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And Just Like That … Recap: Back-to-Back Breakup Champ

Season 2 Episode 6 Editor’s Rating2 stars **

Photo: Craig Blankenhorn/MAX Is anyone else exhausted? Sometimes watching And Just Like That… — and, quite specifically, this time — can be like watching three different shows at once, tonally speaking. I mean, just cutting from the broad comedy of Charlotte traipsing through a snowpocalypse to procure her daughter condoms to an attempt to give Lisa Todd-Wexley a warm, empowering moment alone will give you whiplash, but then toss in the intense family drama that Miranda finds herself in this week, and I’m surprised we all weren’t vomiting from motion sickness. Or maybe you were! In which case, good for you, I get it. It’s not that any inpidual storyline was that bad (okay, the condoms thing made me want to punch a wall), but mixed together it was messy.

Let’s start with Miranda since what happens to her in this episode will surely set her on a new trajectory for the back half of the season. Miranda deals with breakups — two, to be exact. She’s been going a little crazy as she continues to spend her time running between Che’s place in Manhattan, her crash pad at Nya’s in Brooklyn, and still making stops at her sort of home to take care of Brady while not imposing too much on Steve, who still has not found a new place to live even after volunteering to move out during family therapy. Miranda still has a lot of guilt tied up with what she did to Steve and their family, and it only gets worse when while chatting with the girls about relationships with exes, Carrie spills what Steve said to her last season at the house painting volunteer day — that he’ll never take his ring off, that he’ll never move on from Miranda. Carrie tells Miranda this not to make her feel bad but to make sure she knows that if she wants to move this porce forward, if she wants Steve to move out of the house, it’s going to fall to Miranda to push a little. Or a lot. And so when she sees Steve next, she brings up his living situation and the man loses it on her. I’m not saying that we haven’t been headed toward a big Miranda/Steve confrontation for a while now, but the level of this outburst, in which Steve yells at Miranda for not even wanting Brady, felt like it came out of nowhere. The tension there may have been simmering for months to them, but it hasn’t been that long for us. And aside from that family therapy session, we really haven’t seen Steve much this season. It was hard to be emotionally invested in this explosion that felt so out of character.

Steve quickly apologizes once Miranda, who is beyond hurt by his accusations, and they wind up spooning in bed. A good-bye spoon, if you will. And just as Miranda brings up not wanting to hurt Steve more, she finds a condom wrapper on his nightstand. She goes off on him for making her believe him to be the victim, for acting so wounded when he had clearly already moved on (not that casual sex means healthy moving on, but okay). Steve then goes off about how he was never the victim, and I don’t know, friends, it all feels like the writers are trying a little too hard to get us back on Team Miranda. It’s not working — what she did last season was shitty. Anyway, I guess Miranda and Steve are done tip-toeing around one another and on their way to a real porce. Hooray for … someone, I guess. I just can’t figure out the winner here at the moment.

It’s not like Miranda is running into Che’s open arms, either. Che is still going through it since their pilot crashed and burned. It’s bleak, friends. Like, sitting around on the couch all day eating Pirate Booty in sweats, bleak. Wait a second, that actually sounds like my dream day? Maybe Miranda could get off Che’s jock for like one second? Not leaving the house and never talking to human beings face-to-face is like a totally acceptable way of life, mom — er, people. It is wild to me that the major fight between Che and Miranda in this episode kicks off because Che, with no TV show and no desire to do a set at a comedy club, has turned to doing Cameos in bed. Could Che … not just go into the living room and do late-night Cameo recordings there? They HAVE to do them from bed? Also, Miranda’s not wrong about the voice Che puts on while recording — it’s psychotic.

Things aren’t going well over at Che Pasa’s Casa, so when Carrie calls up her pal to ask them to act as moral support for her big gig at Widow Con — excuse me, the “Life After Death: A Widows’ Storytelling Event” — Che begrudgingly agrees, a little bit for Carrie, who does seem to genuinely care about showing up for her fellow widows, but mostly to prove to Miranda that they can leave the house.

When the snowpocalypse hits, Che, admirably, some might say, does try to get out of attending this event. I GUESS I can believe that since the Widow Con has been going on at the hotel for days it wouldn’t just be canceled for the snow, but I refuse to believe that Carrie Bradshaw, even clad in her Pierpaolo Piccioli Moncler coat dress (which seems like it would be more of a hindrance than anything), would walk any amount in this snow. And then! And then! The audacity to make us believe that she’d arrive looking as good as she does! If I walked even a block in that amount of snow and wind, I’d have mascara running down my face and two to four broken bones, okay? But not Carrie Bradshaw. Even though her opening joke bombs, she does ultimately give an emotional and successful reading of her memoir. The crowd eats it up. Che eats it up, too. Finally, someone has given Che some perspective on their situation, and all it took was a room full of women who have been devastated by the loss of the loves of their lives.

