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To watch And Just Like That… is to know chaos. And hey, like last week’s episode showed us, chaos can still be fun. But this week’s “Carrie Golightly” somehow manages to be chaos structurally — why are so many half-assed storylines muddying up our 44 minutes? Did we need more time on reusing the same Giuseppe has a huge hog and you can see it through the Hot Fellas denim onesie joke? — and a real snoozefest in regards to the actual content. We’re only three episodes in, and already, this whole long-distance relationship situation is dragging everything else around it down. Carrie just seems so … sad, doesn’t she? Not to invoke the sacred name of Samantha Jones, but I just don’t think she would stand for Carrie accepting this bullshit deal. Carrie has no friends left telling her to get a grip, and it’s really ruining what could be at least a semi-good time.
Carrie decides to say yes to an author event in Williamsburg, Virginia, and use it as an excuse to … have a lunch with Aidan without making it seem like she’s a needy girlfriend who would like to spend time with the man she loves. She doesn’t want to invade his space. She wants to make it all seem “easy-breezy.” She just happens to be in Virginia, and she’ll just pop in for lunch and then be on her way. All of her friends point out that flying to Virginia for lunch is ridiculous. Miranda, especially, has a bunch of smart-ass remarks about it, but eventually, Carrie pleads with her to stop making fun because this whole thing is “really hard,” and Miranda apologizes. To this, I say with my full chest: boo!!!! More people should be making fun of Carrie for this! Maybe it would snap some sense into her. Alas, no sense is snapped.
Things do almost get interesting when Aidan’s ex-wife Kathy calls and inexplicably asks Carrie if she could bring some Adderall with her for Wyatt because there’s a shortage, and she has no one else to ask. It seems insane for so many reasons, but it does lead to Charlotte and LTW informing the rest of the gals that all the moms on the Upper East Side are peddling drugs — “the playground is like D.C. in the 80s” — and Charlotte procuring some pills for Carrie to take on her trip, which is hilarious. AJLT should 100 percent make Charlotte into a drug kingpin. Though, mostly, this part of the “Carrie Goes to Virginia” storyline goes nowhere except to remind us that Carrie Bradshaw has real narc energy. The look on Aidan’s face when Carrie hands him the bag of pills at the end of the episode means we’ll be getting more on the Adderall request next week, so until then!
Meanwhile, Seema decides to join Carrie on her trip after some infuriating news at work: Seema’s boss Elliot informs her that, surprise, he’s actually 90 years old — “a gay 90 is a straight 70,” he says — and is retiring without discussing succession plans with Seema like he had promised, instead selling his shares to NYC real estate broker and Bravolebrity Ryan Serhant. She’s pissed that she’ll have to be some other man’s number two yet again. She deserves to have her name on the company. She’s worked her ass off — she should be calling the shots.
In positive news for Seema, when she swings by Carrie’s place to head to the airport, she runs into Adam, the landscaper. While I assumed he was brought in to get Carrie all hot and bothered, it’s Adam and Seema who dabble in some overt flirting, even though Adam is currently rocking a sleeveless “home of the whopper” tee. When Carrie asks Adam to make sure Shoe doesn’t escape while she’s gone, and he says, “Don’t worry, I never met a kitty I couldn’t bend to my will,” while looking directly at Seema, I felt that all the way to my toes.
While there is no world in which I would ever believe Seema would fly economy somewhere, she and Carrie make it to Virginia. Most of their time there is about each of them reminding the other that “if you don’t ask, you don’t get.” For Seema, she’s going back and forth on whether she should start her own brokerage group and be her own boss or eschew taking that much risk and working under the new guy. Carrie points out that she hasn’t even asked Ryan if they could be partners — if there is a way for her to stay where she is and still get her name on the company.
Carrie, on the other hand, needs to be more upfront with Aidan. She’s spinning out because she doesn’t understand why Aidan didn’t ask her to stay over since she’s coming all this way. It’s Seema who points out that maybe Carrie’s attempt to be “easy-breezy” made it seem like she didn’t want to stay over. Maybe Aidan is respecting her space. If she wants to spend the night in Virginia with Aidan, she needs to ask.
Only one of our gals winds up getting what they want. After a debacle with their rental car on the way to meet Aidan — Carrie’s license expired in 2017 and she had no idea; Seema, a menace on the road, accidentally drives over traffic spikes — Seema gets the big N-O from Ryan on becoming a partner. When she sees the sign in the parking lot that was supposed to warn her not to drive over the spikes — don’t back up! — she takes it as a sign that she needs to move forward. She decides right then and there that she’s nobody’s No. 2. Seema’s going to head out on her own.
Aidan comes to the rescue to give them a lift, and when Carrie notes that this is a lot just for lunch, Aidan agrees. He asks her to stay the night. Carrie is giddy. All that spiraling for nothing.
Well, sort of. As always with Aidan, there is some kind of caveat. They pull up to his house, and he tells her that usually, he and his kids have a rule where they go over everything that’s happening the next day for stability reasons or whatever. He doesn’t want to just spring Carrie on his kids. Instead, he asks if she’ll stay in the guest house. So now this guy is asking her to hide away alone? He couldn’t stay in the guest house and get up early to go talk to his kids? He couldn’t have Carrie in his room and talk to them before she came downstairs? It feels like there are several other, less humiliating options to choose from rather than stashing her outside the house. I’m really going to need Carrie to start standing up for herself and her needs ASAP or this is never going to work.
This and That
• Charlotte worries that not being able to hang with the younger women at her art gallery is going to cost her in sales, so she and Harry decide to reclaim their youth and go out drinking with Charlotte’s coworkers. All it really gets them is an incident in which Harry pees himself because he can’t get his too-tight, cool guy pants off fast enough, and a rich client attempts to make out with Charlotte in a coke-filled bathroom. In the end, Charlotte winds up making a sale, but it’s to the UES mom who supplied her with Adderall. Now, that’s a clientele Charlotte can cater to.
• Okay, I loved our brief glimpse at “Harry and Carrie Go Shopping!” when Carrie agrees to assist Harry with his wardrobe ahead of his night on the town. More of those two interacting, please.
• We also get one scene in which Miranda invites BBC Joy out to drinks to suss out if Joy might be into her and the two share an intimate moment breathing together. We couldn’t have held this until there was room in an episode to do a full storyline? It feels so wedged in.
• Well, it would’ve been nice to have met Lisa’s beloved editor, Grace, and seen even a little bit of their supposed bond before trying to anchor the emotional beats of a storyline to it. Without that, Lisa confronting her imposter syndrome once Grace decides to ditch the PBS doc for a gig with Steve McQueen just doesn’t have as much of an impact as it could.
• Give Nicole Ari Parker more physical comedy bits! The entire scene in which Lisa is working out her feelings by way of potato masher made me giggle.
• Carrie is going to name the protagonist of her historical fiction novel, right? RIGHT?
Carrie’s desire to be “easy-breezy” with Aidan leads to the most high-stakes lunch you could possibly imagine.
