The devil works in mysterious ways and this May he has cursed us with a splashy new season of Sex and the City spinoff And Just Like That…, a show about large hats and the women who dare to live (and love!) beneath their swaying canopies. I’m here to recap the show, probably, depending on how many people read them because I require a lot of validation to move forward in life. That said, I will be breezing gently through the heterosexual parts and focusing intently on the gay parts, because life is short and love is love. By “love is love” I mean that gay love is more important than straight love.

When we last left our well-heeled fifty-something friends navigating life and love in the big city, they’d all been gathered around Carrie Bradshaw’s Last Supper Table to bid adieu to her legendary West Village apartment. The table itself boasted an impressive Wine Glass to Human Being ratio of 10:1, which was very distracting to me. Somebody needs to do more pre-bussing! Anyhow, those few Human Beings were all encouraged by Carrie to declare what they wanted to “let go” of. For example: “guilt” (Miranda) or  “expectations” (Carrie). If you’re sitting here in awe of my outstanding memory for recalling how last season ended, let go of that awe, I did not remember a thing! I just rewatched the finale so I could write this paragraph because I was not paying very close attention last season.

But as we now reunite with our well-heeled fifty-something friends navigating life and love in the big city, they’re all struggling with disrupted expectations and trying to negotiate a wide range of unexpected realities: cans of Sprite, wicker dog purses, small house fires, collectible dolls, and holding space for lyrics from Wicked.

But I’m getting ahead of myself! Let’s begin at the beginning.

And THIS is how straight people scissor

The dulcet tones of Chappell Roan lead us to a lesbian bar, where Miranda’s guzzling mocktails and lamenting to her her wildly out-of-place heterosexual wing-women, Charlotte and Carrie, that none of the young ladies and non-binary people at this establishment have approached her flirtatiously. This is an accurate depiction of lesbian bar behavior. It could be worse, though, she could be sending blank postcards to Aidan, like Carrie!

A vest-wearing twentysomething at the bar waving at Miranda turns out to be Brady’s old babysitter, Cassandra, rather than the potential love interest Miranda and her now-departed “friends” had assumed. Cassandra and Miranda catch up, briefly — Miranda’s sold the brownstone and is living in a West Village Air BnB while Brady and Steve enjoy #loftlife.

C’mon lemme just get my paws on those knockers

Sure why not?!

“Elephant in the room, I’m a lesbian now,” Miranda says in the deep voice of an imaginary lesbian. The erotic potential of Miranda hooking up with Brady’s old babysitter is thwarted by the babysitter having a girlfriend, but the night charges gamely forward, as nights are wont to do, and around the bend of Miranda’s tenth mocktail, once all the youths have gone home to lie in bed with their girlfriends and watch TikTok, Rosie O’Donnell shows up.

Hello it’s me, Rosie O’Donnell, star of The Flintstones

Get out of town, I LOVED The Flintstones

Rosie O’Donnell’s character is named Mary. She’s a kind woman from a small town outside of Winnipeg, wearing sensible shoes, in town for a week for the World Conference for Compassion For the Unhoused. Mary and Miranda immediately feel connected because Miranda works for Human Rights Watch, which means they both care about human beings besides themselves.

“You’re so pretty,” Mary tells Miranda with unbridled awe, an unfortunately not unfamiliar sentiment for a lesbian Rosie O’Donnell character. At least Tina Kennard had the good sense to echo that praise in the Lesbian Rosie O’Donnell Character’s direction, but Miranda simply laps it up like a cat bathing in a vat of 2% milk.

Mary says “I have a hotel room” and Miranda is like, “okay,” and I’m like OKAY! This is what happens when you are both closer to death than you are to birth, you just get down to business.

The next morning everybody has a nice post-coital glow.

Mary: “You are amazing. I have never experienced anything like that.”
Miranda: “Oh! This is a nice way to wake up.”
Mary: “No you are really, really something.”
Miranda: “I am?
Mary: “Oh my god yes? It felt so — I don’t know — electric? And yet still so natural. I never dreamed my first time could be both those things.”

I mean, it’s a couples trend, right? So when you take that and also think about the necklace….

We could be looking at a soft launch….

