

Carly: Really great we’re spending time on this. Yeah.

Riese: Max felt a kick so everyone knows that he’s now accepted his pregnancy.

Max in Bette and Tina's bedroom telling them he felt a kick

Carly: Yeah. We see Sounder wandering around the pool whining.

Riese: Right.

Carly: I don’t know if that’s supposed to imply that Jenny’s floating in the pool right now? That was a little weird because also Max just walked in from outside where it’s cold.

Riese: Yeah, and everyone has been walking around everywhere this whole time.

Carly: Yeah, this whole time.

Riese: In the video art room, Angus… What the fuck? Go fall down a well. Who would put Angus in this video? No one gives a shit about that douche bag.

Carly: Jenny. Guess who lives in New York? Angus. Of course he fucking lives in New York.

Riese: Ivan!

Carly: Then we see Ivan in front of a “Vote No On Prop 8″ sign.

Ivan in front of his mirror that has a "Vote No on Prop 8" poster on it, in the Bette + Tina tribute video

Riese: And I have some words about this is that, earlier in the season we had Phyllis and Joyce acknowledge that it was legal to get married in California at that time. Then when they’re visiting Marcy in Nevada, Bette mentions the ballot measure and she says when the ballot measure is overturned, then we will get married. So at that point, Prop 8 has already passed. So their election was in the middle of all of this too.

Carly: In the middle of the three-week time span.

Riese: Yeah. And now we go to Ivan who, for some reason, still has a No On 8 poster on his mirror, even though it’s been, at least 24 hours since the election. And also he’s talking about his relationships or something? His rings?

Carly: I don’t know. Yeah. Kit says that he looks handsome, but did not say anything about Angus. And I think that that is good.

Riese: Yeah, because, what is this just my exes? And it’s like, “Sorry. Yeah.” But also, Ivan’s really just talking about how he met some girl or something. I’m like, “What is this? No one knows how to shoot a video. No one who did this knows how to shoot any kind of video.”

Carly: Everyone’s making this all about themselves.

Riese: We get Peggy. Love to see her.

Carly: Thank God. She says she’s going to throw them a huge party in New York because her place has five floors and they can fill those five floors with all of their exes. Best moment of the whole episode.

Riese: I would love to see that spin-off.

Carly: Yeah. Why isn’t that Bettina’s House of Horrors? Come on.

Riese: Then we have Jodi.

Carly: She thanks them for letting her be a part of their life.

Riese: Yeah. But does she?

Carly: Marina, also filming in front of a pool.

Riese: Yeah. Marina, I have a few questions. How, why, what, where? South of France? She’s FedExed a video from the South of France to say goodbye to people who she said goodbye to—

Carly: Years ago.

Riese: Six years ago before driving off a cliff or whatever the fuck.

Carly: This is just Bette and Tina moving to New York is a metaphor for the ending of the show. And so it’s all the past characters saying goodbye to the show and thanking the show. It’s weird. Then, anyway, it’s Carmen. Carmen always looks good.

Riese: Yeah. Carmen looks great. There’s no dance. And there is definitely no indication that she does, that any dancing is to come.

Carly: No. She’s sitting in a chair.

Riese: Still, how is this going to be three hours long? No idea. Then Alice comes in and she’s like, “You guys, Jenny, Jenny, Jenny.” And then the sirens. And who’s here?

Carly: As Jenny is saying goodbye in the video, the sirens are… I mean, it’s very pointed. Lucy Lawless is here. There are seven ladies inside and a little girl who was asleep. Once again it’s the Schecter Seven. Just want to point out again that the seven women, now that we’ve seen the whole season, are Bette, Tina, Alice, Kit, Shane, Helena and Max?

Riese: Wait, what about Niki?

Carly: Niki they don’t count because he says Schecter Seven, which is the thing I just invented in the pilot — or the first episode. And then Niki is pulled out of the bushes.

Riese: Right.

Carly: They already counted people before we see Niki get pulled out of the bushes.

Riese: So they’re counting Max with the mustache as lady.

Carly: Because otherwise they would’ve said seven women and a man.

Riese: They want to get one last misgendering in.

Carly: One last little dig.

