Find all of Back Row’s And Just Like That recaps here.
This season is eleven episodes long, which means we still have three to go. I am both enjoying it and feel like we will be released when it ends. Websites are already locked in SEO Hunger Games for “and just like that season 3” clicks and all the stories say that Max hasn’t confirmed a season three yet. (So, there, I saved you some clicks.)
Loading...
I’m optimistic for the rest of the season because the eighth episode is the first time in the entire reboot that Carrie has been happy. The show works better when she is happy. She’s less of a drag at lunch and more profligate with her spending (we’ll get to that garlic press). You know who else is looking a lot more carefree? Aidan! He’s released himself from the belt of his Belstaff jacket and is wearing it open like a sane individual. Maybe this is partly why Carrie is so happy.
Here’s your character-by-character recap.
Carrie and Aidan
We open with Carrie and Aidan in bed at a hotel that looks way too mid-range for Seema but offers a room service menu with $26 omelettes Carrie likes. They talk about Carrie going to Aidan’s farm in Virginia and meeting his three sons, one of whom is named Wyatt. He lets slip that in addition to the kids, he has chickens! Not the kind you can rent in the Hamptons if you’re rich, but the kind he owns and really knows. He’s squints seductively at Carrie and lets slip a fun farm fact: one of the birds likes to saunter into the house and lay an egg on Wyatt’s bed every morning.
In this scene, Aidan is backlit and fuzzy and I get that it’s supposed to be DrEaMy but it also has the vibe of Carrie either dying or waking up from a concussion.
Carrie shares over lunch with the sisterhood that she actually kind of is dying in the good, Rachel Zoe sort of way because she’s having the best orgasms of her life. She’s in so deep with Aidan that she plans to visit him on the farm, she says. This is a big deal because she’s still traumatized by “that country shack he had upstate.” Carrie is so serious about this that she even looked up farms nearby and hands her phone to Seema so she can see how surprisingly chic at least one of them is. Seema looks at the phone for an eternity before telling Carrie that it’s not as chic as she thinks, she just happened to mistakenly tap farms in Norfolk, England.
Miranda and Carrie then walk outside and Carrie wears what looks like a big pink bathrobe. If this takes place roughly a month since the last episode, it’s March, which means it’s cold as hell, yet Carrie wears her coat open and I have no idea how Sarah Jessica Parker is pretending like this is easy and comfortable. Carrie asks Miranda if Big was a giant mistake, and Miranda says she doesn’t know how to answer the question which is another way of saying: yes girl, sorry!
Next Carrie goes to visit Che, manning the front desk at the vet like a normal person who never filmed a pilot. Carrie says she wants to rent Che’s place so she and Aidan have somewhere to do it when he’s in town since Aidan still won’t go to her apartment and they’re “spending a fortune” on hotels. This does not track with the Carrie who gave Enid $100,000 for a magazine, but as a committed And Just Like That viewer I have signed up for accepting such inconsistencies, so let’s move right along. Carrie adds that Che can stay at her place when Aidan’s in town and Che takes the deal.
We then see Carrie and Aidan going up to Che’s 18th floor apartment. Aidan wears the same Belstaff Trialmaster jacket but opened up like the doors to his farm in the mornings. Now we can all sleep better at night because this is how he is meant to wear it.
Carrie and Aidan have plenty of stuff with them — luggage (of course Carrie makes him carry a non-wheeling suitcase that looks like an oversized doll accessory) plus a huge bag of Chopt. But Aidan immediately decides that Che’s apartment doesn’t have essentials, including salad tongs and a pepper mill. Serious question: do people come home with their Chopt salads and reach instantly for tongs? The whole point of it being chopped/chopt is that you can stir it up and eat it with any utensil, including probably a butter knife.
This inspires a “we love having sex with each other” shopping spree at a Sur la Table sort of establishment, where Aidan reveals himself to be the kind of man who knows that a tiny cheese grater is for salt. They go back to the apartment with tongs, a pepper mill, and a $47 garlic press which is, shockingly, an actual thing. Aidan cooks chili and Carrie wears purple sweatpants (first purple pants mention) when Che shows up and, sensing the strong “we love having sex with each other” energy, asks why it didn’t work out the first time around. Carrie says it was because she made a horrible mistake.
Cut to Carrie and Seema at the hair salon, and Carrie learns that Seema canceled their Hamptons rental because she doesn’t want to be third wheel to Carrie and Aidan. Carrie acts devastated by this but it was frankly the right call. If Carrie actually liked the idea of sharing a house in the Hamptons, she and the gals would have done it successfully a few times on Sex and the City.
Aidan solidifies his boyfriend status by having dinner with the women and making them all laugh hysterically about his chicken, whom he apparently lifts into his kid’s bed to lay an egg. And Carrie really must be head over heels for this man because instead of regarding this the way she does his upstate house, she ends the episode by bounding off to rural Virginia. Do any Back Row readers have chickens? Can anyone shed light on what it would really be like to let them lay eggs your kid’s bed?