Miranda’s hope for a hookup with a nice woman at a bar who cares about human rights is becoming something else entirely, something incredibly important and pivotal for Mary — something perhaps she would’ve preferred for Mary to disclose ahead of time.

Miranda: “First time?… your first time with a woman?”
Mary: “This was my first time with anyone. I’m a virgin. Or, I was a virgin.”
Miranda: “You were a virgin?”
Mary: “Yes. I’m a nun!”
Miranda: “You’re a nun.”

Miranda, who obviously has not read Lesbian Nuns: Breaking the Silence or seen that L Word scene where the nuns bang on the bus, is for some reason not thrilled by the news that Mary is a nun.

I adore Sarita Choudhury and she deserves better than this episode but honestly, don’t we all. Seema’s storyline kicks off with her wearing a sexy outfit in bed, pissed that her boyfriend Ravi’s been too busy filming his cinema film for their FaceTime dates. She should send him a blank postcard! Instead she accidentally lights her hair on fire while smoking a cigarette.

Well after I soaked my hair in olive oil, I saran wrapped my head, lit a cigarette, and then went to the garage to get a drink from the garage fridge — and look at me now!

On an innocent walk through the park, Seema tells Carrie she demanded Ravi fly to New York to prove that he loves her. Carrie doesn’t need that kind of thing anymore because her and Aidan have grown and changed but more importantly, now she has this hat:

I don’t know either, mister, I found her sitting on the bank of a lazy river, singing “Big Yellow Taxi” to herself

Unfortunately, when Seema’s femme boyfriend does finally arrive in New York City, his behavior isn’t what Seema had hoped for. Rather than going straight to a lunch reservation following a night of intimacy, he wants to scout three post-apocalyptic piers for his film. Seema doesn’t want to drink Sprite from a can and eat sandwiches from a cooler!!!!!

Sure, I’m in a perfect mood to discuss my car’s extended warranty

As for the one and only Lisa Todd Wexley, she wants her experience, wisdom and track record to immediately green-light her ten-part docu-series about unsung Black Sheros, but PBS wants her to somehow get Michelle Obama involved, despite Michelle Obama’s certified status as Sung. As a dedicated Topical List Purist, I’m horrified on LTW’s behalf that they want to include someone so off-category. Also if I may direct the class to the monitors in the background of this meeting — that’s queer African-Haitian-Ojibwe Native American sculptor Edmonia “Wildfire” Lewis!

see

Lisa’s Husband Herbert knows himself to be a very electable city comptroller, perhaps ’cause nobody knows what a city comptroller is, but his campaign aide Chauncey thinks he’s not quite “cool” enough yet to cinch the elusive city comptroller vote. But, hopefully pulling Lisa away from her work (finding Michelle Obama) to plan him a cocktail party at the Red Rooster (very cool) will change that!

Try it, it’s poison

Unfortunately LTW’s also drawn in to Charlotte’s subplot this episode, in which a mean woman at the park is convinced Charlotte’s dog was off-leash, maliciously attacking her dog Peanut. Something about how this scene was edited felt like I wasn’t supposed to be there.

Of course we went shopping for new outfits right after watching the Barbie movie why do you ask??

Charlotte insists her Sweet Baby Angel would never be off-leash or harm a dog. She goes ahead and accuses her dog-walker of letting him off-leash anyhow, which makes the dog walker quit. Then she can’t secure a kennel spot due to her dog getting cancelled by Park Lady.

Carrie, too, continues to suffer — she’s living in an empty mansion waiting for her couch upholstery to arrive in 2026, talking to her cat about her pants — and her house alarm keeps going off, claiming her kitchen door is open when it is, in fact, actually closed. While running around trying to fix this scenario, she slips and falls thus Carrie must call Miranda to say, “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up.”

Really? They’re back to calling it HBO Max again?

The weird thing is, she definitely can get up because in the very next scene she’s galavanting around her kitchen with merely a mildly maimed finger. But Miranda is there, of course, confessing that she closed out her evening at Lesbian Bar by having hotel sex with a nun. At last, Carrie finally knocks a joke out of the proverbial park: “You fucked the Virgin Mary!”

She’s not done, folks:

Miranda: Can you ghost a nun?
Carrie: It would be a holy ghost!