Riese: Just right under the wire there.

Carly: Oh, yeah, also Niki was skulking around in the bushes, like you do.

Riese: Right. Which is, you know, she’s a movie star and I’m sure that no one noticed that. So Tasha shows up, right? But there’s a lot happening here and I have a few questions. First of all, nobody looks like they could have just killed somebody. No one. No one there has any murdery energy. Murdering someone is a pretty unusual decision to make. It’s not something that you just chill afterwards. They all know about the railing. Why would anyone assume it wasn’t suicide or an accident?

Carly: Was the brightly colored tape in any way disturbed?

Riese: Oh, my God.

Carly: Was it moved, was it pushed, was it torn? Why are we not talking about these obvious questions?

Riese: There’s no blood in the pool.

Carly: They don’t say her cause of death either. Did she hit her head when she fell? Okay. First of all, jumping off of a second story balcony into a pool is not really a way to kill you. Wouldn’t you just be jumping in a pool?

Riese: It’s called diving.

Carly: I guess it’s a possibility.

Riese: But she would’ve had to hit her head.

Carly: She would have had to hit her head and have a spinal situation.

Riese: Then there would be blood and there’s nothing wrong, we’ve seen her head already, remember, in the first episode, even though in this scene they don’t have the rolling the body through.

Carly: There’s no blood.

Riese: There’s no blood in the pool.

Carly: But also, if she dove in headfirst from upstairs and did hurt her neck or spine, she probably would have survived.

Riese: Survived. Yeah.

Carly: And just had a paralysis, a spinal injury, something. What actually caused her death?

Riese: If she fell in, then she could have swam out.

Carly: Right.

Riese: Unless, again, she hit herself somewhere. But if she had there would be blood.

Carly: Right. It would be a much more traumatic scene if there was Jenny’s blood everywhere. And we see the body wheeled out. There’s no blood.

Riese: They also — someone would have heard it.

Carly: Yeah. It would have been a loud, horrible noise if she hit her head or something coming down. Nothing about this makes sense. This whole season is based on something that makes no sense.

Riese: Right.

Carly: Not only do they not figure out who killed Jenny or if she killed herself, but they didn’t even actually figure out what killed her. And that is so weak.

Riese: Did she drown? Also her face looks completely normal when she was… Not, I mean, again, they completely pretend like that… In this episode, there’s no wheeling of the body through, is there? That was just in the pilot? Or in the first episode?

Carly: It is. But it’s shadowy. We see her outside being wheeled, but we don’t see inside. And also if they knew that she was dead because we saw a coroner’s car outside, why would she not be covered in a sheet immediately?

Riese: Right. Right.

Carly: And if they thought she wasn’t dead, then they should be doing CPR. Anyway.

Riese: Right. Bette and Tina aren’t crying, which is also weird.

Carly: No one’s crying.

Riese: Why are Shane and Bette wet? Did they—

Carly: I guess what happened is that Shane and Bette jumped into the pool to try to rescue her. Is that what we’re to believe?

Riese: I think so.

Carly: Or was Bette just trying to do an at-home spa situation?

Riese: Also the officer says there was just a few glasses of wine at the party, and there was an entire minibar outside. Alice was wildly drunk, glasses everywhere. And so Niki comes out of the bushes, she comes into the room where they’re all sitting and they’re shaken or whatever. And Niki says, “Oh, I came to talk to Jenny and to tell her that she’s keeping you here.” And Shane yells at Niki, “Shut up, shut up,” because the detectives are standing there like, “What’s happening?” You know? But also everyone’s just acting like someone is going to be incriminated for something that they all know could not have possibly have happened. Shane yelling at Niki not to incriminate herself in front of detectives? What?

Carly: What?

Riese: That looks suspicious. And this situation in and of itself, again, no blood in the pool, Jenny looks fine on the… There’s nothing about this… And there’s a broken railing. Maybe.

Carly: Maybe a broken masking tape piece.

Riese: There’s nothing about this that says murder.

Carly: No.

Riese: Especially because everyone was walking around with each other, no one was really ever, Bette was the only one alone with Jenny. And we saw that scene end I think.

Carly: Yeah.

