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As has been Michael Patrick King’s wont throughout the third and final season of And Just Like That…, there have been a lot of callbacks to previous scenarios in Sex and the City. Whether this is truly intentional or not—or just a matter of not “remembering” the similarities (like not remembering that Lisa Todd Wexley’s [Nicole Ari Parker] dad had already died in season one)—the fact remains that the overall effect makes it seem less “calculated” and more like King and co. were out of truly fresh ideas.
With the supposed final chapter on Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker) closing (though, based on past occurrences, viewers know that Bradshaw always has a tendency to “reanimate”), her conclusion is not only somewhat forced—a means to repair the ending that she was given for the series finale of Sex and the City—but also a redux of SATC’s season five episode, “Anchors Away.” In it, the running motif is based on something Charlotte York (Kristin Davis) tells her friends, including Miranda Hobbes (Cynthia Nixon) and Samantha Jones (Kim Cattrall): “Everyone knows you only get two great loves in your life.” She then spells out, without thinking, that Big (Chris Noth) and Aidan (John Corbett) were Carrie’s, leaving her somewhat flummoxed about what that’s supposed to mean for her romantic future. However, another running theme, one that’s always been there in this particular show, is that the city of New York is her great love. Or, as she cheesily puts it to the others, “You’re never alone in New York, it’s the perfect place to be single. The city is your date.”
That doesn’t mean the city still won’t make you feel like shit for being “alone,” as it does when Carrie, in her bid to have a little date with herself, de facto New York, ends up caught in a rainstorm after realizing the Guggenheim is closed on the day she wants to visit it (so much for being a seasoned New Yorker). Even though, at present, the Guggenheim is open seven days a week. In any case, as a result of the closure and bad weather, she’s led to Café Edison (another now defunct NYC institution); never mind that, geographically speaking, it wouldn’t have been possible for her to just “stumble into it” a few blocks from the Guggenheim, seeing as how it was about a forty-five minute walk to do so (Carrie instead describes it as a mere “several wet blocks later”). But then, SATC has never prided itself on a sense of realism—so how could anyone have expected that And Just Like That… would?
However, one thing that both shows undeniably have in common is parading the question that King brought up on Kristin Davis’ Are You a Charlotte? podcast, the question that has been at the core of the narrative from its inception: “Am I enough? Am I enough alone?” In “Anchors Away,” it seems as though, for Carrie, the answer is still no. In fact, she’s disturbed from the outset by her experience at Café Edison, when the proprietor barks, “Singles at the counter!” Carrie tries to push back with, “Oh, I was hoping to get a table—” “Singles, counter!”
At said seating arrangement, Carrie is further horrified by a glimpse into her future via the other woman at the “singles counter,” Joan (played by Sylvia Miles, a New York fixture until her death in 2019), who begins gabbing with her immediately. Taking a shine to Carrie because she sees something of herself in this person, Joan announces of the singles counter at the café, “We single gals gotta have a port in the storm, am I right?” Carrie doesn’t look so convinced of that being true as she observes Joan crushing some white powder on her plate. Joan explains, “Lithium. I like to sprinkle it on my ice cream. You ever try it?” Carrie says she hasn’t and, when further questioned by Joan about what “mood elevator” Carrie is on, the latter tells Joan she isn’t “on” anything. Joan smiles, saying she used to be like Carrie until she broke up with some guy named Morty in ‘82, adding, “Thought somebody better would come along. Never happened.” Obviously, Carrie feels the sting of that comment, having recently ended things with Aidan for what was then the second time.
What’s more, the question of the week for her column is whether or not, “when it comes to being carefree single girls, have we missed the boat?” For Carrie, the idea of losing her ability to be single without judgment a.k.a. being single while also being “of a certain age” is what scares her the most. More than being single itself. Which is why, later, at the Navy party (with Fleet Week also being a through-line of the episode), Carrie takes a look around at the goings-on—including Charlotte flashing a tit to one of the Navy officers—and realizes this kind of scene isn’t for her anymore, informing Samantha, “I was right. This ship has sailed. And, tragically, I’m still on it.”
In the so-called final episode of And Just Like That…, “Party of One,” Carrie is met with a similar feeling in the opening scene, which itself echoes the one when she’s at the “singles counter” with Joan. Only instead of having a live “seat mate” this time, And Just Like That… aims to show just how far Carrie has been thrust into the future—apart from the robot servers and digital menus—with a Tommy Tomato stuffed toy (sure to become a real thing after this…then again, maybe not). This is the “creature” she ends up sitting across from at the restaurant. Of which she tells the host, “I was walking by. It looked so interesting.” A comment that sounds borderline racist in that an Asian restaurant would be described as “interesting” to her at this juncture of her existence in NYC. Or the fact that, also at this juncture, she should be surprised by a menu presented to her on an iPad, where she selects the items she wants via the screen. Treating it as though she’s never seen one before at another restaurant, Carrie goes through a whole “I’m so naïve” bit before the host that seated her presents her with the abovementioned Tommy Tomato, beaming at Carrie as she explains, “You don’t have to eat alone.”
