[Regarding the unforgivable tardiness of this week’s essential and highly anticipated recap: I am marooned in North Carolina—where politicians are apparently allowed to pretend to be Democrats and then turn Republican once they’re elected so they can ban abortion—and the electricity keeps going out! It’s just like Aidan’s old gross cabin! This is not the lifestyle to which I have become accustomed! Send help!]
This week on Season 4 of Sex and the City And Just Like That… Carrie is having some sort of dick-matized psychotic episode, while all her other white friends suddenly have jobs again! Plus! Peak Carrie Bradshaw real estate nonsense!
Carrie and Aidan Shaw have been spending weeks in bed doing straight sex in fancy hotels and ordering room service ever since he vowed never to return to her apartment because of how he can’t let go of and is still very traumatized by how much she broke his heart and ruined his life there. A wonderful foundation for their romantic and very believable reconnection!
He’s all showing off his dad bod, which reminds him that he is an actual dad to several chickens and three human males in Virginia. He’s like, “Hey, come meet my large adult sons and the chickens who lay eggs in their beds at my farmhouse!” And Carrie’s like, “Yes, that is a thing I am very interested in doing now!”
Eventually, Carrie leaves the bed so she can go have a fully manic episode about how in love she is with Aidan at lunch with Miranda and Charlotte and Seema. She’s like, “I googled his house in Norfolk and it looks exactly like Howard’s End!” And Seema is like, “Oh my god, you dizzy bitch, you googled houses in Norfolk England!”
Also, Carrie wants them all to have dinner with her and Aidan, but Seema is being suspiciously weird about it…
After lunch, Miranda decides she needs to walk Carrie home, because she is obviously having a psychotic break. You can tell because she is wearing a bathrobe and flats:
“Yo, Car-cinogen, do you think maybe you’re acting a little nuts re: Aidan Shaw?” Miranda asks.
But Carrie is like, “No! I’m having bonkers orgasms now so maybe I should have never married John Big and married Aidan instead!” (Wait, was John Big bad in bed??? That is how I am choosing to interpret these comments.)
Also, remember how in Season 1, Professor Karen Pittman (not in this episode at all!) got Miranda an internship with Human Rights Watch, but Miranda was like, “Fuck human rights! I’m going on a sexual journey with Che Diaz instead!” Well, now that she is a sexually confused single lady again, Miranda has begged Human Rights Watch to let her be an intern after all! Everything is going fine on her first day at work, until her boss is like, “Come to this important meeting while all the other interns who are 25 and have been here for years and years fetch coffee or something.” This makes the other interns jealous, so they hate Miranda now.
Meanwhile, Carrie visits Che Diaz at their new job at the dog pound, but they cannot go to lunch with her because they remain desperately poor and need to work through their lunch break to make extra cash. But instead of going and buying her destitute friend Che Diaz a salad or something (or soups, the food of the poor!), Carrie instead lays out this byzantine scheme: She and Aidan are spending too much of their combined millions of dollars on hotels, so they want to Airbnb Che’s Hudson Yards apartment to stay in when Aidan is in town. Also, Che Diaz can live there when Aidan is not in town and stay at Carrie’s apartment when he is. Absolute real estate nonsense! But Che Diaz is poor and is like “Ok, rich friend, you can pay my rent and I will just constantly rearrange my life and living situation to suit the whims of your ridiculous new relationship.”
At Big Gay Bread Company, Anthony is busily punching some dough, when Giuseppe, that sexy Italian poet who works for him now, comes in and is like, “Stopa beating upa that dough, you weirda angry man!” Then he starts doing a Ghost with Anthony, like he’s Patrick Swayze and Anthony is Demi Moore except they’re sexually kneading dough instead of sexually kneading clay or whatever. And Giuseppe is like, “Oh, BTW, I’ma gay bones.” So, Anthony immediately attempts to fire him, I guess because he’s too sexually incontinent to work with a hot young gay without constantly sexually harassing him. But firing someone for being gay is illegal (at least it is in New York, I think), and firing someone because you’re attracted to them is definitely illegal, and Giuseppe knows all this, and is like, “You willa be hearing froma mya lawyer.” So, Anthony un-fires him, and Giuseppe, a poet, poetically says, “Girl, take a chill pill!” What a way with language he has! Such felicity with words!
