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Owing to significant news, including Anna Wintour’s step back from oversight of American Vogue and Jonathan Anderson’s debut at Dior, I did not get to recapping the fifth episode of And Just Like That. However, given that so little happens on this show and that many of us are probably mostly hate-watching it at this point, I figured it would be fine to lump two episodes together. We are now halfway through a 12-episode season!
In the course of the last two episodes, the show seldom veered from reducing these women to their shoes and expensive apartments, continuing the impressive feat of making Emily in Paris look downright Shakespearean. Why Sarah Jessica Parker is allowing this show to be a pox on her legacy, I cannot understand. But I fear we’re heading toward an inevitable moment where Carrie must choose between Duncan and Aidan in order to tee up — I’m afraid to even type it — a fourth season. HBO, it’s okay — you can put this show out of its misery and just have her choose Duncan!
Let’s take a look, character by character.
Carrie
Carrie apparently loves wearing high heels in the (dis)comfort of her home. When she is alone in her still-empty place, she walks all over in high heels like a one-woman fashion show. I guess this was the writers’ way of giving us gratuitous shoe porn, because apparently they write around outfits (maybe not the best way to produce compelling material, as it turns out!). But even in the interest of promoting shoe ogling, it was a perplexing array of maximalist heels, including white over-the-knee boots, as though the whole minimalist/Phoebe Philo/stealth wealth moment never occurred in the imagined universe of this show… even though it chronicles people who are obsessed with fashion.
Apparently, Carrie’s clomping disturbs the grown Harry Potter living under her stairs: Duncan Reeves, a world-famous biographer. Carrie, despite working as a famous writer herself, seems never to have heard of him. He confronts her in a collarless shirt and cardigan because And Just Like That’s men are allowed to be comfortable. Carrie refuses to abate the clomping because high heels are basically her entire personality. That the And Just Like That Instagram account memed this line as though it is iconic shows you just how bizarrely out of touch this version of Carrie has become.
Carrie then attempts to placate Duncan with a gift basket of local foods. He tells her he comes to New York to write, not to learn about local anything. Carrie is appalled when Duncan attempts to give her what Carrie calls “nursing home” slippers from Amazon. Rather than not wear her heels in her home, she goes through the effort of laying down the ugliest brown carpet runners you’ve ever seen and then makes an elaborate show of having her heeled friends walk on those instead of the wood.
At which point, we must pause and ask: who is this woman? Who buys brown carpet runners to appease a man she dislikes so she can wear painful-looking shoes in her own home when no one is around?
I asked ChatGPT and it bristled at the query:
Carrie texts Samantha, who lives in London, to ask if she knows anything about Duncan. Samantha says “he’s a lot of fun.” There’s a predictable joke about him living under Carrie but Samantha wishing he were under her. His sex appeal validated, Carrie takes her rage out not on Duncan for trying to tell her how to live her life, but Miranda, who stays with her after getting tired of the heavy metal blasted by a naked man living next to her Airbnb. Carrie snaps at her for spilling a Coke on the table Aidan ended up ordering her from First Dibs after disparaging it, and for eating her yogurt and banana. If she loves walking in her heels so much, needing yogurt and a banana present the perfect opportunity for her to leave her house wearing vintage shoe booties and a ballgown.
Carrie ends up at dinner with Duncan, where she says she’s writing a novel, and he says he’s writing about Margaret Thatcher, but he’s worried about whether or not readers will “accept a woman” from him. Later, over mutton stew in his basement apartment, they agree to read each other’s first chapters. She then recounts this meal to Aidan over the phone, while he combs his thin wet hair into whatever the opposite of a cunty little bob is. Clearly jealous of Duncan (“like the donuts,” he odiously quips) he shares that he’s coming to visit because Wyatt’s going to Wyoming for a troubled-kid wilderness program.
When Aidan arrives, he tries to be cute and throw a stone at her window like he used to, but he ends up shattering it, such is Aidan’s usefulness in all ways now. Only then, surrounded by shards of glass, is Carrie finally barefoot in her own home. He’s like, “Why aren’t you wearing shoes?” and Carrie admits it’s because of Duncan. Aidan wants to go to Scranton the next day to find vintage French doors to replace the one he broke, but Carrie can’t because she has an influencer event at Tiffany’s. The brand mention and shot of her and Charlotte walking around the first floor of the Fifth Avenue flagship had to have been paid placement, along with the Tums she starts her day with. If the writers want to have any fun (alas), they’ll have her at a Tums influencer event in the next episode.
