AND JUST LIKE THAT: Carrie Bradshaw, Homemaker
I guess this show blew its entire location budget on Miranda’s dumb Los Angeles sex and beach cleaning odyssey (R.I.P. Hamptons house) because to no one’s surprise we’re glossing right over Carrie’s big momentous trip to Virginia. Surely, nothing interesting happened there at all, like for instance Carrie failing to be able to interact with Aidan’s large adult sons like a normal human, or chickens making a nest in the ballgowns you know she 100% packed to wear on a farm.
Anyway, here’s Carrie totally relatably wearing a bejeweled cocktail dress in Che Diaz’s bed because she and Aidan Shaw are still AirPNPing Che’s apartment because he continues to refuse to enter her apartment. So, he rolls in and exposits about how his alleged sons just can’t wait for their new step-mommy Carrie Bradshaw to come visit them again. Except for his youngest son, who hates her and is “tricky” and “has a thing about planes.” Then Aidan FaceTimes the youngest Shawling to confirm that he does indeed hate Carrie Bradshaw and all that she represents.
Also, Aidan continues to be terrible at being stealth about their illegal sublet situation. He’s apparently been talking to people in the building because he is a down-to-earth folksy type dude who says howdy-doo to everybody he sees. He’s also apparently a 6’ 5” child who has to take all his clothes off and run around the house in his underoos the minute he gets home, because that’s all he’s wearing when he and Carrie discover a scary note slipped under their door. It is from the building manager, and they are evicted from Hudson Yards! Wherever shall they live now!?
“How about the perfectly fine apartment I continue to own?” Carrie suggests.
“NO!” Aidan maturely cries, stamping his foot and storming off to go watch Paw Patrol (which is copaganda) or something.
So, Carrie has to break the news to poor Che Diaz that they can no longer do their whole idiotic apartment swap anymore. Which is fine apparently, because Che Diaz is just rolling in cash from their new vet concierge job and can now afford to pay their own Hudson Yards rent! Did you know that vet concierges made so much money? I sure didn’t! So convenient! No one will be homeless! Not even the box of adorable fluffy-wuffy kittens that some cute queer fan (and maybe also future love interest?) brought to the vet for Che to re-home in Carrie’s apartment!
Another full-grown man who is being incredibly difficult about real estate is that big Hollywood movie director who is Seema’s client. She’s been showing him literal palaces all over town for weeks and weeks and he has hated all of them! Too bad he doesn’t have a nonbinary sidekick whose home he can appropriate! Seema is so fed up with him! But then he’s like, “Actually, I’ve just been wasting your time showing me all these apartments so I can flirt with you.” And Seema doesn’t mind that at all, because she has been secretly horny for him this whole time obviously! So they have sex together right there in that apartment that neither of them own, while off-brand American Russell Tovey famous real estate guest star Ryan Serhant just waits around downstairs, I guess?
Anyway, now Seema and that director guy are dating, so she brings him to dinner with Carrie and Aidan. And guess what! Aidan is a big huge fan of the director guy’s moving pictures! While the boys are blah blah blah-ing about CINEMA, Carrie and Seema run away to the little girls room to blah blah blah about how Seema doesn’t think the director is marriage material because of how he’s probably always sexing with famous actresses. But Carrie is not about to let a conversation not be about her, so she’s like, “Hey, I want to sell my apartment now for real this time so that Aidan Shaw and his Shaw-spawn can come live with me in a big house!” And of course Seema has the perfect house just waiting for Carrie Bradshaw to buy!
The next day (maybe? What is time on this show???), Carrie brings Miranda and Charlotte to see the perfect house that she is about to upend her entire life to buy just to appease her weird boyfriend and his sons who will probably never set foot in there. Miranda and Charlotte, who remember how Carrie almost sold her apartment in the first movie and then briefly moved into that crazy minimalist downtown apartment last season, are like, “Jesus, here we go again!” But Carrie’s like, “No no no! I’m really ready to definitely 100% for sure get rid of the apartment that has kind of defined me as a character for this entire franchise and move into this place now.” Plus, also, she gets along great with Aidan’s ex-wife, which is surely proof that all is great and going to work out fine! And I guess all the Shaws and ex-Shaws have some kind of Spidey-sense that lets them know whenever anyone is talking about them, because literally seconds after Carrie mentions her, Aidan’s ex-wife calls demanding a parent/girlfriend conference!
Ok, so meanwhile, this other cursed storyline is going on: Miranda is all stressed out because Brady Hobbes is wasting his life flipping burgers at Steve’s bar. So she begs Charlotte to make Lily hang out with him, because Lily is plagued by model minority anxiety very driven and ambitious and Miranda hopes she can inspire Brady Hobbes to not be a lazy doofus. But this plan backfires spectacularly because Lily is actually a rebellious, sexually liberated singer-songwriter now and Brady Hobbes is horny for every girl! One morning, Miranda catches Lily sneaking out of Brady’s bedroom wearing only a t-shirt and immediately assumes they have hooked up, which they obviously 100% did probably?
“They hooked up!” Miranda tells Charlotte, who freaks out, and is like, “No no no this never happened!” (It totally did.) But then also she starts planning Lily and Brady’s wedding and worrying about what a nightmare in-law Miranda will be.