Like Miranda, Charlotte also has a job again. She is going to work in Victor Garber’s art gallery, but she has suddenly developed body dysmorphia due to believing that all the other gallerinas will be much younger and skinnier than her. So, she and Nicole Ari Parker go shopping for a new dress. They find one that Charlotte loves, but she thinks the belt that goes with it accentuates her alleged paunch. A helpful shopgirl brings her some other dresses to try on, but Charlotte is like, “Those are not dresses! They are tents, and I will not wear them, you absolute monster!”
Over in Hudson Yards, Carrie and Aidan arrive at Che Diaz’s apartment with some salads from Chop’d and discover that Che Diaz’s kitchen is basically empty. And they need tongs for their already tossed Chop’d salads for no reason! So they go shopping for all kinds of kitchen utensils and other stuff so that they can completely take over Che Diaz’s apartment and make it their own, which feels pretty weird and presumptuous if you ask me, but obviously this show is not interested in interrogating the entitled behavior of any of these people. Also, during this entire shopping scene, Carrie behaves in a manner that 1) continues to make me question her state of mind, 2) is possibly just a weirdly awkward performance of delight on the part of SJP, and/or 3) is maybe the show telegraphing that Carrie is trying way too hard to convince herself that this is all going great? But also, 4) that last one might be giving the show way too much credit.
Seema is also clearly disturbed by Carrie’s behavior. She’s at work busily ignoring Carrie’s texts about dinner with Aidan, when suddenly her real estate partner, John Glover, bursts in and foists a new client upon her! The new client is a famous Marvel movies director who enjoys doing Cecil B. DeMille cosplay and is also a heterosexual man. John Glover is like, “You can do sex with him!” And Seema is like, “Sure, fine, whatever.” To be continued on that, I guess.
Back at Human Rights Watch, Miranda still can’t get the other interns (there are three, total, including Miranda) to like her, even though she brought them garlic chip cookies or whatever. At lunch they text mean things about her to each other RIGHT IN FRONT OF HER! Then their pregnant boss comes in and is like “Great job on everything, Miranda! You’re the best intern ever and these other two are trash!” So, the other interns text additional even meaner things about her. Poor, poor over-qualified Miranda! (Although, why is she even doing this internship in the first place? Like, she pivoted from corporate law to human rights law, which I get is obviously a whole different type of law. But like…couldn’t she just get an actual job based on her very impressive resumé and decades of experience and probably tons of professional connections?)
Ok, so another thing about Aidan and Carrie staying at Che’s apartment is they have to pretend to be Che’s cousins because their neighbors frown upon people Airbnbing their apartments. (But probably not because Airbnbing exacerbates the city’s dire affordable housing crisis. They probably just don’t want randos in their fancy over-priced building.) Aidan however is very bad at remembering the fake names he keeps giving Che’s neighbors for no reason. He’s like “Hi we’re Brad and Janet and JimBob and BoJack,” all the time. They don’t know you, buddy! You could just tell them your real names!
The neighbors get suspicious and call Che to complain, so Che goes over to Hudson Yards and is like, “Wow, you completely remodeled my whole apartment without my permission, cool cool cool.” Also, Carrie and Aidan are so barfingly in love that Che’s like, “Why didn’t you two work out the first time?”
Carrie: “Because I made a mistake.” Sooooo… I guess that’s the show’s party line now? John Big = Mistake; Aidan Shaw = True Love?
