As the episode opened on Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker) typing in bed, I felt the stirring of genuine interest. Her rekindled relationship with Aidan (John Corbett) makes me curious where the story will go, instead of watching an impossibly rich person flit from irrelevant conflict to irrelevant conflict week after week.
Aidan, returning from a week in Virginia, kisses Carrie and says he has to shower after the flight. “I thought I smelled some extra leg room on you,” she says, and it occurs to me that maybe Carrie and Aidan can make it work because they have the same cringey sense of humor. He says his boys loved her, but she’s insecure about hard-to-please 14-year-old Wyatt. I don’t understand why this meeting didn’t happen onscreen, until Aidan calls Wyatt to report he lands safely and the kid is a giant pill. Glad we can’t have one enjoyable child on this show.
Unfortunately, Carrie and Aidan have been spending enough time in Che’s (Sara Ramirez) apartment that building management has taken notice and delivers a letter that the tenant has exceeded the maximum guest visitation. This forces the issue of returning to Carrie’s apartment, which Aidan still refuses to do.
Enter: Seema (Sarita Choudhury). My girl gets two things to do this week! First of all, she has sex with her Marvel movie director, Ravi (Armin Amiri), after he makes her show him apartment rentals for three weeks. “I’ve never done this with a client before!” she insists as they get dressed after fucking in the property she’s showing him. When she brings him to dinner with Carrie and Aidan, Aidan absolutely geeks out because he and his boys love one of Ravi’s movies.
Seema and Carrie have some girl talk in the bathroom wherein Seema insists Ravi is fun sex but not marriage material because other women are always dropping into his DMs. To drive this point home, she pretends to do a TikTok dance, and it’s delightful. Carrie tries to push on this, but Seema insists she change the subject. Carrie has never needed to be told twice to talk about herself, so she tells Seema she’s ready to look for a new apartment. For real this time.
Meanwhile, Miranda (Cynthia Nixon) is fully a career woman again, so it’s time for her to freak out in earnest about Brady (Niall Cunningham) not going to college. “You need to figure out your path,” she tries to tell him, but he’s not having it. “You didn’t figure out your path until 56, so give me 38 more years?” Fine, Miranda will find another path to badger him: She calls Charlotte (Kristin Davis) to ask her to send Lily (Cathy Ang) to Brooklyn to hang out with Brady, hoping her drivenness will “rub off” on him. Charlotte does not love this idea, but Miranda pleads. “Charlotte, my only child is making French fries for a living. I don’t want his greatest achievement to be mastering the crinkle cut.” So elitist! So Miranda!
If you’ve seen the And Just Like That… season-two poster, in which Brady and Lily are gazing at each other, you know what happens next. They bang! (Are people still saying bang?) Miranda, home to take a shower because Nya (Karen Pittman) is having hot sex in their shared apartment, sees Lily emerge from Brady’s room in just a T-shirt, and the secret is out immediately. Miranda and Charlotte discuss over an emergency lunch. “There is no way, Brady is not even her type!” Charlotte insists. “What is that supposed to mean?” demands Miranda, the woman who recently told Charlotte her son is amounting to nothing. Yikes, this could get messy.
Charlotte agonizes over this to Harry (Evan Handler), who is half listening as he battles with a caterer for Herbert’s (Chris Jackson) campaign event. (Side question: What is Harry’s job? Isn’t he a lawyer? Why is he event planning? If someone understands, please explain in the comments.) “No matter how you slice it, this doesn’t end well.” She gasps. “Unless they get married! But oh my god, she would have Miranda as a mother-in-law.” Her whole stream of consciousness here is extremely relatable. We can all agree Miranda would be a horrible mother-in-law.
Miranda and Charlotte spy on the kids at the Wexley campaign event, which is held in Charlotte and Harry’s apartment. When they confide in Carrie what they think happened, she gets the line of the night: “Wow, that’s like hearing that two of my stuffed animals are having sex.” I’m not sure what Miranda and Charlotte are trying to do, catch them in the act? They’re obviously fucking! In the end, Charlotte admits that she had a lot of sex her mother didn’t know about and she’d rather not know about her daughter hooking up with one of her best friends’ kids. Good choice.
Also at this event, Charlotte’s boss (Victor Garber) asks Carrie if she’s ever been married, and then if her presumed divorce was ugly. Carrie, who just last week wondered if Big was a horrible mistake, replies, “No, it was a wonderful marriage to a wonderful man. It ended much too soon.” What! What is with this show and forgetting about huge emotional developments from episode to episode? And on that note: We haven’t heard from Steve (David Eigenberg) in forever!
Seema finds a perfect place for Carrie, but it’s massive with four bedrooms. Carrie, for whom money is not a problem, thinks this could be fine because she and Aidan both need their space and maybe he’ll want to bring his boys to New York at some point. It seems like there might be a snafu when Aidan’s ex-wife Kathy (Rosemarie DeWitt) asks Carrie to coffee, but it’s mostly to respectfully request Carrie not use her sons as material in any future writing. Carrie gracefully agrees, and all seems fine, until Kathy says, “You can’t hurt him again.”
Carrie never has any plans to hurt anyone, but that hasn’t stopped her from doing so in the past. She brings Aidan to look at the massive potential apartment, and while he loves it, he seems nervous when she says she’s going to sell her old place. Perhaps Carrie is just more chill than I am (unlikely), but I would force this issue. Your relationship is not on solid ground if the man still can’t set foot in the place where it fell apart more than two decades ago, and she’s taking a big step for him here. She admits what Kathy told her, and Aidan has the right response: “I think this is now. You’ll hurt me, I’ll hurt you, we’ll get pissy, we’ll work it out.”
Maybe two people in their fifties are more mature than people in their thirties and actually can make it work. AJLT is slowly but surely whittling away at my skepticism, and I’m going to be so irritated if they kill off Aidan in a second Peloton incident in the season finale.
Stray observations
- Aidan still wears tighty whities. That’s all.
- Lisa (Ari Nicole Parker) spends the episode falling asleep in her closet because she’s overworked. When she’s late to Herbert’s campaign event because of this, he’s furious, but then she tells him she’s pregnant. Wait, how old are these people?
- On one of these occasions, she sleeps through dinner so their daughter eats Lucky Charms. When Herbert wakes her up, she starts to get ready for bed at 8 p.m. “What about me? What about dinner?” he asks. In my notes: “Go fuck yourself!!!” Lisa has a more diplomatic response that still gets the same message across: “You know where the cereal is.”
- Nya once again doesn’t get to do much this episode except reintroduce sex scenes to the show, as she’s just discovered Tinder. She’s delighted that she can orgasm and then just look at her phone without pretense, until she sees on social media that Andre is expecting a baby with a new woman. Hate this for her, but girl, you didn’t want a baby! It’s okay!
- Does Giuseppe (Sebastiano Pigazzi) have his own writer? Between him pointing out Charlotte’s oil paintings of her dogs and saying, “Five dinners with no dick is, how you say, not very gay,” I always enjoy his scenes.
- Che is back to writing standup after someone recognizes them in the vet’s office, and I don’t really feel the need to follow Che’s life anymore. Treat them like any other ex on Sex And The City and cut them loose!
- Miranda’s suit when they’re checking out Carrie’s apartment is to die for.