'And Just Like That' Season 2 Episode 10 Recap: Is Carrie Just a Huge Jerk?
Who cares about other people's feelings when there's a dinner party to throw?
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This episode wanted to be about balancing the pressures of middle age, both personal and professional, with children. However, the episode was really about how Carrie can be a huge jerk.
We see Charlotte, LTW, Aidan, and Miranda all try to figure out how to come to a new normal with their families. Meanwhile, Carrie is mostly left to eat zucchini chips, decorate her apartment, and ignore her everyone’s problems but her own. Here’s your character-by-character recap of the season’s penultimate episode.
Carrie
How could Carrie Bradshaw have moved to New York City when she was 21 and never visited Coney Island? People who move to New York City when they’re young and not tired do all the things. They go to different boroughs to try the place that New York magazine says has the best dumplings/pizza/tacos/whatever in the city. They take the ferry to Governor’s Island in the middle of the summer and sit there on a blanket all day drinking wine out of a box. They take the Metro North to the Botanical Gardens to see the cherry blossoms and maybe also to drink wine out of a box. They go to Coney Island to eat a hot dog or play a carnival game or even just sit on the beach with – that’s right – wine in a box. What kind of newspaper writer occupies such a bubble of striving, such a vacuum of curiosity, that they never go to Coney Island?!
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Carrie visits Coney Island for the first time with Aidan because his bestie Steve is taking over a hot dog-and-clam stand there. She wears a sparkly jacket and another pair of purple pants, while Steve wears big purple gloves (for cleaning) that don’t look entirely dissimilar to the ones we’ve already seen on LTW (for sashaying). Carrie flirtatiously asks, “Steve, how did you ever find this place?” As though Coney Island is a top-secret spot that has never been featured on the cover of a Cyndi Lauper album and in a Beyoncé music video, among myriad other iconic works of pop culture. Steve says he used to come out here when things were bad with Miranda to clear his head. One day he was sitting on his favorite bench, looking out to sea, when he turned around and saw the hot dog stand and realized he needed to do something new, just to make himself happy, and “fuck all that bougie Brooklyn bullshit.” Fine, but he clearly likes all the boujie Brooklyn bullshit if he’s a regular at Whole Foods and is willing to fight Miranda to keep their brownstone.
Over vegan brunch with the gals consisting of zucchini chips and mimosas, Carrie learns that she won a raffle at a school fundraiser to have a Michelin-starred chef come to her apartment to cook a dinner for 16 people. She decides to turn it into a goodbye party for her apartment, and leaves the restaurant wearing a mustard-yellow quilted coat with the proportions of a graduation gown.
If this show’s writers are going to wrap up at least one story line before the season finale next week, it’s Anthony and Stanford’s. Carrie calls Anthony to her apartment, where she wears pajamas and heels. She’s interrupted her busy schedule of decorating her new place and smelling her books to relay some information to Anthony about Stanford. Carrie tells Anthony that after a big fight with his TikTok client, Stanford fled to Kyoto where he became a Shinto monk. She says Stanford is giving Anthony all of his possessions, including the apartment.
Carrie really wants Aidan to go to her “last supper,” but he still refuses to go into her old apartment. In bed in their hotel room for the last time before Carrie moves into her new place, Aidan tries to make it seem like he’s at fault for not going into the apartment. He says something about how he hates that when they were together the last time, he tried to lock her down when she clearly wasn’t ready.
As he talks, he gets a call from Cathy, who says that their son Wyatt drove his truck into a tree, broke his collar bone, and is in the emergency room. Aidan catches a flight home, only to discover that Wyatt snuck out of his house, hitchhiked 30 miles to the farm, drank his dad’s beer, and then got in his truck and hit a tree, totaling the car and breaking not just his collar bone, but also his leg in two places. Aidan is beside himself, telling Carrie on the phone from his car that all Wyatt said he wanted was to sleep at his dad’s house, and that he should have been there. Carrie takes his call from her new, devastatingly cavernous apartment, and barely reacts to his anguish (arguably over-acted, but still). She just says, “Oh honey… breaks heal.” She may as well have been like, “Welp, these pillow aren’t gonna fluff themselves, good luck with all that!”
