"And Just Like That… Season 3 Finale: The Shocking Twist That Changes Everything – What It Means For Her Future Alone"
New York is strutting back onto the small screen like it owns the place — flashy, unpredictable, and a little bit messy. With And Just Like That powering through its third season, we’re revisiting a city and set of characters that somehow still manage to keep us guessing. But here’s the kicker: when Carrie Bradshaw wraps things up by dancing solo to a karaoke machine, are we celebrating her newfound freedom, or just left wondering if the scriptwriters forgot to invite the rest of the gang for a proper farewell? It’s a curious world where Carrie ends up alone, not because she should, but because the story raced there like a sprinter with no finish line in sight. Does a life well-lived as a single woman mean redefining love on your own terms, or simply resigning to solitary nights with oversized plushies as company? As the season stumbles between heartfelt moments and cringe-worthy chaos, it forces us to ask: can a show about friendship, love, and New York glamour survive when it loses its soul? Pull up a chair, grab some pie (maybe the whole tin), and let’s unpack the tangled mess that is this season’s rollercoaster.
New York is so back, baby. And Just Like That’s third season is in full swing, and Harper’s Bazaar will be recapping new episodes every Thursday. Read ahead to find out what happened this week, or click here to read last week’s recap.
So … that’s … it? The indefatigable Carrie Bradshaw says her final farewell by dancing by herself to a karaoke machine? My expectations weren’t very high, considering the events of the penultimate episode didn’t leave us much to work with for the 34 minute-long finale, but I had hoped and prayed that whatever ending we were dealt would feel close to satisfying for a character as dear to our hearts as Carrie. Well, I was wrong. They didn’t even give us one final scene with all the girls together—not even, at the very least, a shot of just Carrie with Miranda and Charlotte, and they owe us that much. I suppose the fracturing of Thanksgiving plans (who in their right mind would choose to wrap up the Sex and the City universe on a goddamn holiday episode?) had rendered one last girlfriend hangout all but impossible. The closest we got was Carrie, Seema, Charlotte, and Lisa inexplicably sitting front row at some bridal fashion show, a random placement in what has been a random tangled jumble of a season.
If that’s how they want to play, then fine. Let’s just get this out of the way: Carrie ends up alone. We all probably knew that Carrie was going to end up alone. And I don’t mind that Carrie ends up alone. In fact, I am one of those Sex and the City fans who think that Carrie should have never ended up with Big to begin with. My frustration lies more in the fact that this conclusion, this whirlwind emotional crescendo, feels unearned and rushed. It’s as though we sprinted from a one-night stand with Duncan to this grand philosophical epiphany on the state of single womanhood in the amount of time it would take Carrie to hail a cab. I wish we had arrived at this ending after a season that didn’t feature her dithering about over Aidan and his emotional baggage. What does it even look like for Carrie to live a fulfilling life as a single woman? Is it possible to live in a world where the Carrie Bradshaw chooses not to go on dates? It’s not enough for me to simply hear Carrie say that she’s on her own. I want her to show us.
All throughout the unsubtly-named “Party of One,” Carrie is assaulted with reminders of her perpetual singledom. The episode begins with her dining solo at a hot pot joint, where a well-intentioned waiter decides to leave an oversize plushie doll in the empty booth opposite Carrie. So she doesn’t have to eat alone. Duh. The doll is both insult and directive. For the first time in her life, she is beginning to come around to the idea of being by herself—full stop. She may have had stints of solo living before, but those moments were always buttressed by the expectation that she wouldn’t be alone by herself for too long. After Big had died and left her widowed, she wondered if maybe Aidan would fill his shoes, which is a totally normal and respectable thing to admit aloud if you’re as shameless as Carrie, I guess? Then, when the Aidan detour turned out to be fruitless, she had her sights set on Duncan, even as he told her that he would be leaving her and, promptly, left. “I have to quit thinking, maybe a man, and start accepting, maybe just me,” she tells Charlotte.
The admission depresses the hell out of Charlotte—a natural reaction for the ultimate husband girl—and she makes it her mission to reverse Carrie’s luck. Charlotte secretly invites Mark Kasabian to Miranda’s Thanksgiving festivities, intending to pull her matchmaking strings between her most fabulous friend and the world’s most boring art gallerist. There’s just one small wrinkle to her plan (besides the fact that Carrie adamantly does not like him): Charlotte forgets to uninvite Mark after she changes her own Thanksgiving plans, and he ends up spending the entire evening trying to cozy up to Carrie, who is in desperate need of a buffer. Luckily, the night ends with zero unwanted advances thanks to a series of very unfortunate plumbing predicaments that practically sends Mark scuttling out the door with his tail between his legs (more on that latter), his flirtations with Carrie all but forgotten. So Carrie comes home a single but changed woman, as if she finally understands that it’s her house and she can do damn well what she pleases. That means leaving her heels on and blasting music loudly and eating an entire tin of pie by herself. It also inspires her to rewrite the mediocre epilogue she had just written in the previous episode. Instead of The Woman attending a party for a handsome British widower, she will simply realize that she’s not actually “alone.” She’s just “on her own.” I’m not sure if that revelation is necessarily worthy of an entire epilogue, but I guess you could apply that logic to the entirety of And Just Like That too.