Riese: Because we saw that shortly thereafter with Tina and upstairs when Max came upstairs and Bette, again, didn’t seem shaken.

Carly: So clearly what happened at the end of that scene, she confronted Jenny and then walked into the hallway, and Jenny just stayed in that room or on the balcony. And then no one heard from her again. But everyone was outside for a while before they went inside to watch the film, which would be the point at which Jenny wound up in the pool. Also, you can’t have it both ways. You can’t be like, the pool is shallow enough that if she dove she’d hurt her head, because also then it’s shallow enough that if there’s no blood, then if she got in the pool, then it’s also shallow enough to just stand up and walk out of.

Carly: Yeah, people don’t usually have pools in their backyard that are so deep.

Riese: Right.

Carly: I feel like usually those pools go to a six foot deep end, sometimes a little more. There was no diving board. So we know that it’s not super deep that she could have drowned in the pool.

Riese: She weighs 90 pounds at most so it’d be really hard for her to drown herself. When I went scuba diving they had to wrap me in weights so that I could just fall under water, you know?

Carly: Oh, God, that’s incredible. The only thing I can think of is that she was in some way rendered unconscious and then fell in the pool. In which case she would have drowned. But how does an adult woman drown in a backyard pool?

Riese: I guess Bette could have strangled her and then—

Carly: Strangled her and thrown her over.

Riese: But Bette wouldn’t do that with people walking all over her house.

Carly: But Bette wouldn’t do it.

Riese: That would be—

Carly: Right, right.

Riese: And Jenny would have screamed.

Carly: Yeah. Killing someone via strangulation is like… I’ve watched enough true crime documentaries to know that the profile of a person who kills someone via strangulation is, yes, it’s a very personal, intimate thing, so that tracks, but you are also, that’s so fucked.

Riese: You’re watching someone die in your arms.

Carly: Physically pulling the life out of… Bette wouldn’t, Bette couldn’t do that. We know that she couldn’t do that. And also there would have been a scream. There would have been noise. They would have been on the balcony where the windows are open and everyone was outside. Nothing about this makes sense.

Riese: No. And then one nice thing happens, is that Tasha shows up and Alice is so happy to see her, and Tasha’s like, “I’m not going to leave you,” or whatever and they hug and that’s really sweet. And then someone says to the detectives, “We’re a very tight knit group and we look out for each other.” Why are you saying that?

Carly: That’s not suspicious at all.

Riese: That sounds bananas. And then someone says, “You probably want us to come down to the station.” What? What are you guys talking about?

Carly: Lucy Lawless is truly like, “This is a frenzy. Wow. This is the easiest case I’ve ever worked. They’re just going to show up.” And that’s exactly what they do. Everyone gets in their individual vehicles and drives to police.

Riese: Right. Why would anyone think this was anything but an accident or a suicide? No one is even crying! Max isn’t crying. Alice and Helena aren’t crying. Niki’s not crying.

Carly: Shane’s not crying.

Riese: You say, “We’re all a very tight knit group and we all look out for each other.” Your friend just died.

Carly: Bette looks like she came from a spa.

Riese: Yeah. And then they all dress like movie stars, get into their seven different cars.

Carly: Oh my God. And then they all walk individually in slow motion towards the police station with a huge Beyoncé style fan blowing their hair back. It’s such an incredible—

Riese: Choice.

Carly: An over the top way to end this series. But again, one that makes absolutely no sense.

Riese: Right? It’s this glamorous ending. So they look insane walking up to — and also they all change. They all look wonderful for the interrogation that they volunteered for. And also, we have two business owners, we have a high profile gallery owner, we have a movie executive, we have a future cop, we have Helena. No one wants a lawyer.

Carly: No one has mentioned it. No one has even mentioned wanting a lawyer.

Riese: Besides Niki.

Carly: What if Joyce had shown up to be everyone’s lawyer? That would have been a great ending.

Riese: I know. She’d be like, “Hey ladies, I’m here. Put me on retainer.”

Carly: Like, “Joyce, you do criminal cases?” She’s like, “I do all cases. I’m the only lawyer in West Hollywood.”

Riese: And then we see Jenny’s final video goodbye, which makes it look like what? A suicide.

