The Season 2 promo photo for And Just Like That featured a “Last Supper” homage, with Carrie Bradshaw as our lord and savior, her closest friends, Miranda and Charlotte, at her side, and the extended cast fanning out from there.
Ironically, the series ended last night after the third season with a last supper, Thanksgiving, but instead of being a whole cast get-together, it was a small, chaotic, literal s--t show.
Carrie leaves Miranda kissing her girlfriend on the floor of her flooded “powder room,” goes home alone to her Gramercy Park mansion, and dances to Barry White. There’s nothing wrong with this final image, except that, in the entire episode, the last time we’re ever seeing our Sex in the City girls, the three main characters do not share a scene.
Carrie sees each of her friends at least once during the last episode, and there are several permutations with the other side characters: Seema and LTW join Charlotte and Carrie for a bridal fashion show for some reason no one cares about, Carrie and Miranda spend most of Thanksgiving together, and even Anthony gets the afterthought of a plotline yet again.
Why couldn’t Carrie, Miranda, and Charlotte interact even once this whole episode? There’s no way this was meant to be the series finale, no matter what Michael Patrick King says. Someday the truth will out, but, for now, we can mourn what could have been.
The series reboot needed to end more like the original. The main cast needed to be seated around a table. At minimum, it could have been at the Thanksgiving dinner. The best case scenario would have the three main characters alone at a table in some hot NYC brunch spot the next morning. I would have accepted Seema and LTW along for the ride. But it needed to be the friends, not the various main characters scattered to the corners of Manhattan with their lovers and spouses.
The promo for Season 3 featured the main lady characters marching across the street, which is in fact reminiscent of one of the final images of the original series: the four women (Samantha included), arm in arm, laughing and chatting as they take up the entire sidewalk. The original show ends with Carrie alone, walking down the street until she fades into the crowd.
Via voiceover, Carrie says, “The most exciting, challenging and significant relationship of all is the one you have with yourself. And if you can find someone to love the you that you love, well, that’s just fabulous.” She’s referring to Big, but it’s implied that the girlfriends love the Carrie that she is, as well.
Meanwhile, the AJLT finale ends with the horrible “Woman” protagonist of Carrie’s novel. Carrie’s voiceover says, “The Woman realized she wasn’t alone. She was on her own.” Any self respecting Les Misérables fan knows that “On My Own” is the anthem for pining, and the line, like much of the show, lacked the skillful prose of the original.
Alone and “on her own” are synonymous, and both are okay, when referring to being in a romantic relationship. But Carrie is not alone in the world nor is she on her own in life.
Hey, it’s fine for Carrie to be single at the end of the series. I think that is the right move. But she, and we, needed the moment of connection with her friends to remind us what the SATC universe is really about.
Throughout the original series, movies, and reboot, Carrie has been a flawed protagonist, something SJP has been increasingly defensive about in interviews. However, her most redeeming quality isn’t her ability to thrive on her own (with a ton of inherited wealth). It’s that, even though she often fails, she tries to be a good friend. Carrie spends a chunk of the last AJLT delivering pies all over the city to her people, never lingering more than a second, as if she couldn’t care less about her friends’ little dramas. Her good deed is only a gesture, and it feels like an obligation.
In Season 4, Episode 1 of the original series, after Carrie bemoans being single on her 35th birthday, Charlotte says, “Maybe we can be each others’ soulmates.”
The success of Sex in the City isn’t because of the raw look at the sex lives of thirty-somethings. It wasn’t because of the beautiful clothes. It certainly wasn’t because of the strength of Big and Carrie’s relationship, or any of the other characters’ romantic entanglements. The four women on the original series showed a (mostly) positive example of what it means to be there for your friends. Through breakups, marriages, cancer, miscarriage, babies, divorce, being left at the altar, Dubai, and getting a diaphragm stuck, they listened to each other, offered advice, and gave a literal helping hand (Samantha really was the best of them).
On a personal note, I am “the demographic” that idolized the original series. I was younger than the main characters and much of my early ideas about relationships were shaped by the show. Though I am a Charlotte, Miranda rising, I had a similar trajectory to Carrie.
When I, like Carrie, became suddenly single (mine didn’t die on a Peloton, though…), it wasn’t the “next guy” who saved me. It wasn’t even me pulling myself up from my bootstraps. It was my friends. Those same women who watched DVDs of SATC with me in college showed up and helped me deal. When I couldn’t rely on myself alone, they were there.
Like Carrie, when I’m home alone—I mean on my own—I can turn on music as loud as I want, stomp around in my heels, and eat pie with a spoon (I don’t). I like having my own space. As Carrie said in the Sex and the City finale, my relationship with myself is significant. But, what the Carrie of And Just Like That seems to have forgotten, but what I never will, is that, no, I’m neither alone nor on my own, so long as I have and am a good friend.