Che needs to be honest with themself and what they need in order to move forward, and they realize this deteriorating relationship with Miranda is just not it. When Miranda arrives at Che’s place post-Steve emotional rollercoaster, Che doesn’t hesitate to broach the subject: This isn’t working. Miranda doesn’t even put up a fight — she knows it, too. They are in different places in their lives and this situation they’re in isn’t just a rut. So, for the second time that day, Miranda participates in a good-bye spoon session. At least this one ends a little more amicably than the last? We’ll see what this breakup means for Che Diaz as a character on And Just Like That…, but what I’m more interested in is what this new freedom for Miranda means. Will we be getting some “Carrie and Miranda brave the dating world” content like the good old days? A girl can dream.

Other expeditions out in the snow are even less believable than Widow Con. Listen, I’m all for sex positivity, but in what world would a woman brave the storm and wander the streets of the Upper East Side in search of condoms to deliver to her teen daughter who has decided — and announced to her family — that she is going to lose her virginity? No woman, I’m sorry. This is on Lily! And if the big obstacle to these teens getting condoms is that Lily’s boyfriend doesn’t want to be recognized at the pharmacy, couldn’t Lily just go get the condoms? This entire situation is maddening. As much as Charlotte and Harry have revealed themselves to be the best part of season two, Lily has revealed herself to be the worst AJLT offspring. I appreciate her awareness that sex after Shake Shack might be a bad idea but otherwise, hard pass. Does Charlotte deserve some of Lily’s neuroses? Sure, but not to this extent. At the very least, the whole situation does give us some more big comedy moments from Kristin Davis. I will always treasure watching her yell, “Please! My daughter needs condoms!” at a man through a snowy pharmacy window.

All of these shenanigans, mind you, are going on while LTW is going to an event that has somehow not been postponed, celebrating her as a Black filmmaker and her film celebrating the work Black women have done while trying to break barriers in their respective fields. There’s a whole scene in which LTW, who has walked from her apartment carrying her wig box, puts her wig back on in the bathroom and tells another Black woman that “We’re not gonna let a little snow stop us, now are we?” It’s a great moment with a powerful sentiment, but then Charlotte is delivering condoms to her daughter and Che is calling Carrie’s opening act at Widow Con “the Don Rickles of Death,” and it’s like, what is this show? The tonal shifts are wild.

Speaking of wild, buckle up, babies: All the talk about relationships with your exes from earlier on gets Carrie thinking about Aidan Shaw, who, apparently, has been porced for five years now. After her time at Widow Con and being reminded that she is still alive, Carrie decides to send Aidan an email. “Hey stranger, remember me?” she writes. We already know John Corbett is set to appear, so it kind of takes the suspense out of the “will he respond?” of it all, but still: Prepare yourselves; Aidan Shaw is coming.

This and That

• In Carrie Bradshaw Remains the Worst: It feels so on-brand that she would just forget an old writing partner (now Widow Con event coordinator played by Rachel Dratch), even if said writing partner only lasted a brief time and the woman — formerly Karen, now Karrie, for reasons a little too late to be that funny — is a maniac (although, wouldn’t that make her more memorable?).

• Begging people to put Dratch in more things. She shows up for two scenes here and is such a breath of fresh air. We needed this wild energy!

• I couldn’t help but laugh during Carrie’s disastrous book tour Zoom with a social media influencer who clearly had no idea who she was and did not care one bit because haven’t we all had a Zoom in which we wished our computer just fell off our desk and crashed to the floor?

• Okay, but seriously, can Seema get more of a storyline than “books a house in the Hamptons for her and Carrie?” Not that I’m not looking forward to watching Carrie and Seema get up to no good on vacation — Seema’s poolside fits alone — but come on, we are just wasting Sarita Choudhury here, people.

• This goes for Nya, too, obviously. Her post-porce dating adventures would be just as, if not more, interesting than Miranda’s. Let her live!!

• Carrie having to replace her computer immediately makes me think about “My Motherboard, Myself,” one of the all-time great Sex and the City episodes.

• There are many reasons I don’t think I’d be friends with Carrie Bradshaw, but her being okay with never having seen 27 Dresses is toward the top of the list.

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