Spoilers follow for season three of And Just Like That … through episode nine, “Present Tense,” which premiered on HBO Max on Thursday, July 24. 

For three seasons, And Just Like That … has been chasing nostalgia while utterly ignoring its characters’ pasts. Miranda hasn’t mentioned Steve in ages, Carrie has essentially excised Big’s memory from her life, and Anthony barely mourned Stanford — three men who were integral to these characters’ lives for decades. And yet, Aidan has an outsize role on the show and an inflated presentation as Carrie’s one defining love. AJLT wants to be its own chapter with these friends at different stages of life with different definitions of happiness. But the return of Aidan was never anything but a way to hold Carrie, and the show, back.

It’s a nice fantasy to think you could reconnect with a lost love and achieve new bliss, and to be fair, And Just Like That … has all the other elements of an idyllic, sterile daydream: Everyone’s fashionable, everyone’s flourishing at work, everyone’s rich, everyone’s desirable. Aidan, though, was a symptom of the Sex and the City revival’s inability to definitively decide upon its identity. Does it want to be a zanier, kookier farce than its predecessor, or does it want to recapture the complicated relationship dynamics of that show, now with its characters firmly of AARP age? To do the latter, AJLT needed to at least somewhat evoke who Carrie was back then — selfish, self-involved, aware of how she was hurting Aidan but unwilling to stop — and it refused to, because then the fantasy of the show, and of these women becoming better versions of themselves, would be broken.

As Carrie’s on-again, off-again anti-Big love interest, Aidan was an integral secondary character in Sex and the City, folksy and direct where Big had the scummy Glengarry Glen Ross gleam. Before Aidan appeared in AJLT, he was canonically sort of pitiful, presented as always longing for Carrie, his one who got away. Aidan was habitually on the receiving end of Carrie’s whims: She accepted his marriage proposal, then had a panic attack while trying on wedding dresses; in Sex and the City 2, they kissed after unexpectedly running into each other in Abu Dhabi, even though Carrie was already married to Big.

In AJLT, though, Aidan’s no longer the easygoing guy who drew Carrie in with his happy-go-lucky affability. When he and Carrie reconnect in season two, their relationship’s rhythm is set by his ultimatums. He doesn’t want to stay in Carrie’s apartment because of the bad memories, so they play house in hotels or Airbnbs until she eventually sells her apartment and moves. He has major family drama, including a fractious relationship with his teenage son, Wyatt; their dynamic is so bad that Aidan asks Carrie to wait for him for five years, until Wyatt is an adult and Aidan won’t be as responsible for him — a real misunderstanding of how parenting works — and then enacts a frankly absurd no-contact policy with Carrie. On SATC, Aidan’s treatment of Carrie was always undergirded with the sense that he was trying to change her into the person he wanted her to be. On AJLT, emboldened by both new money from a furniture deal with West Elm and the death of his rival, Big, Aidan is presented as leaning into his worst instincts.

AJLT is somewhat lazy in its recurrent use of characters’ poor communication skills to create drama, and it applied that approach too often to Aidan, whose only modes were grumpy or petty. But to the credit of “Present Tense” writers Julie Rottenberg and Elisa Zuritsky, Carrie and Aidan’s fights in this episode depict an honesty we’ve never before seen between them. As they fight about Aidan’s trust issues and Carrie’s exhaustion with his demands, Sarah Jessica Parker makes Carrie’s anguish physical: Her body crumples on itself as she raises her voice at Aidan, she averts her gaze when she admits she’s no longer 100 percent in on their relationship, she chews her lips. Their arguing confirms Aidan is absolutely not the man she should be with; even his apology to Carrie dips into blame for her cheating on him with Big all those decades ago (ignoring, of course, that she technically cheated on Big with him, too).

These dialogues feel like AJLT finally taking a definitive step forward, away from the SATC comparisons the show kept inviting by including Aidan. The final scene of “Present Tense” is a wonderful reminder that this show, at its core, is about the friendship between these women and how they choose ibe another time and again. Carrie putting on a stylish cocktail dress and meeting up with her friends for a night out is a lovely exclamation point on that idea, and hopefully a sign that AJLT won’t rush Carrie into another romance any time soon. (Please, don’t pair her with Duncan in some unnecessary echo of Lisa Todd Wexley’s “flirking” relationship with her editor. Creative collaborations can be sex free!)

Admittedly, getting rid of Aidan won’t solve all of AJLT’s problems. This is a show with a nebulous connection to its established reality and our own, a version of New York City that seems to exclusively consist of empty luxury real estate, Anthony’s Hot Fellas bakery, and galleries where Victor Garber pops by every so often to remind us that yes, he is still that hot and charming, and yes, it’s probably time to rewatch Alias. This is a show where you can spot the gags coming a mile away because AJLT is so devoted to the setup of “Here are the women making fun of a ludicrous situation,” followed by, in that same episode or a later one, “Here are the women suffering through the same ludicrous situation as karmic comeuppance or something.” But when AJLT invests time in the friendships that made SATC so compelling, it’s still a comforting watch with its promise that we, too, can grow older with people who know us best and accept us for who we are. And if we never learn what exactly was in Aidan’s mysteriously heavy duffel bags, that’s absolutely fine. Good riddance to bad rubbish, tube socks and all.

 And Just Like That … finally releases us from the one character holding it back.