AND JUST LIKE THAT: Behold the Splendor of the Beginning (of the End)!
In which Jackie Hoffman burns the show to the ground in a cleansing fire.
Welp, we’re limping towards the finish line along with Carrie and co. this week on And Just Like That’s penultimate epitaph, and gee whizz, Michelle Pattycakes King was not kidding when he said they’re doing a two-part finale. Basically this was half an epizood. Some stuff happened! Nothing got resolved! It all whooshed by in a dizzying 28-minutes, leaving us as unsatisfied as poor Harry Goldenblatt. But then, what else is new with this show, right?
It all started several days (maybe a week?) before Thanksgiving. Carrie was in her old neighborhood buying baked goods at the great Jackie Hoffman’s house of crusts, which pissed off all the other white ladies because Jackie Hoffman was being all crusty about not letting anyone but Carrie have pies. Jackie Hoffman was all “Carrie Bradshaw is the most perfect beautiful brilliant golden-haired sylph ever, and the rest of you are glue-sniffing peasants!” Which, like, we get it, show. Carrie Jessica Parker is a goddess and we none of us are worthy of her presence upon our TV screens! (But, hey, at least Jackie Hoffman got to cook (pies) for half a minute. I like to imagine that after Carrie left, she burnt her bakery, and this whole show, to the ground in a cleansing fire. BEHOLD THE SPLENDOR OF HER BEGINNING!)
Next, Carrie decided to creep around her old building for shits and giggles. But Lizette caught her and instead of calling social services, she invited Carrie to come sing “Let’s Have a Kiki” at her pre-Turkey Lurkey Day soiree later.
But first, Carrie had to go see her terrible editor, who I’m not convinced isn’t perhaps suffering from a traumatic brain injury that has left her with the mental capacity of a Disney Princess-obsessed five-year-old. Naturally, she thought Carrie’s future BookTok-viral historical romance novel The Woman in the blah blah blah who fucking cares Boots was a towering work of GENIUS, except she hated the ending, which was: The Woman dies elderly and unmarried in her garden after Aidan Shaw fucks off her lover dies in some war.
“Why can’t a unicorn that is also a prince under enchantment come in on a rainbow and save her???” Carrie’s editor whined as she licked her giant lolly.
And that got Carrie to thinking about how she herself is also a lonely old castaway, marooned on the shipwreck of her romantical life due to John Big previously dying and Aidan Shaw being ridiculous. So she proceeded to obsess about that to all her girlfriends, including Seema, who just wanted to complain about having to meet Smelly Adam’s (probably) smelly sister on Thanksgiving. Unfortunately, ol’ Seems made the mistake of suggesting that Carrie buy her own basement now that Duncan was never again returning to it. That threw Carrie into one hell of a conniption!
“YOU THINK I SHOULD SELL MY GIANT HOUSE THAT I BOUGHT FOR MY GIANT LOVE AIDAN SHAW AND HIS LARGE ADULT SONS NOW THAT THEY’RE NOT GOING TO LIVE IN IT WITH ME!?!” Carrie wailed.
Poor Seema just had to sit there and house several martinis until Carrie tired herself out fretting about all that and whether or not she maybe missed her old apartment. (We all miss that apartment, Carr-tilage!)
Elsewhere, Harry Goldenblatt was complaining to Charlotte about how he had been struck impotent due to his recent brush with prostate cancer, and he couldn’t possibly attend the Thanksgiving revelry at Miranda’s house of horndogs with a limp pee-pee! But Charlotte couldn’t concentrate on Harry Goldenblatt’s wangfoolery, because just then a dazzling vision in crimson sequins entered the room. Time slowed down, and Charlotte’s breath caught in her throat. Could this truly be her dearly departed Rosaline York-Goldenblatt returned to her from the shadow realm of nonbinaryhood into which the imposter changeling Rockford had cast her???
Charlotte quickly snapped out of that fucked up cishet fantasy, realizing that it was just Rockadoodle done up in Jazz Age drag because, as a theatre-loving nonbinary tween, they had been forced to accept the cissy lady lead role in their high school production of Thoroughly Modern Millie due to there being zero musicals with lead nonbinary characters apparently.
So, basically Charlotte spent the whole rest of the episode being problematically wistful and trying not to talk about how deep down she secretly longed for Rock to slough off the woke mind virus and be a thoroughly retro dame. (Somewhere, Che Diaz fired a bazooka at their TV before raising their fist to the sky and vowing to wreak havoc upon the lives of everyone in the AJLT writers room via their next standup comedy concert.)
Then it was the night of the premiere of Constant Billiards Gossip Theys Academy Presents: Thoughtlessly Mordant Mildred, and the whole cast was there to support Charlotte. This included Anthony who had recently agreed to become Guiseppe’s husbone but was having second thoughts due to plot reasons. I guess more on that next week?
Meanwhile it was also a crossover episode with The Wex Wing (get it? Because their last name is Wexley and they’re allegedly political?), so Nicole Ari Parker and Failed President Christopher Jackson were also there to talk amongst themselves about how depressed FPCJ was for being a failure at politics. Various Karens kept coming up to him and being like “LOLOLOL, you lost to A COMMUNIST ACTIVIST prole! We’re moving to Connecticut before Zohran Mamdani can repossess all our millions to feed poor gutter urchins and make the city a place where poor people can afford to live! Byeeeee!”
The only person not at Thumble Middle Milfy was Miranda. See, she had concocted a scheme to lure Brady Hobbes’ baby mama Mamma Mia (booooo, show! Lazy joke!) to her house for Thanksgiving so that she could snatch the still-gestating foetus from out of her womb hole. But Miranda was foiled once again, as Brady Hobbes had learnt of her heinous plan and was real cheesed off regarding it. Oh, he was so upset! He even tried to get Dolly Wells and her fancy prancing doggos to turn on Miranda! Will he be victorious in his efforts to remain a deadbeat papa? Tune in on Thanksgiving (which is next week) to find out!
Now, I know you’re all wringing your hands and sweating because I haven’t said anything about our golden goddess Carrie Bradshaw in several paragraphs. She was there for a lot of that other stuff, but it had almost nothing to do with her — except that Victor Garber showed up again to, I hope and pray, not be her last-minute love interest, please god!
What did have a lot to do with Carrie was going to Lizette’s party at her old apartment, for which she found herself hopelessly homesick. But when she got there, she was shocked to discover that it was not in fact a very special Thanksgiving episode of Glee in which she would get to sing and dance with former high school theatre kids, but a dismal group hang with a bunch of 20-somethings who were all probably on ketamine. Worse yet, she found that Lizette had turned her beloved apartment into a maze-like warren of shoddily constructed walls splattered with black light paint, which honestly just felt like the show rubbing salt in the many wounds it has inflicted upon us all for the past five years on its way out.
Lizette nonsensically explained that she had committed this loathsome crime against interiors so that she COULD HAVE A ROOMMATE, a thing literally no one has ever wanted, because she is too askeered of living alone.
“Aren’t you afraid of the unwashed masses descending upon your mansion and parading you through the streets in a cage now that Mamdani is mayor?” Lizette asked Carrie. “Who will protect you now that you are so hopelessly forever alone???”
With that in mind, Carrie began questioning her life choices, which, as we all know, perversely always leads her to make somehow worse choices. Sure enough, she returned to Gramercy Gardens that night and began writing an dumb epilogue to her dumb novel in which a handsome (gay) stranger (please not Victor Garber) scales the walls of The Woman’s garden and frees her from her pathetic life of solitude.
To be continued, I guess?
Wracking my brain trying to think of a musical with a canonically non-binary lead...
…Victor Garber???