Miranda
In the first lunch scene, Miranda wears a sweater that was much better proportioned than the first sweater she wore in the previous episode, which looked like it eats humans. On her walk with Carrie, we notice that she wears purple slacks (second purple pants mention) that — Anna Wintour deep cut incoming — remind me of that scene in The September Issue where Anna says she doesn’t like the purple pants in Edward Enninful’s color-blocking photo shoot because “they look big.” Tap this to watch the clip:
Amy Odell on Instagram: “The news about Edward Enninful leaving his role as editor in chief of British Vogue has, as predicted, descended into messy gossip. Much of it centers on his and Anna’s allegedly “icy” relationship. My attitude about this is that she has an icy relationship with a lot of collaborators! She doesn’t lavish praise, she doesn’t approve things she thinks are wrong, she has a certain exacting standard for Vogue. We got a window into how she is at the office in the fantastic 2009 documentary The September Issue. I pulled this clip of her working with Edward on a color-blocking shoot that she ultimately killed. But it’s not like this kind of thing was unique to Edward. It was also fascinating to see the push-pull between her and Grace and ultimately how that led to the magazine producing beautiful work. #annawintour #vogue #edwardenninful #fashion #britishvogue I”June 5, 2023
Miranda paired them with fuchsia heels, which didn’t feel like the heels of someone who owns so many brown sweaters but were a fun statement nonetheless.
These days, Miranda is single and has time to be an intern at Human Rights Watch, where she works alongside Gen Zs who resent her. When they handed her a partially eaten garlic chocolate chip cookie I thought it was part of a scheme to sabotage her. Only, as their boss seems to know, they might not be smart enough for that? They are, however, bitter that they’re barely allowed to take notes in meetings while Miranda, who to be fair has thirty years in corporate law on her resumé, is trusted with such tasks right away.
During lunch, Miranda takes a seat at their table where she dresses her salad then shakes it in the container like genius Kardashian impersonator Yuri Lamasbella. (A salad hack for you, Aidan.) The Gen Zs regard her with disdain and seem to text about her while she’s sitting right next to them. It’s no matter, because their boss decides that Miranda should fill in for her on maternity leave. This was a nice turn of events for Miranda, who has always been such a work horse that it’s felt off to see her without a career. Plus, aside from some sexual encounters she seemed to enjoy and that stunning purple gown from the previous episode, not much else this season has really gone her way.
Charlotte
Charlotte tells her teen kids that she’s going back to work and they react somewhere between indifferent and pleased that she won’t be around so much. She wears a peculiar, badly layered outfit with a fuzzy hot pink sweater, pussy bow, and ruffled collar. Clearly she needs some better clothes, so enter the most confident of all dressers on this show, LTW. Wearing a purple dress with high purple boots (or boot pants? anyway, purple bottoms mention number three) and a yellow sweater over top, she accompanies Charlotte shopping. Trying on clothes, Charlotte is self-conscious about her figure. She buys a black dress with a skinny pink waist belt because she can’t help herself and just wear black, but also isn’t stylish enough to work with color like LTW. She digs out an old photo of herself that looks like an Instagram #ootd but from 1999. On her first day of work, she puts on a few pairs of shapewear, but then decides to throw them out at the gallery when she sees that her colleague is not thin and wears a crop top. That’s the Charlotte we know — willing to part with $250 worth of undergarments after wearing them for all of 40 minutes.
Seema
Seema finally had something to do aside from ride around in her brown car. Sure, this episode saw her at the hair salon again, but she also got to have two meals with the gals and… work in her office! The real estate partner she’s apparently had this whole time wants her to take a difficult film director client off his hands. He enters her office wearing a linen jacket with a tie wast and tells Seema that Marvel is paying for everything and she’ll earn a big commission. He pleads with her to take him, saying, “Show me where I want to live.” Seema clearly finds him handsome and says OK.
At the hair salon, Seema tells Carrie she can’t do the Hamptons rental with her and that she’s canceled it so that they don’t lose the deposit money. She can’t bear to be a third wheel to Carrie and Aidan. Carrie isn’t like, “You won’t be a third wheel!” Instead, she says she will only be a third wheel some of the time. Seema made the right call because that sounds uncomfortable for everyone. She tells Carrie that it’s been hard to see her with a boyfriend and that she needs space. Carrie acts like this is very sad for her but Seema assures her their friendship will be fine.
Apparently needing space equates to missing bread service at dinner. She shows up to the Aidan meal a little late looking insanely fantastic in a full-sequin black pantsuit which makes up for her silly white spa outfit with the huge fur collar from the previous episode.
Anthony
Anthony somehow has been running his bread business the past month with only Giuseppe delivering loaves. When he learns Giuseppe is gay (Giuseppe: “A straight poet? Come on.”) he tries to fire him rather than risk electric attraction to an employee. Giuseppe quits and kisses him, which would seem to put the bread business in jeopardy. Maybe before the season ends this show will have some storylines about how successful people can have satisfying relationships and jobs at the same time. If a show like Sex and the City can evolve into the woke bingo card that is And Just Like That, surely it can figure out how to give us, well, just that.
ncG1vNJzZmiZna68pbHLpWWsrZKowaKvymeaqKVfpXyiusNmoa6rpGK5qrfEZquhmaRiwKat0qilZmpdmr2qv86dnGZok2o%3D