Carly: Yep.

Riese: She says, “You guys changed my life.” And that, like, could be a sweet moment because you are thinking she came in in the beginning, she came out of the plane from Iowa and was thrust into this world, and that’s sort of like a full-circle thing, but it’s not because it’s ever so distracted by how stupid everything else is.

Carly: Yep.

Riese: And then they have the nerve to put on the screen, “Thank you for six great seasons.”

Carly: The gall.

Riese: It was five great seasons. Well, four, because I didn’t like Season Three either.

Carly: Season Three was a dark spot for many of us. This will be the final time I say this: And that’s the episode.

Riese: Well, did you like the episode Carly?

Carly: No. No, Riese, I did not. Did you like the episode?

Riese: I didn’t. I didn’t really like the episode.

Carly: What was there to like?

Riese: As far as, you know, when you’re wrapping up a series of beloved characters. Also, it was a very quiet finale. It was very bland.

Carly: It really was.

Riese: There was a lot of silence. They showed literally the same clip twice of Bette in the interrogation room, which is completely nonsensical.

Carly: They didn’t actually end any storyline. They actually created more questions than coming up with answers, which is like, ugh. And I also feel like maybe we should also mention that in Generation Q, for those who haven’t seen it, they say that a woman drowned in Bette’s pool and that she killed herself.

Riese: Right.

Carly: That is made canon in the reboot. So truly, what was the point of Season Six? I would venture to say nothing.

Riese: There was nothing.

Carly: And that they spent their whole budget on Bette and Tina’s expanded set.

Riese: Addition.

Carly: Yeah. They spent it all on the addition to the house and the cop cars and all the crane shots. And instead of putting it towards lighting for the season. That’s my guess.

Riese: And it was a terrible way to end these people and their lives and their loves. And it was just a big all-around nonsensical shit show.

Carly: Just madness.

Riese: What would have been good is if Woozy had shown — Weezy or whatever, had shown up, “Hey, guys, still need me to fix that railing?”

Carly: She shows up after the cops were there. She shows up at the very end before they go to the interrogations. She just rolls through right after Nikki does.

Riese: Right.

Carly: And she was like, “Hey, sorry. I was just fucking about 12 men. I came here to fix the railing. Oy oy oy.”

Riese: Maybe they’re saying that someone could have killed Jenny and then just tossed her into the pool. There was no time for any of this to happen. There was no time, no one had motive or opportunity.

Carly: And they were all at the same location. They’re all at the same location where the indoor and outdoor spaces were blended by fully open doors and windows, and enough people around that they all would have heard or seen something regardless of what happened.

Riese: Yeah. And it’s also just so idiotic that they didn’t even… I know you can’t determine a cause of death at the scene, but like they didn’t even bother to get to the very obvious detail of, as you just mentioned the, tape on the railing.

Carly: Is that fully intact? Because there was a whole lot of tape up there.

Riese: Yeah. And since Sounder is sniffing around earlier, that’s when we’re supposed to think Jenny’s already in there. It doesn’t make sense.

Carly: But she’s obviously not. Yeah.

Riese: And it doesn’t make sense because the writers didn’t write it with a specific murderer in mind.

Carly: They didn’t write to anything.

Riese: Right.

Carly: They wanted to leave it open-ended, which you can’t do.

Carly: Television writing 101. Even if the audience doesn’t know, the people responsible for the content have to know what’s going on inside the mind of their characters, and they never figured it out.

Riese: Yeah. And they had no idea. I was trying to think that Helena Peabody is going to go murder Jenny because she told Dylan about Niki’s set up. No one even likes Dylan. By the way, this is the last acting job that Alexandra Hedison ever did. And I don’t blame her. I would be like, “I don’t think I’m made for this, because this is bananas.”

Carly: “I’m never doing this.”

Riese: Yeah. “I’m never doing anything of this nature ever again.” Well, and that’s the end of the worst episode of television that we’ve ever seen in our lives.

Carly: In the worst season of television. It’s over. We did it.

Riese: We did it. I still had fun talking about this season, even though we didn’t care for it.

Carly: Me too.