Charlotte
I had thought last week that Charlotte’s sophisticated art gallery job would mean fewer pouf sleeves and cheesy clothes and more boss-bitch suiting and clean necklines, but I was wrong. It seems that weekdays at the gallery are for black pouf sleeves and weekends at brunch are for Barbie pink. We see her in gallery wearing giant polka-dot poufers as she shows Sam Smith a six-figure painting. A coworker frantically summons her to a landline call from Rock, who left their earth science notebook at home. Charlotte calls Harry and says he has to bring the notebook to Rock at school because she’s selling art to Sam Smith. He’s annoyed that Charlotte has called him because he thinks that every time the phone rings, his father has died and because he’s in the middle of doing something with a brief. She points out that she’s run to the school herself a million times and it’s his turn. To his credit, Harry doesn’t need to hear anything more before he agrees to go.
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This idea that women can’t “have it all” could not feel more trite. That said, having kids, particularly young ones, plus a career is a struggle in a world that is conditioned to go to moms for everything. Charlotte’s storyline may indicate that women can’t have it all, but they can tell their families that they need to live – and then go live! Charlotte tells her kids to respect her brunch time with the ladies on the weekend because that’s something she needs after not seeing her friends all week. After she ends selling the painting to Sam Smith, her younger colleagues say that whenever one of them closes a sale that’s $100,000 or more, they all go out to drinks. She says no, she has to go home, but they insist, and before we know it Charlotte is at the bar with them taking shots like a Gen Z. When she gets another text, she drunkenly throws her phone into a pitcher of margaritas and lets it disappear with the dirty dishes.
Later, she stumbles into her apartment as drunk as she’s ever been on this show. Harry, Lily, and Rock are all, Where have you been? We need X, Y, Z – and A, B, C, D, E, F, and G! She informs them that she’s “slaying at work” and threw her phone into a pitcher of margaritas and has no idea where it is. Lily tells her she’s gross, and Charlotte sasses right back that she was “a person before all of you” and “more than your wife and mom.” This is not a revolutionary monologue on Charlotte’s particular kind of privileged motherhood, but made a point that a lot of women watching this show, who bottle up their micro-rage every time the school calls them at work instead of their partners, were probably happy to hear.
Miranda and Che
First, let’s get something out of the way: that purple-and-yellow coat was fabulous. I will not be debated on this point.
Second did anyone else find the plot line about Miranda being a bad person for ditching her exes to be as random as that Sam Smith cameo? Since when is this something unique to Miranda? And since when is it a bad thing to leave exes behind? Who says women have to stay friends with them or keep up with them or not resent them? Sure, you could argue that for the sake of shared children it makes sense to at least try to have a cordial relationship. But as for Che? Skipper? Why can’t she just move on?
Carrie is the first person to shame Miranda for how she treats her exes, pointing out that she hasn’t even seen Steve’s new Coney Island joint. This feels more like an “I went to Coney Island, look at me!” flex than something that merits genuine concern. After Miranda – wearing that incredible coat – meets a woman named Joy at the U.N. who has greyhounds instead of children, she arrives home to Nya’s apartment where Nya tells her she’s going to cut her ex off like Miranda does. Thusly shamed, Miranda decides to go to the comedy club to see Che’s standup with Carrie and Aidan. Che’s act is all about how terrible it was to be with Miranda, and, unsurprisingly, about as funny as an injured puppy. Miranda leaves, making eye contact with Che on the way out. Che runs out to catch Miranda, who’s all, “Where are all the jokes about what a mess you are?” Maybe she still loves them just a tiny bit because “jokes” is a pretty generous term.
As Miranda is humiliated, Carrie just sits in the booth with Aidan, having a grand old time. Why didn’t she rush out the door to check on Miranda? Isn’t Miranda her best and oldest friend? And isn’t Che someone she’s known for all of what, a couple of years at best?