It all comes to a head at this big fundraiser thing that Harry is throwing for his BFF (men can have those too!) President Christopher Jackson’s comptrolling campaign. Everyone is there! (Except Che and Seema and Aidan: not invited? And Professor Karen Pittman: too busy having tons and tons of sex with Disney’s Tarzan. And Nicole Ari Parker: keeps falling asleep in her closet for reasons…)
Miranda and Charlotte spend the whole party spying on Brady Hobbes and Lily and trying to figure out whether they really are having sexual relations. (They totally are!) They lurk around corners and try to interpret their body language and sniff out their pheromones. But none of that works! So, they decide to burst into Lily’s bedroom where they suspect she is hobbing on Brady’s knob. Luckily, though, they were wrong! The room appears to be empty and Lily and Brady are nowhere to be found. Miranda and Charlotte are just like, “Welp, I guess we will never know whether our kids are doing sex shenanigans together!” Which can’t be the end of this, right? RIGHT???
But also, TWIST! There was someone doing sex shenanigans in Lily’s bedroom! It was Anthony and Giuseppe, the cute gay Italian poet! See, they’ve been going on dates ever since Anthony forced Giuseppe to quit his job at the sexy bread delivery service and go on unemployment so that they could be gay lovers together. But Anthony has also been very uncharacteristically withholding sex because he believed that the only reason someone as hot and young as Giuseppe would date a crotchety old troll like himself was for a green card. Which, yeah, that doth have the ring of truth! But actually, it turns out Giuseppe has dual citizenship or something. He’s like, “Mamma mia! Mia mamma wasa born ina Boofalo!” Relieved and extremely horny once again, Anthony dragged Giuseppe into a teenager’s bedroom at a fancy political event so they could kiss and rub their boners together.
Good gord, this party was such a chaotic clusterfunk of other minor pointless “plot points” too, like how Harry thought that Victor Garber was sexually into Charlotte, but actually he’s only sexually into blondes, so that’s nothing to worry about I guess. One blonde that Victor Garber was maybe into was Carrie. They had an awkward pointless conversation where Carrie was like, “My husband John Big is dead!” Which maybe the point was just to raise the cursed specter of John Big YET AGAIN? Or maybe to further muddy the stupid waters about how John Big was a MISTAKE? Who knows! This show just throws so much chum out there and it is truly impossible to predict what is going to be consequential later and what is just there so that all of the 37 main characters and guest stars all have something to do!
One thing that is definitely going to be consequential is that Nicole Ari Parker is preggo now. That is why she was constantly falling asleep in her closet! The unborn foetus was foeating her from the inside and sucking the lifeblood energy out of her, and making her late for Harry’s party for President Christopher Jackson.
Ok, but so back to Carrie, our Caroine! The next day (?) is the day of her meeting with the former Mrs. Shaw, Rosemarie DeWitt, a white woman who got up that morning and decided to wear an obi. See, Rosemarie DeWitt-Shaw has read Carrie’s sad grief memoir and is like, “DO NOT write about my kids, you sociopath!” Which, it’s weird that literally no one in Carrie’s life has ever had this conversation with her before! Like, wouldn’t you think that at some point Miranda or Charlotte or Samantha or Aidan or John Big or any of the millions of men she’s slept with would have fully sued her for invasion of privacy or something? But no! They have all been content to let her exploit their personal lives and air all their dirty laundry for the general public’s entertainment all these years! (Oh! You know what would have made a great storyline? Since this show is all about bringing back old characters all the time, they should bring back Berger, who maybe wrote a whole novel about a character based on Carrie! And she has a whole crisis about someone writing about her for once and realizes what it’s been like for everyone else this whole time!)
Carrie is fine with Rosemarie DeWitt’s request though, because she’s barely a writer anymore anyway. She’s a homemaker now! She’s like, “Oh, by the way, I’m buying a huge new house for your ex-husband and children to live in with me! You’re cool with that, right?” And Rosemarie DeWitt is like, “Uuuugh, could you please not destroy my family’s life this time, exspecially our youngest baby boy who hates you and who we are kinda vaguely telegraphing might be on the spectrum or something without every actually saying it?” (Consequential plot point or random underexplored detail? Who knows!)
Also, it is definitely starting to get super weird how focused this show is on Aidan Shaw, a 60-something-year-old man, potentially “getting hurt.” He is an adult! Why is everyone constantly talking about him like he is one normal romantical disappointment away from perpetrating a mass shooting or something? (I mean, besides his bizarre obstinance about Carrie’s old apartment…)
It turns out, two episodes after he freaked out and almost abandoned Carrie on her stoop due to being traumatized by their past relationship, Aidan is sick of being treated like an abused rescue dog as well! Later when Carrie takes him to see the new house in Gramercy Park and tells him what Rosemarie DeWitt said, he’s like, “Actually, I’m emotionally mature now and can handle whatever bullshit you will inevitably throw my way as long as we never ever have to go into your old apartment.” So they kiss and Carrie sends him off to Virginia for the week or whatever.
Then, back at Carrie’s old stoop, she runs into Lisette, her 20-something it-girl downstairs neighbor who says she has to move out now due to the gay guys she sublets from wanting to move back in. (Wait, Carrie had gay downstairs neighbors? What is their story???) Oh! Lisette needs a new place to live and doesn’t want to leave their building? How convenient! You can see the gears turning beneath ol’ Bradshaw’s beret. She’s not selling that apartment! She is totally going to rent it to Lisette so that when the whole Aidan thing inevitably blows up in two episodes, she can evict poor Lisette and move right back there! I mean, that Gramercy house is never happening! There’s no way! If Carrie Bradshaw and Aidan Shawbrad live happily ever after in Gramercy Park I will eat my Gabriela Hearst cashmere blankie!