AND JUST LIKE THAT: Carrie Gazes into the Abyss and the Abyss Gazes Back

You know what’s terrible for depression? THIS SHOW!

Oh, hey gang. Were you wondering what happened to me? Probably you were all really worried due to my unexplained absence from your inboxes this past Friday noontide-ish, so I guess I owe you an explanation? (Not that I want to set some kind of precedent for explaining myself…) Basically, I was too busy being depressed on a beach and didn’t have time to concern myself with Carrolina Bradshaw and whatever was going on with her in her life.

You know what’s terrible for depression? THIS SHOW! Like, not because of the supposedly “sad” things that happen to our heroines. No one cares about any of that! Nah, it’s because And Just Like That is so boring and dumb, and instead of being a frothy, comforting distraction like it’s supposed to be, all the unamusing pointlessness instead serves as a weekly reminder of, you know, the basic futility of living, the yawning void at the show’s center mirroring the yawning void within us all.

So, yeah, I had to go lie on a beach for two days and dwell in that. It was all very Joan Didon or Lana Del Rey or Bret Easton Ellis or something, except with less cocaine, and the cigarettes were illegal “Rainbow Rain” (whatever that means) flavored vapes.

Now, though, I’m no longer on a beach. I am at an airport and I’m CAFFEINATED! So, I should probably get busy repeating what happened most recently on And Just Like That to you finally. (It might take a while though, because there are a lot of hot dumbros at this airport and I keep getting distracted. By the dumbros obv, but also by existential despair.)

Carrie von Trappshaw and her two lowly goatherds.

Carrie arrived home from whatever the hell it is she does all the livelong day, which based on what she was wearing is maybe starring in a community theatre production of The Sound of Music. (Is it fashion, we ask ourselves? No, the deep well of sorrow within us answers back.) Where could her gangly cornpone love Aidan Shaw be? she wondered. Probably in the back garden being all passive aggressively friendly with Duncworm, the darkness within her answered. And the darkness within Carrie Bradshaw was right (as the darkness within us all so often is).

Aidan Shaw was out there like, “Hey, Duncbro, wanna compare weenuses so you can see how much bigger mine is than yours?”

Duncan: “What what, cheerio,” *smokes pipe due to Margaret Thatcher for some reason* “Do tell me more about those smashing Chippendales male strippers you’re so fond of wanking off, pip pip, quite!”

Carrie: *gazes into the middle-distance lost in the self-constructed hell of her own thoughts and regrets*

Sadly, Carrie was unable to take to her bed for the blessed self-nullification of a depression nap because she had to go have sushi at Seema’s new office.

“I’m starting to think getting into an all-consuming, probably grief-fueled relationship with a man I have twice before broken up with and cheated on a million years ago with my dead husband John Big was a bad idea,” she said.

Seema, who unlike us hasn’t seen this all play out twice before, was probably just about to say something about how the grief stuff could be kinda interesting, thematically, and maybe we should have been exploring that all along, but she suddenly realized she had to run away across town for a meeting with Broseph McChoad, some sort of marketing man (not that it matters). That was unfortunate for her, and us, because her storyline continued to be all about how Carrie’s doofus Garden Gnome won’t let her wear deodorant. So, she was all sweaty when she got to the meeting, and Broseph McChoad was like, “Gwaaah! Girl, you smell ripe!” So, Seema had to run to the potty to fumigate herself.

[Deep within us, the darkness whispers, You still haven’t watched Adolescence. Or Pachinko…]

So, that was the whole of Seema’s “plot” for the week. As for everyone else, well… I mean, man, this episode really begged the question: Why even is anyone else on this show besides Carrie? Like, whoever wrote this one barely tried with the other characters’ “storylines.” I mean, just do a Carrie-and-Aidan bottle episode or something, show!

