Helena (Rachel Shelley) gets out of jail on bail and collects her hidden funds and flees the country with a new girl she met in the clink. Shane, as she always does, ends up sleeping around and breaks Paige's heart, with Paige retaliating by burning Shane's business down. Fortunately, Shane's best buddy, Jenny, finagles her way into getting the job as the director of her movie, Lez Girls, by charming moneybags William (Wallace Shawn) and Shane lands the job as set hairdresser for the film. Tina (Laurel Holloman) and Bette spend the season fighting their feelings for one another, only to give in to their passions several times, finally resulting in Bette and Jodi splitting up. Jodi's final slap in the face to Bette is to make her infidelity the focus of an art installation, humiliating Bette in the art world.
A huge development in the show is the introduction of Dawn Denbo (Elizabeth Keener) and her lover, Cindy (Alicia Leigh Willis) as they open what becomes a competing club to The Planet called She-Bar. Shane's rampant libido causes a tiff between Dawn and Cindy and the girls from The Planet, causing Dawn to wage all-out war in trying to destroy The Planet and eventually sneakily purchasing a lion's share of its stock. Fortunately, Helena saves the day when she comes back into town following her mother's hospitalization.
Alice (Leisha Hailey) and Tasha (Rose Rollins) have their ups and downs as Tasha is threatened with expulsion from the service for breaking the code on homosexuality. She fights it, giving up her career in the end for her love for Alice, but Alice catches the eye of a fashion designer during her stint on The Look as a guest host and problems arise. Probably the most drama surrounds the filming of Lez Girls. With Jenny at the helm, she becomes intolerably selfish and her assistant turns tail and runs. She is quickly replaced, however, by Adele Channing (Malaya Rivera Drew), a dowdy fan of Jenny's writings who is all to happy to act as her slave. Max (Daniela Sea) seems the only person who notices something is a little "off" with Adele, and by the end of the season, not only has Adele transformed into Jenny's doppelgänger, but she manipulates situations and gets Jenny fired as the director and herself hired in Jenny's place. Of course, if Jenny hadn't been so foolish as to get into a hot and heavy relationship with the star of the film, Niki Stevens (Kate French), it wouldn't have been nearly as easy for Adele to do what she did.
Poor Max has hardly any storyline at all this season, save for starting up a relationship with Tom (Jon Wolfe Nelson), Jodi's interpreter. He's a gay man and Max used to be a lesbian, but now she's living as a boy, she just didn't go through with the surgery. And now they are hooking up? Huh? Max's sex life is more convoluted than Mr. Garrison's on South Park! Finally, Phyllis (Cybill Shepherd) cools off her romance with Joyce, divorces her husband and alienates her daughter, Molly (Clementine Ford), who busts in on a girls' party to find her mother in an embarrassing situation. What's a girl (Molly, that is) to do except start up a romance with Shane, forsaking her Supreme Court internship, causing Phyllis to step in and degrade Shane. The explosive season finale finds everything coming to a head with all the girls at the Lez Girls wrap party, where many things are revealed and hearts are broken.
There are several special features on board including some small featurettes about the Subaru Pink Ride supporting breast cancer research, the Wolfe Video Party which is a big deal during the Woman's Final Four each year, a PSA on the Point Foundation and a music video for the band, Uh Huh Her, of which Leisha Hailey is a member. Probably the coolest special features, however, are the first two episodes of The Tudors: Season 2, which come on the disc itself, plus the first two eppies of Dexter: Season 3 and Californication: Season 2, both accessible online by popping the disc into your computer. Since I don't subscribe to Showtime, this was a huge boon for me.
If you are a fan, you know you'll already be buying The L Word: Season 5 to add to your collection. It's a great drama with excellent storylines and characters, but it's not for the prudish. These girls like to get down and dirty, so it's not for the young ones by any means.
