From the very start of their disastrous love affair, it was obvious that Miranda Hobbes and Che Diaz were never going to work out. It’s not just because And Just Like That seems determined to humiliate Sex and the City’s most formidable redhead—or the fact that the first time they met, Miranda was yelling at Che for offering her 17-year-old son a toke.
The whole relationship package came loaded with red flags—from Che’s self-centered moodiness, to Miranda’s inability to grasp that while Che might be the first nonbinary person she’s ever met, they are not some kind of one-of-a-kind unicorn. With each passing episode of this season before their inevitable break-up, “Chiranda” proved more and more cinematically dysfunctional.
All of that said: Did Miranda really deserve to get brutally roasted like she did this week during Che’s first stand-up gig in months? As they say, all is fair in love and comedy.
All the girlies seem to be going through it this week: Seema is saying “I love you” to her new lover before she’s ready; Carrie is worried about her relationship with Aidan after his son gets in a serious accident; Charlotte is getting fed up with her family’s learned helplessness; and her friend Lisa Todd Wexley is struggling to decide how she wants to respond to a very inconvenient pregnancy. The August blues seem to be hitting everyone lately, and apparently even our TV characters can find no reprieve.
Not everything is going terribly for Miranda; at least, she’s crushing it at work. Then again, when is she not? While Miranda has always thrived in the office, it’s her personal life that tends to give her trouble.
Lately, she’s returned to an idea first broached in Sex and the City—that after break-ups, she tends to cut people out of her life. The insecurity starts when Carrie visits her ex-husband Steve’s new bar on Coney Island without her, and it only worsens after her friend and roommate Nya Wallace says she envies Miranda’s scorched-earth approach to break-ups. Suddenly, Miranda is questioning everything and also thinking about her long-gone ex, Skipper, whom she also cut out of her life post-split.
Determined to avoid repeating her past mistakes (and goaded by a diabolical Carrie, who insists that she come to a dinner where both Steve and Che will be in attendance) Miranda decides to turn over a new leaf by surprising Che at their comedy show. This is where the trouble begins.
“We were both kind of in the same place,” Che tells their audience on stage. “She was confused about everything, and I was confused about why I was fucking her.” It’s at this point that Miranda gets up and leaves—catching Che’s eye on her way out. When they meet up outside, however, things don’t exactly improve.
To Miranda, Che’s routine is an act of betrayal—a breach of the confidence that she believes their relationship should have provided. To Che, this argument only proves that Miranda never understood who they were or how they process their emotions. Ultimately, this is only further proof that these two were never going to work out long-term; after all, as this episode demonstrates, lawyers and stand-up comedians tend to have very different opinions about the value of discretion.
But let’s go back to Carrie for a minute. This week, she finds out that she won a dinner at home for 16, catered by a Michelin-starred chef. (You know, just a casual raffle win.) Given that she’s preparing to move to a palatial new apartment, Carrie decides to make this dinner a “Last Supper”of sorts for her old apartment, where she’s lived since the start of Sex and the City.
While Carrie might joke that she’s not sure she knows that many people she’d actually like to eat with, however, I still have to ask: Did two of them really need to be her best friend’s relatively recent exes? Was Bitsy von Muffling not available? Carrie can say that this is a Miranda problem and that she needs to get over it, but something tells me that if Miranda invited, say, Jack Berger, Carrie would be saying something to the effect of, “I’m sorry, I can’t, don’t hate me.”
Then again, Carrie has been emotionally inconveniencing people left and right lately. Beyond Miranda, there’s also Aidan’s 14-year-old son, Wyatt—who understandably doesn’t seem thrilled that his father is suddenly jetting off to New York to be with his new girlfriend every chance he gets.
So far, Aidan and Carrie have been pretty content to shrug off Wyatt’s displeasure, but things change at the end of this week’s installment, when Carrie receives a call from a sobbing Aidan. It turns out that after a fight with his mother, Wyatt hitch-hiked to Aidan’s farmhouse in Virginia, got drunk, stole his truck, and wrapped it around a tree. Suddenly, that carefree bliss Carrie and Aidan shared seems to have dried up.
Aidan is devastated that he was not there for his son, and as she listens to his cries, Carrie understandably worries that their relationship might be in trouble. Thankfully, the worst that could happen is that she winds up newly single in a gorgeous new apartment with an adorable kitten—so I honestly can’t say I’m too concerned. Maybe the next guy could have better taste in jackets!
Speaking of taste... Charlotte has apparently maintained a sharp eye for good art, even after decades away from her work as an art gallery director. This week, she manages to sell a canvas to Sam Smith—but not before her kids call her roughly one million times with distracting, trivial problems like forgotten notebooks. As chill as the York Goldenblatt family initially seemed about its matriarch returning to work, they’re a little more dependent than they thought.
And Just Like That Season 2 has been a comedic showcase for Kristin Davis, and this week continues that proud tradition as Charlotte blows off her family for drinks with work colleagues, throws her phone in a margarita pitcher, and reminds herself who she really is. When she finally stumbles home looking properly disheveled, Charlotte reminds her family, “I was a person before you—I was a person before all of you!” Fed up with each and every useless human member of her family, Charlotte locks herself in her room with only the family dog, Richard Burton. (Natch.) And honestly? Good for her. These kids just don’t understand how good they have it—and yes, I’m including Harry in that statement.
Like her put-upon friend Charlotte, Lisa Todd Wexley is also annoyed with her family this week—specifically, her husband Herbert, who tends to prize his career over hers. As unintentional as these slights are, they’ve fostered a passive aggressive streak in the relationship, which tends to flare up every time Lisa feels sidelined.
As we found out last week, Lisa is pregnant—and given how close she is to getting her PBS documentary off the ground, she’s not thrilled about the timing. She’s also furious at Herbert, whom she begged to have a vasectomy after the birth of their third child. (As he explains, he put it off and then forgot to have the procedure because Lisa had postpartum depression and he wasn’t sure how serious she was.)
In spite of all this, Lisa also insists this week that she “can’t” have an abortion for reasons she doesn’t specify. Hopefully we delve into this a little more in future episodes, but in the absence of further context, this decision is a bit of a disappointment. Plenty of pregnant women choose not to have abortions, but Lisa also seems miserable at the prospect of having a baby and has no immediately obvious reason (religious or otherwise) to oppose abortion. In the absence of any clear reasoning, stigma stands to fill in the blanks.
Elsewhere in Manhattan, Anthony might soon be forced to confront a little stigma himself—specifically, his refusal to bottom. When pressed by his extremely hot Italian lover, Giuseppe, for a reason, Anthony finally blurts out, “I’m not the woman, okay?” Giuseppe—reliable deliverer of such wise quotes as “five dinners with no dick is, um, how do you say, not very gay”—quickly counters that he cannot comprehend why Anthony would object to “more love.”
When Carrie tells Anthony that his ex-husband, Stanford, has given up all his worldly possessions to become a monk in Japan, Anthony decides that he, too, might be ready to start letting go of things that do not serve him—starting with his refusal to be penetrated. Could Anthony be on his way to finding spiritual enlightenment? Honestly, probably not. Then again, a good orgasm is nothing to scoff at, either.
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