Anyway, here are all the pointlessly perfunctory things that happened to the other four (?) main (???) characters:

Like Seema, they were all still suffering from the previous week’s storylines. For Charlotte that meant she still had vertigo. So, she and Harry Goldenblatt just stumbled around their bedroom and talked about his swollen balls and catheter from his prostate cancer surgery.

Miranda, meanwhile, had to come clean to Dolly Wells about throwing her beloved priceless gin down her garbage hole due to being an alcoholic. But Dolly Wells was like, “Meh, whatever,” so, that all turned out fine for them.

Over at PBS, Nicole Ari Parker was continuing to try to do a career while her husband, President Christopher Jackson, was trying to lose weight and kept yelling at her and everybody else about it. “Just go on Ozempic!” she responsibly yelled back, and that was that.

HBO Maximum didn’t even bother putting out photos of anyone else so here’s Patti LuPone and some mouthy gay.

As for Anthony, who the show keeps failing to make us care about at all, he was having dinner in his weirdly sad little kitchen all alone with Patti LuPone for some reason, when suddenly she tried to murder him. Tragically, she failed.

[I hear the new Lena Dunham show is pretty good, the darkness inside whispers. Or maybe it’s time you finally watched The Wire. Or The West Wing. You could even just rewatch Fleabag…]

That night, in Dunco Baggins’ hobbit hole, Carrie was just telling him that he hadn’t written enough in his Maggie Thatcher biography about all the shoe shopping she probably did whilst trying to dismantle Britain’s social safety net, when Aidan Shaw burst in and tried to force them to eat steaks, the most virle of foodstuffs, with him. Duncan blanched at the sight of Aidan Shaw brandishing his quivering meat and said he would content himself with a basin of gruel by the fireside instead, while Carrie cattle-prodded her man back upstairs.

Aidan Shaw was still all pissy later when Carrie tried to crawl into bed with him, reeking of Duncan’s pipe weed. “I can still smell that no-good English bastard on yah,” he cried. “Git ye to the shower, woman, and don’t come lookin for no lovin tiln’ ya done scrubbed the filth offa yuh!” So, Carrie pouted on off to Shoe-the-Cat’s room, where she spent a sleepless night pondering the crushing pointlessness of trying to be known by another person.

The next morning, Aidan Shaw was cheerfully making breakfast in an effort to ignore the fact that all our hopes and dreams and earthly good works will inevitably fail and wither before our eyes. Carrie, however, had turned her disgust with herself and the meaninglessness of existence outward, and raged at him for not being able to cure the persistent desolation within her.

“I TOLD YOU NEVER EVER TO SPEAK TO THE MAN WHO LIVES IN THE SAME HOUSE THAT I KEEP INSISTING WE BOTH LIVE IN!” she raged, ragefully, at Aidan.

Then she was like, “Probably you think I’m having straight sex with him, which I’m for real totally not and have definitely never thought about doing.”

But before I could bother to pay attention to anything Aidan Shaw said, Carrie stormed out of there to go shoe shopping (just like Maggot Thatchroof!), and the whole “point” of that was just so that Andy Cohen could breeze through the show for two seconds because I guess Michael Patrick King et. al. think we care that he was an extra in Sex and the City one time.

[Andy Cohen is one of MINE, the emptiness within us whispers…]

Later, Carrie met Aidan at some restaurant and they said some things at each other about past and present tense verbs, which is what cis straight people do now because they’re so jealous that trans and nonbinary people get pronouns. Once they’d conjugated their grievances, they broke up due to realizing that what should have been an ill-advised but fun middle age fling had turned into a stupid clusterfuck of them being simultaneously in completely different places in their lives and also somehow still playing out the same dumb patterns they always have. WHO COULD HAVE SEEN THAT COMING?

[Deep well of despair: *smirks smugly*]

What is the present participle of “fart noise”?

Then Carrie put some brooches under her boobs (see image above) and went to dinner with the rest of the cast, narrating her terrible book into the sucking chasm of loneliness insider herself.

See you in two days (maybe) for more fun good times!