Editor's note: The below contains spoilers for Season 3 of The L Word: Generation Q.The L Word’s initial conceit was to explore queer relationships through an ensemble drama, an endeavor the show did significantly well both over its original six-season run and currently in the final Season 3 of its reboot. The original series followed the relationships and friendships of a small, tightly-knit group of gay women living in L.A. The present-day iteration, The L Word: Generation Q, began in 2019, with “Q” referencing a new, younger group of queer characters introduced to the show. Several characters from the first series have popped up over its three seasons, including long-time couple Bette Porter (Jennifer Beals) and Tina Kennard (Laurel Holloman) and their friends Alice Pieszecki (Leisha Hailey) and Shane McCutcheon (Kate Moennig).
Our very first introduction to the narrative — The L Word’s pilot episode — happens in the master bathroom of Tina and Bette’s Los Angeles home. Tina excitedly, softly, calls out to Bette that she is ovulating, and Bette pulls Tina in for a kiss, murmuring, “Let’s make a baby.” Tina and Bette’s journey of couplehood — breakups, parenthood, coparenting, comings-together-and-aparts — takes off from here and continues, right up through the close of The L Word: Generation Q’s second episode, “Los Angeles Traffic.” At the conclusion of this episode, Bette runs after Tina, in Los Angeles traffic, no irony intended: Bette is making the effort to get to Tina, which is as perfect of a move as Bette could make at that moment of their relationship. Tina accepts her outreach of love, and they fly back to Toronto, where Tina lives, presumably for the rest of ever.
Tina and Bette's Relationship Has Seen Many Ups and Downs Over the Years
Tina and Bette's couplehood is easily a litmus test, not only of the possibilities of healing and growing in relationships, and co-parenting — and are a visible example of queer women in these learnings and roles — but Tina and Bette's narrative arc also grounds the direction of the series, both as regards its geographical transitioning and influence on the emotional organization of the friendship group.
A lot happens, of course, over a 20-year-plus relationship, to bring these two characters to choosing each other again, and finally. First, through such a long period of time, living together and separately, they come to know each other intimately. Their strengths and weaknesses, goals and dreams, and angsts and progresses that come through living, become full-blown known to the other during the course of their beginning monogamous couplehood. They live through the journey of becoming parents, Bette cheating on Tina, their separation, and both of them being in and exploring relationships with other people.
Regarding the latter piece, we are seeing Bette, in present-day, tell Tina that Tina is the love of her life. This admission from Bette harkens back to a moment in the original series where Bette has a girlfriend, whom she cheats on with Tina. Tina is talking to Shane and Alice after everyone finds out about the affair, and tells her close friends that it’s always been Bette for her. One could certainly say if you go out into the world and be with other people, and at the end — of a 20-year plus spread — you realize the one you love is the one you have loved the most, and from the beginning, this instinct has a strong chance of being well-founded and grounded.
Bette and Tina Successfully Co-Parent Through the Years
Another bond that reveals a positive intimacy is Bette and Tina's relationship as co-parents. That is to say, co-parenting as a divorced couple is not always going to be easy, or even amicable. Yet, Tina and Bette’s experience show an example of a couple who co-parent through, at first being together when their child is born, to separating and sharing custody, to coming together as a couple again by the time their daughter, Angelica (played by Jordan Hull as a teenager and by Olivia Windbiel as a baby and toddler) goes to college.
In the early episodes of the show’s reboot, Bette and Tina share close, conversational moments as they eat with their friends at a café, remembering their experience as parents to a then-infant. We see here two elements further confirming why their partnership is strong: they share an expansive commonality, which is a love for being a parent specifically to Angie, but more than that, Tina and Bette hold each other in high regard as parents, and as partners in that parenting journey.
Bette Finally Proves Herself With a Declaration of Love
Fast-forward to the last minutes of “Los Angeles Traffic:'' Tina, historically, has been the one in the relationship who, one could argue, sacrificed or compromised more to support Bette in her career than Bette supported Tina in her goals. When Bette wants Tina to stay in LA, and tells her so, at the end of this episode, an emotional red flag comes up for Tina: not again. Though a different situation this time, Bette would need to be really clear to show Tina that she does not expect Tina to give up her career in entertainment or her home and life in Toronto. And so, when Bette runs to Tina and tells her, yes, her work and her friends and the city of LA are all significant to her, but it is Tina who is the most significant to her, this is it. The declaration. The commitment.
We'll have to wait and see if, or when, Tina and Bette reappear later on as The L Word's reboot of this narrative journey of LGBTQ individuals, spanning over 20 years, comes to its close. Bette and Tina may not always be an example of what to do or not to do in a romantic relationship, but in the end, they are an example of what known and chosen love looks like.