Later, Miranda trepidatiously calls Carrie to say she can’t go to the last supper since Che is attending. This seems perfectly understandable, why should Miranda have to endure the discomfort of being around an ex who crafted a whole standup routine about how horrible she is just so that Carrie feels she and her apartment are properly feted? Does anyone really give a rat’s ass about that apartment except for Carrie? No, her friends are just going to be there for her. Yet instead of saying she understands, no big deal, the other night was rough, Carrie tells Miranda to grow up and go. Maybe if Miranda were a pair of shoes Carrie would treat her with more concern.
Seema
Seema tells Ravi she loves him during sex and he says, “I love you too.” She panics and runs over to Carrie’s apartment in her second full leopard look of the season. That first leopard look was one thing, but the idea that she has at least two outfits like this may be insane? Kind of like Carrie trudging to Widow Con in the Valentino Moncler puffer dress that may as well have been a giant suction cup. The clothes on this show are doing everything in their power to be even less practical than The Row’s $800 white satin ballet flats. Carrie tells Seema it’s OK, feel your feelings, etc. but quickly loses interest in her problem because the kitten adorably finds its way to a shoebox. And wouldn’t it be more fun to talk about what Carrie should do with this kitten than Seema’s emotional distress? Obvi!
LTW and Herbert
LTW is incredibly stressed out about the prospect of having a fourth child. She doesn’t know how she’s going to manage it with her career, and becomes furious with Herbert for not getting a vasectomy eight years ago when she asked him to. Herbert can’t do anything he’s asked, ranging from sending anniversary party invites to taking it upon himself to ensure they don’t have more children — after his wife has carried three of them. He admits he should have listened to her, and says that if anyone can do this, she can. But that’s the whole point — LTW doesn’t WANT to be saddled with more responsibility and she knows a man who can’t even send a Paperless Post certainly won’t be able to pick up the slack. Rather than say he’ll drop his dumb comptroller campaign, he asks if they should “be having the other discussion.” She says she is “grateful” to have that option, but can’t do it.
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Vogue’s Michelle Ruiz noted that she would terminate the pregnancy if she were this distressed about it, writing, “Not to overthink the sociopolitical implications of a Max reboot, but why is a show with its roots in going there dancing around not only the word but the topic, especially after Roe v. Wade was overturned and the right to abortion is so urgent?” LTW’s line about being “grateful” to have that option sounds less like something a woman would say in the privacy of her own bedroom than like something a lawyer or publicist added to the script so that anti-choice viewers — which surely make up a minority of the audience — don’t get mad. (Even though, as Ruiz notes, the original Sex and the City included frank discussion about abortion.)
LTW says she doesn’t want to have an abortion and, later in the episode, miscarries.
Anthony and Giuseppe
In a love scene featuring Anthony and Giuseppe, a long conversation ensues about how Anthony has never bottomed, which confuses Giuseppe who thinks that’s something they should both do. Whatever happens with Giuseppe, at least Anthony won’t have to fight Stanford for those Versace bedsheets.
Nya
Nya gets an invitation to Carrie’s last supper which means that, at long last, the writers are allowing her to leave her apartment for something other than buying a cookbook.
Again, I'm not watching the show, just reading recaps and following Twitter. Someone thankfully posted the terrible overreacting in the car crying scene, with Carrie barely concerned enough to say "oh honey, breaks heal".
I couldn't help but wonder, what did SJP think of that line? Surely, as a mom of three herself, she must have known how tone deaf it would come across. UNLESS Aiden will use this as an excuse to break up with Carrie for good: "my son was in a massive accident and all you could say is "breaks heal".
And the insistence of the writers making Carrie and Che friends for no reason is weird, but is probably because they needed to give Sara Ramirez something to do. Che and Miranda broke up, there was no reason for Che to attend Widow Con, no reason for Carrie to rent Che's apartment, no reason for Che to be at the Last Supper since they have NO CONNECTION to the old apartment.
Miranda’s wardrobe has been very good this season. That coat was the pinnacle.