After the Tiffany event, Aidan tells Carrie he slept with Kathy and that it was a mistake he wouldn’t make again. Carrie doesn’t seem to care all that much because she figured they were in an open situationship. Then, they’re passionately embracing in bed and Aidan rounds out his time in New York by wearing a cheap suit to LTW’s dad’s funeral that splits along the crotch when he sits down. He can’t help but be absolutely not hot at every turn.
Charlotte
Charlotte learns while carrying a purse with her dog’s face on it that Harry has prostate cancer, but he asks her not to tell anyone because he doesn’t “want to be the cancer guy.” This would maybe beat being the “pants-wetting guy”? Charlotte says she’ll quit her job to care for him, and he tells her no. She even offers to cancel their weekend Governor’s Island glamping trip, but Harry insists they go even though their kids (understandably, I’d argue) have no interest in spending a night in a tent on Governor’s Island. Charlotte is clearly being wrenched apart inside by Harry’s diagnosis, but keeps her promise to Harry and doesn’t tell her friends. When she bumps into that woman Mitsy, who this show just can’t quit but needs to like a smoking habit, at Memorial Sloan Kettering where Harry has an appointment, she’s wearing what one assumes is her depressed dress: a minimalist (for her) denim sleeveless wrap that actually becomes her nicely! Mitsy asks her who she knows with cancer, and Charlotte lies and says she’s there to volunteer.
Harry decides to have surgery instead of radiation and Charlotte goes downtown to buy male Depends (another brand activation Carrie could hit). Because in this imagined universe, where every fashion-inclined woman rejects minimalism, no one but Duncan uses Amazon and Charlotte travels to Gramercy to hit a CVS where no one would see her. Only, she bumps into Carrie and comes clean about Harry’s diagnosis and her fear that, unlike this show, he’s going to die.
LTW
Lisa shows up to the Governor’s Island glamping trip that only she and Charlotte wanted to do with her arms in the air like a Kardashian riding a gondola at the Jeff Bezos-Lauren Sánchez wedding. She admits to Charlotte at the spa that she has a crush on her new editor, Marion. In the next episode, she puts her phone on do not disturb when she’s working with him, even though moms don’t ever do that. The writers, instead of making the point that this is fine for moms to do, decide to have Herbert show up to her editing suite to tell her that her father has died and she may have missed the chance to say goodbye to him because her phone was on silent. So there you go, mothers who watch this show: silenting your phone and ignoring your family is, according to this program, one of the worst things you can do.
LTW then finds herself at odds with the woman who ran her dad’s theater and who sent an invitation to his funeral before LTW could get to it. The seemingly purposeless conflict easily resolves, and then LTW finds herself unable to deliver a eulogy, but very able to dress her and her daughter in dramatic structured black suiting.
Miranda
Cynthia Nixon really drew the short straw this season. So far over these six episodes, all her character has really done is watch a reality TV show, eat guacamole, go slightly viral for saying “wild cunt,” and start a relationship with the sane-seeming Joy. After getting berated by Carrie for wandering her apartment naked and eating her snacks, she enlists Seema to help her find a new place. Seema tells her to spend $150,000 over asking on a spacious, gorgeously furnished apartment, and Miranda at first says no out of principle. But because this show is little more than wealth porn now, it’s not long before she blithely agrees and offers to throw in extra for furniture, like it’s springing for one more baguette at Anthony’s bulge-themed bakery.
Seema
Seema tries and fails to secure a loan from a bank for an office for her new real estate firm. Then, because she’s out of a job, she has to let go of her brown Mercedes and driver, which is what qualifies as an emotional arc. I stopped expecting anyone’s finances to make remote sense on this show, but her inability to afford her car and driver did not add up, did it? If she was one of the most successful realtors in the city, that would make her pretty rich, no? Also, what happened to the idea of her banging Carrie’s gardener? If she can’t have her company or her car, and has to utter lines like “I work in real estate — not unreal estate,” can’t she at least have that?
