Carrie Bradshaw’s time at Vogue might be one of Sex and the City’s most complicated and under-discussed eras. On one hand, there was the fantasy. (Getting paid $4 per word at Vogue, are you kidding me?!) But in exchange for a job “a million girls would kill for,” there was a catch: Carrie got her own version of Miranda Priestly in her fantastically frosty editor character, Enid Frick, who returns this week on And Just Like That.
Carrie and Enid have never quite seen eye to eye. Enid fancies herself a woman of great substance and has historically had little patience for Carrie’s sunny disposition—or for her “creative” takes on assignments. When Carrie was dating the venerated artist Aleksandr Petrovsky, Enid hated her even more for poaching an eligible, older man from her own vanishingly small dating pool. Years later, it seems little has changed.
Sometimes, people simply refuse to be won over, and Enid’s good graces are apparently as impenetrable as a diamond. Then again, this week is all about perspective. Whether it’s Charlotte and Harry working their way through his newly discovered “dry ejaculation” problem, Miranda weighing the implications of her increasingly boundaryless relationship with the endlessly villainous Che Diaz, or Carrie realizing that her relationship with Enid might never be anything more than transactional, the fourth episode of And Just Like That Season 2 has all the girls soul searching.
The fun begins this week when Carrie runs into Enid at a restaurant and boldly confronts her about snubbing her request for a blurb. All those years of (presumable) loyal freelancing service, and Carrie’s former boss still can’t cough up a generic compliment or two? (As Taylor Swift once said, quoting Katie Couric, quoting Madeleine Albright, “There’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help other women.”) As we eventually learn, Condé Nast let Enid go with a golden parachute years ago, and while she now runs a “wildly popular” newsletter called “Ask Enid,” she’s also working to launch a new magazine for older women called Vivant. (That’s apparently French for, “Yes, I’m over 40, but I’m not dead yet, goddamnit!”)
This is apparently where Carrie comes in. Enid, who keeps insisting they’re in the same age bracket, wants her old colleague to help get Vivant off the ground. At the same time, she’s adamant that if she blurbed Carrie’s book, she’d have to blurb “everyone’s” book.
Sarah Jessica Parker and Candice Bergen.
Craig Blakenhorn/Max“Doesn’t everybody have a book?” Carrie asks an instantly sour Enid, who bitterly replies, “Well I don’t.” Yup—nothing’s changed.
Carrie chews the moment over later on with her friend Seema, who encourages her to follow up with Enid and go tit-for-tat—or, more specifically, a blurb in exchange for a contribution to Vivant. This brings us to a party at Enid’s, where the guest list includes none other than Gloria Steinem. For Carrie, Enid has always been a bit of a puzzle. She can be brusque in some moments, but her refusal to indulge Carrie’s every editorial whim certainly beats the infantilization and eventual sexual harassment that Carrie faced from her male Vogue boss, Julian, in Sex and the City.
When Enid makes clear that all she wants is a donation from Carrie—and not even an article for Vivant—Carrie’s fantasy of a mutually respectful relationship with her mentor dissolves. She accepts the transactional reality, snaps a photo with Gloria Steinem, and proclaims, “And just like that Enid and I became PayPals.”
Also letting go? Miranda, whose return to New York is already causing chaos at home. Brady might’ve been the one to call his mom crying, but now he’s pretty fed up with both his parents and their strained attempt at temporary cohabitation. Steve has installed a punching bag in his bedroom, and things between him and Miranda are about as sore as you’d expect. As Miranda tells Carrie, “He’s not allowed to punch me in the face, and I’m not allowed to take up any more space than the couch.”
Once Brady gives his parents the ultimatum to figure their relationship out, Miranda joins Che—infamous homewrecker and newly minted sitcom star—at their new apartment, also in New York. It seems Miranda has (mostly) accepted Che’s secret ex-but-still-legally-married husband, Lyle (Oliver Hudson), but it’s unclear how happy she actually is about it. Last week, she seemed pretty fed up, and yet here we are again. (Maybe she’s reeling from the news that Brady will not be going to college in the fall—understandable.)
Gloria Steinem, Sarah Jessica Parker, and Candice Bergen.
Craig Blakenhorn/MaxChe manages to stage the beginnings of a threesome with Miranda and Lyle soon after revealing that they and Lyle once shared a girlfriend named “Janny.” Before long, however, Miranda backs out—hopefully because she realized that in this “threesome,” the only role left for her to play seemed to be kissing people’s backs while they ignored her. (She should give Charlotte a call; she has experience with this problem.) Seriously, though, how much longer will Miranda stand for this?!
Charlotte, meanwhile, finds herself in a very “take-charge” place this week when her husband, Harry, starts dry ejaculating. (It’s pretty much exactly what it sounds like.) This is devastating to Charlotte, who describes the orgasmic display of ejaculation as “like birthday and Hanukkah and Christmas all rolled into one.” Alternately, she also considers it “the confetti at a parade—like the finale fireworks on the Fourth of July.” (Finally, Kristin Davis’s comedic chops are getting their due.)
Things are looking dire at first, but then the doctor reveals that all Harry needs to do in order to start squirting again is strengthen his pelvic floor. In this week’s most exquisite moment, Charlotte teaches her husband to think of his penis like an elephant’s trunk and “slurp” the semen off the floor. Now that Carrie’s gotten her entire podcast staff laid off because she couldn’t bring herself to talk about vaginal dryness, I don’t want anyone telling me that Charlotte’s the prude ever again!
But Charlotte’s not just helping Harry get his groove back this week; she also receives an intriguing offer to work at an art gallery with Victor Garber, a new addition to the cast. It’s unclear what’ll come of their conversation, which unfolds just as Charlotte’s friend Lisa Todd-Wexley announces her husband’s candidacy for comptroller for him, in an effort to appease her judgmental father. But in the meantime, Harry does recover his mojo—and after only one groan-inducing “kugel”/“kegel” joke. Mazel tov!
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