This time, she’s even more horrified/affronted than she was when she got saddled with Joan at the singles counter. And also this time, the geography of where Carrie ends up eating totally doesn’t match the reality of where she would be. For the location it’s shot at, Haidilao Huoguo, is in Flushing. Oh sure, Queens might have come up in the world, but definitely not to the point where Carrie Bradshaw would fuck with it on a whim. Though that isn’t to say she wouldn’t shlep to the Brooklyn Botanical Garden, which is where it looks like she, Charlotte, Lisa and Seema (Sarita Choudhury) are when they attend a bridal fashion show. Before entering said show, Carrie recounts what happened to her: “Ladies, they put a boy doll across from anyone eating alone.” Not exactly great publicity for Haidilao Huoguo, but oh well.
What’s more, gone are the days when, as in the season two episode, “They Shoot Single People, Don’t They?,” the relative “lack of technology” didn’t make such an experience feel all the more sad and bleak. And yes, at the end of said episode, Carrie has the same epiphany about an “okayness” with potentially being alone forever, delivering the voiceover, “Instead of running away from the idea of a life alone, I’d better sit down and take that fear to lunch.” She does just that, and, since phones weren’t pervasive in 1999, when the episode aired, she didn’t even have that as a crutch for sitting alone at a restaurant either, proudly declaring, “So I sat there and had a glass of wine…alone. No books, no man, no friends, no armor, no faking.”
This constant exploration of what it would mean to be truly alone, perennially single is the North Star of the SATC universe (in addition to the four friends being each other’s true soul mates). Coming up repeatedly every time Carrie found herself, yet again, in the position of being an “old maid” (another trope that arises in the season five episode, “Luck Be An Old Lady”). In AJLT, with the realization that both Big and Aidan, her “two great loves,” as Charlotte once put it, are no longer options—seeing as how Big is dead and Aidan is overused (which is really saying something considering how overused Big once seemed to be)—Carrie, for the first time, doesn’t appear as though she’s holding out hope for someone to be her “other half” in the future.
As she tells Charlotte during their “walk and talk” after the bridal fashion show, “Who will I be alone? Yes, I know I’ve lived alone a lot, but I’ve never lived alone without the thought that I wouldn’t be alone for long.” She then concludes, “I have to quit thinking: maybe a man. And start accepting: maybe just me.” Charlotte, of course, refuses to give credence to the idea that being single at Carrie’s age is acceptable (just as she refused to accept it back when they were all “spring chickens”). Or that it might be a genuine possibility, which is why she decides to invite Mark Kasabian (Victor Garber), the art gallery owner that employs her, to Thanksgiving at Miranda’s, hoping Carrie will see that there are, in fact, still plenty of non-jank fish in the sea. Even at “their age.”
Carrie, of course, isn’t having it, mainly because she’s never been even remotely attracted to nice guys (this, too, was part of why Aidan never really “did it” for her—granted, he showed himself to be a true asshole later on, which was, funnily enough, when she was most committed to the relationship). But Carrie isn’t so quick to get on board with Charlotte’s plucky attitude about “male prospects” for the future, with even Duncan Reeves (Jonathan Cake), the British bloke she finally slept with after a season of flirtatious energy, not panning out as a viable suitor.
All of which leads Carrie—and the viewer—back to what she had said at the end of the SATC series finale, “An American Girl in Paris (Part Deux)”: “The most exciting, challenging and significant relationship of all is the one you have with yourself.” As King reminded, “That was the sort of mission statement of Sex and the City. The interesting trick to it is Carrie then answered a phone call from a man who was coming to be with her [Mr. Big]. [But] it was always in my mind, ‘What happens if there’s no phone call?’ How strong of an individual do you have to be to make that same sentence when there’s no one on the horizon?” With Carrie adding to that sologamist line while answering Big’s phone call, “And if you find someone to love the ‘you’ you love, well, that’s just fabulous.”
But in And Just Like That…, with Big dead, Aidan insufferable and Carrie being “too old” to have as many options on the dating scene as before, it appears King saw the opportunity to give his ultimate main character the ending he wasn’t bold enough to back then. The ending he didn’t think viewers would accept back then: “The woman realized she was not alone. She was on her own.” This being the “dazzling prose” Carrie chooses to conclude her 1800s-era manuscript with, despite the recommendation her agent gives her about how this would be a tragedy, especially for the time period.
And yes, viewers would have been ready to accept this conclusion—if only it hadn’t all been delivered so poorly…and so randomly, to boot. Complete with the much talked about clogged/overflowing toilet scene, which has absolutely no relevance or use to the episode. It can’t even be argued that it offers “comic relief” value. It’s just full-stop disgusting and basically mirrors the belief that this entire series was a turd that kept floating up. Until now. For that was it, the end. Finito. No more. And, by playing the SATC theme song during the credits, it just goes to show that King and co. were fundamentally trying to signal that all they wanted was to do their best to give the original Sex and the City the ending they thought it deserved. The more “courageous” ending for Carrie. For, as King also told Davis on her podcast, SATC was always about “the anarchy of saying single people are enough, being single is enough.”
However, the way Carrie makes it look in these final scenes of AJLT, it doesn’t come across like that at all. Not even with the contrived musical selection of Barry White’s “You’re The First, The Last, My Everything” (which, by the way, is still much too easily associated with Ally McBeal—the eponymous character of said series, incidentally, ending up “alone” as well, perhaps proving it was more avant-garde in its day than SATC).
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Genna Rivieccio
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