Later, Seema is getting her hair washed at a salon, a thing wealthy people cannot be expected to do for themselves, when she realizes that Carrie is right next to her also getting all of her hairs washed. Seema is still being super weird about Carrie and Aidan, so she tries to sneak out of the salon. But Carrie spots her and is like, “What the hell is going on!”
Here is what is going on: Seema thinks that Carrie thinks that she can just bring Aidan along to stay at the fancy previously no-boys-allowed palazzo they’re renting in the Hamptons this summer. And she’s right! Carrie did think that! But Seema doesn’t want to feel like a third wheel all summer.
Seema: “You’re being so gross and unhinged about his dude, I don’t want to go to Hamptons with you any longer!” So, she got their deposit back so they wouldn’t have to waste thousands of dollars having a miserably awkward summer. SEEMA HAS CANCELED THE HAMPTONS STORYLINE!
Carrie, like the rest of us, is devastated! “I don’t care about wasting money!” she says, because of course she doesn’t! She’s renting and fully refurbishing auxiliary apartments all over town just to protect her whiny boyfriend’s fragile ego! But also she’s sad because Seema is pulling away from her and doesn’t want to be best friends anymore. (All of which is triggering my great Fire Island friendship freakout of 2023 again!!!)
So…WE ARE NOT GOING TO THE HAMPTONS!!! This fucking show FRAUDULENTLY teased us with the prospect of summertime fun girls trip episodes and has now MERCILESSLY snatched that away from us all! Someone call the Human Rights Watch interns! I think we have grounds for a class action lawsuit!!!
Giuseppe should probably also call the Human Rights Watch, because Anthony is still trying to fire him! Anthony is like “I cannot possibly be professional and not sexually harass you all the time if you continue to work here!” But instead of suing the pants off Anthony, Giuseppe quits so he can take the pants off him. Sexually. Because Giuseppe is gay for Anthony too! So, they kiss, and I guess that’s all fine.
Meanwhile, Charlotte, who has been starving herself on bone broth for weeks, squeezes herself into layers and layers and layers of Spanx and Skims for her first day of work. But when she gets to the Victor Garber Art Emporium, she is delighted to find that one of her coworkers is fat! (“Fat” is a neutral descriptor, not a derogatory term and should never be interpreted as such.) “Hooray! Fat women are allowed to exist in the world without feeling shame about their bodies and even have jobs instead of hiding in caves!” Charlotte thinks. And, cured of all her body image issues by this single interaction, she flushes all her Spanx down the toilet, causing a major plumbing issue for the gallery.
(I mean, on the other, less charitable hand, you could read this scene as Charlotte, an average size woman, realizing that she’s not as fat as her co-worker and gaining very problematic confidence because of that. Just saying…)
At Human Rights Watch again, Miranda continues to piss off the other interns, who are now becoming openly resentful towards her. “Well aren’t you little miss perfect, Miranda,” they snidely say to her. And she’s like, “No, I am a sexually confused alcoholic going through a divorce,” which is definitely TMI and inappropriate, but the interns just scurry away.
Then Miranda’s pregnant boss comes out and says that she wants Miranda, an intern, to fill in for her while she gets her baby extracted. “Oh no! The other interns will hate me more than ever now!” Miranda cries. But her boss is like, “Shut up, you’re more experienced and they’re just dumb interns.” So, now Miranda is the boss of Human Rights Watch, god help us all.
Cut to Miranda and Charlotte having dinner with Carrie and Aidan. Suddenly, Seema shows up just to put her cigarette out in Carrie’s dessert and smash a bottle of champagne in Aidan’s dumb face for RUINING OUR HAMPTONS STORYLINE!
Ugh! If only! No, actually she just joins everyone at dinner because she’s conveniently over her weirdness about Carrie and Aidan for no reason.
And finally, we find Carrie in her apartment grabbing her dusty old copy of Howard’s End to read on the way to Aidan’s house in Virginia, which will definitely not set up unrealistic expectations that will be disappointed when she gets there and meets all those chickens.