Riese: In fact, the worse something is the funnier sometimes it is I think.

Carly: Yeah. So we did it. We got through the entirety of The L Word, and you all listening in your respective homes or wherever you are, you got through it with us as well. And I think we should all be commended for that. Yeah. Go easy on yourselves today. You deserve it.

Carly: Thank you so much for listening to To L and Back. You can find us on social media over on Instagram and Twitter, we are @tolandback. You can also email us to [email protected]. And don’t forget, we have a hotline. You can give us a call, leave a message, it’s (971) 217- 6130. We’ve also got merch, which you can find at store.autostraddle.com. There’s stickers, there’s shirts, including a Bette Porter 2020 shirt, which is pretty excellent. Our theme song is by Be Steadwell. Our logo is by Carra Sykes, and this podcast was produced, edited, and mixed by Lauren Klein. You can find me on social, I am @carlytron, Riese is @autowin. Autostraddle is @Autostraddle. And of course, autostraddle.com, the reason we are all here today.

Riese: Autostraddle.com.

Carly: Alright. And finally, it’s time for our L Words. This is the segment of the show where we end things by simultaneously shouting out a random L word. Usually, these have little to no relevance to anything we just recapped. Okay. Riese, you ready?

Riese: Okay. One, two, three. Lucy Lawless.

Carly: Leave me be. Riese, you said Lucy Lawless?

Riese: I did, yeah.

Carly: That’s beautiful. I said, “Leave me be,” which is a comment to the show to leave me alone because we are done with it.

Riese: Also Lucy Lawless’s forehead did a great job, and her eyes, in this scene. I really appreciated getting to see close-ups of all of her faces.

Carly: There were some nice shots of the back of her head and her shoulders, and shots where other people were in them talking about the crime they did not commit. That was really fun.

Riese: Yeah.

Carly: Yeah.

Riese: So we’re not saying goodbye because this isn’t goodbye, but you’ll probably want to take a long nap after this episode.

Carly: Yeah. You’re going to want to lie down. This was a very long episode, and thank you for sitting through it. Thank you for listening and liking our show.

Riese: Yeah. It makes me really happy.

Carly: It’s still pretty overwhelming to me that… Yeah, me too. I can’t believe that… I forget that anyone listens to this.

Riese: Lots of people do.

Carly: It’s just me and Riese talking shit occasionally. But thank you all for being on this entire journey with us. This has been quite an experience.

Riese: It has been wonderful. And we’ll see you soon.

Carly: And we’ll be back in two weeks, so don’t worry about it.

Riese: Yeah. It’s not over. Unlike Jenny’s life. And now we’re going to go launch Autostraddle!

Carly: Bye.

Riese: Bye.

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Riese

Riese is the 43-year-old Co-Founder of Autostraddle.com as well as an award-winning writer, video-maker, LGBTQ+ Marketing consultant and aspiring cyber-performance artist who grew up in Michigan, lost her mind in New York and now lives in Los Angeles. Her work has appeared in nine books, magazines including Marie Claire and Curve, and all over the web including Nylon, Queerty, Nerve, Bitch, Emily Books and Jezebel. She had a very popular personal blog once upon a time, and then she recapped The L Word, and then she had the idea to make this place, and now here we all are! In 2016, she was nominated for a GLAAD Award for Outstanding Digital Journalism. She's Jewish and has a cute dog named Carol. Follow her on twitter and instagram.

Riese has written 3266 articles for us.

3 Comments

  1. Wow, I can’t believe it’s over! Thank you so much for seeing it through to the horrifying end. Will you consider, PLEASE, doing another podcast in the future? The Real L word? Ilenes bird instagram? Reading the phone book (do those exist anymore)? I LOVE YOU!!! 😭😭😭❤️❤️

  2. Never noticed the awful time warp in season 6, so Jenny and Shane were together less than 3 weeks? When she bumps into Molly they act like they haven’t seen each other for months and Molly has already moved on!?

  3. Thank you for this glorious podcast. We truly went to hell and back. I’ll miss it. I hope the Autostraddle team makes more podcasts in the future! Honestly you and Carly could just riff on a different L Word/lesbian pop culture topic every week and I would listen to it.

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