The most interesting thing that happened to Carrie in the finale was a conversation she had with Seema during the bridal fashion show. Things may still be hot and heavy for Seema and her blond granola hunk, but, after Adam proclaims his disdain for the institution of marriage, Seema isn’t so sure where their relationship is heading. Scratch that—she’s not even sure where she wants their relationship to go. Sure, she’s always dreamt of getting married since she was a little girl, but were those really her dreams or were they the product of a society that conditions little girls everywhere to aspire to be wives? Unfortunately for us, we never really get to arrive at a definitive conclusion for Seema, this premature series finale marking yet another victim forced to sprint to unwarranted finish lines. But, we at least get the inklings of a fascinating idea, proof that there could have been some real meat to this show if the writers’ room only had the verve to take a bite. At Seema’s request, Carrie provides some illuminating insight into why she herself chose marriage once upon a time: Marrying Big meant that she was chosen. Not that Big chose her, or that Carrie chose Big. Marriage was something Carrie could point at when she felt unwanted. I loved hearing these two contemplate a thoroughly modern question about relationships—is it okay to crave feeling chosen by your own partner, and is it your partner’s job to make you feel chosen?—and I only wish we could’ve heard more of it.
Despite the despicable lack of air time for that conversation, Seema gets an ending worthy of her. In other words, I think she winds up reasonably happy. Carrie confronts Adam while he’s working on her garden the morning of Thanksgiving, a task he doesn’t mind doing because, to him, Thanksgiving is just another Thursday. But Carrie wants to know if his apathy towards traditions extends towards her dear friend. Adam brushes her fears away. “Seema is definitely not just a Thursday,” he confirms. “She’s special. She’s a lifetime.”
The other romantic subplots are less gratifying. Anthony builds up the courage to tell Giuseppe he doesn’t want to get married just so he can be Giuseppe’s substitute mommy, to which Giuseppe responds by throwing a pie in his face (deserved). Charlotte, And Just Like That’s reliable comedic relief, finally gets to have sex again once Harry gets a surprise boner while she’s in the middle of basting their Thanksgiving turkey. And Lisa … oh where to begin with Lisa?
After dangling Lisa’s work crush in our faces all season long, that romantic aberration ended with less bang than a sneeze. Lisa gets an email informing her that Michelle Obama will consider narrating her docuseries, and Marion celebrates the victory by pulling her in for a too-long hug. When they part to look each other in the eye, it seems, for a millisecond, that Lisa is really about to jump his pants. Instead, she decides to put an end to her temptations by speaking them plainly. She’s married, and he’s married, and “whatever this is” can never “go anywhere outside of this edit bay.” Marion is surprisingly circumspect in his response, immediately bowing down to her wishes. He agrees that they will “work it out.” Except we literally never get to see them working it out. This was a missed opportunity for real emotional catharsis after so much sexual repression, and I’m a little more than peeved that we never got to meet Marion’s wife either, but whatever. What we get instead is Lisa coming home with a renewed sense of marital fidelity. Let’s put aside the fact that Herbert is still acting like a kicked dog, annoying the crap out of Lisa, who just wants her husband to put on some real big boy pants and go to work. But whether he’s in Tom Ford suits or sweatsuits, Lisa still chooses him, and she tells him as much. The sentiment is moving enough for Herbert to assure Lisa that he’ll get over this bump eventually. I get the sense that we’re supposed to assume their marriage will work out in the end because Herbert volunteers to clean up the dishes after Lisa spent all day laboring over Thanksgiving dinner. Woo! The bare minimum!
Speaking of missed opportunities, what a shame we didn’t see more of Steve before they pulled the proverbial plug on And Just Like That. I liked his coparenting dynamic with Miranda and it felt refreshing to witness former spouses capable of acting like old friends. Our very last Steve cameo comes during a dinner out at a Mexican restaurant, where he’s trying to suss out more information about the mother of his future grandchild from Miranda. “How can I put this nicely?” Miranda muses. “I’m afraid she might be an idiot.”
Mia’s presence at Thanksgiving goes about as well as you can expect. She pulls up to Miranda’s apartment with her rude Gen-Z friends, Silvio and Epcot, who take no time to immediately make themselves at home. Silvio turns Miranda’s Pottery Barn living room into a ballroom, and Epcot (his parents were Disney freaks) makes no effort to disguise his cheese plate-induced shits in the bathroom. It doesn’t help matters that Mia exclusively eats seaweed and brown rice, sending Brady on a mad rabbit dash through Chinatown to pick up some last-minute Thanksgiving additions.
Where is Miranda during all of this? At the vet with Joy, who had to cancel her RSVP at the last minute because of a dog emergency. At first, Miranda thinks Joy is trying to ghost her. She would have good reason to, as an admittedly anti-kids kind of gal who had a front-row seat to Brady’s temper tantrum last week. She eventually finds out that Joy really does have a dog emergency; Sappho swallowed a sharp object and had to undergo surgery. After comforting her crying girlfriend at the vet’s office, Miranda comes home to everything in shambles. The turkey is raw because Brady left Carrie in charge of the kitchen while he left to pick up Mia’s food. Mia’s friends are calling Miranda crazy to her face. And, for some godawful reason, Mark Kasabian is sitting on her couch. Brady loses it, using his mom as an emotional and verbal punching bag in front of everyone, and Mia, surprisingly, comes to Miranda’s defense. It’s a gesture that signals that Miranda will likely be in her grandkid’s life after all.
When the worst of the disasters seem to have been averted, a tsunami hits. And I mean a real stinker of a tsunami. Epcot’s lactose intolerant bathroom trips were apparently more than Miranda’s toilet pipes could handle, and Mark just happened to be the unlucky guy witnessing Epcot’s poos rising from the depths and over the toilet lid ledge. Reader, I screamed at the sight. It was nauseating. After Mark unceremoniously ran out the door, Miranda ended her Thanksgiving on her knees and in rubber gloves, wondering where she went so wrong. It’s at that moment when Joy walks through the doors. Miranda was there for her family, Joy says, so now Joy wants to return the favor. The romantic gesture moves Miranda to tears. The two embrace, Miranda wrapping her stanky toilet gloves all up and around Joy’s hair. True love.
And just like that, I need a break from television.
Post Comment