While there’s plenty to unpack and explore in the realm of Miranda being the target of a very clingy hookup after her own compromised emotional experiences with Che, instead we are shifting focus to Mary being uncool through her pursuit of joy in everyday life. She wants Miranda to meet her for dinner at the Tavern on the Green! I mean it’s simply a well-known modern tavern nestled in a bucolic Central Park setting and a historic landmark restaurant unlike any other!

Carrie’s alleged contentment with her Aidan situation is challenged further by Anthony, when she meets up with him, his young Italian boyfriend, Rock, and Lily for a 15-minute ballet performance in a 95% empty theater. Lily has a crush on the lead dancer, and Carrie can relate because she once dated Alexander Petrovsky, a large-scale installation artist played by the world’s most famous male ballet dancer, Mikhail Baryshnikov. She doesn’t say this, but I can sense it in the air.

God?

Anthony’s outraged that Carrie’s unclear on Aidan’s return date, insisting she shouldn’t sit all alone in her big house and wait for Aidan like Rapunzel. Luckily Aidan calls Carrie at 3 AM from a truck in a field after having three beers to tell her that he aches for her and they try to have phone sex but Carrie eventually just pretends to have phone sex and at the end says “my goodness!”

Miranda calls Carrie to leave a voicemail negging on “Sister Mary Tourist” for inviting her to Central Park to ride the carousel. Does Mary need to pump the brakes? Yes. But honestly Miranda, maybe you should go ride the carousel!!!

A-ha I knew Che Diaz had a finsta

Charlotte’s Dog Saga finally reaches its wretched conclusion: thanks in part perhaps to Lisa’s gentle prodding, Charlotte tells Park Lady she’ll pay Peanut’s MRI bill despite her deep certainty that her Sweet Baby Angel would never harm a soul. She’s willing to compromise her understanding of her dog’s temperament to finally know peace, but luckily for Charlotte, no such compromise is necessary — it turns out that Park Lady just had bad eyesight and confused Sweet Baby Angel with another dog. She screams, “Whoever owns this dog better stay away from me and my Peanut!” Ok.

There’s poop in this purse I can smell it!

Seema’s saga wraps up, too — over the course of one rambling day, Ravi has shown utter disregard for Seema’s needs and desires, carting her along on a cross-borough journey in a van, missing all their carefully planned meals, which also likely annoyed the restaurant employees who had to keep changing their reservation only to see it eventually cancelled. I think this is the fiftysomething bachelorette’s equivalent of when I wanted to have lunch with my boyfriend and instead ended up driving all over G-d’s green earth looking for a specific color of plastic bucket he needed for a Fraternity rush event. Unlike Seema, it took me nine months to break up with that boyfriend, but Seema is hotter and smarter than me. She is a fancy woman who only does fancy things, like flirt with death and call her driver.

This would be the perfect location for a new Red Lobster

Ravi says he will always love her. “Great last line, roll credits!” she says, which would’ve been a perfect moment for the show to cut and roll the credits, because also then we wouldn’t have to watch the rest.

Our final destination this evening is LTW’s Red Rooster party for (hopefully!!!) New York City’s next City Comptroller. The venue is bustling with positive energy that I cannot really connect to the election in any meaningful way, but most importantly the venue is filled with cool people, and also three white women talking about Aidan.

DO ANAL WITH AIDAN DO ANAL WITH AIDAN

Carrie says she and Aidan have a very honest sex life so she feels bad for faking phone sex. Doesn’t everyone fake phone sex with their boyfriends? Then Miranda says, “I used to fake real sex,” and I think oh, maybe not everybody did fake phone sex with their boyfriends.

Big news: Herbert and his college A capella group are gonna do a little performance, which is fantastic because Herbert was in Hamilton and what’s cooler than A capella?

🎵 I saw the sign and it opened up my eyes 🎵

During this performance, Harry inexplicably stands up and screams YEAH BABY WHOOO and swings his dinner napkin violently in the air and first of all, when did he arrive, and second of all, what?

WORK!

Anthony apologizes to Carrie for sharing his opinions about Aidan. Carrie accepts his apology and they hug and she admits that actually everybody thinks it’s weird that she and Aidan just send each other blank postcards and she’s not sure when he’s returning to New York City and that her house alarm thinks the kitchen door is open when it is, in fact, closed.

But good news for LTW, Chauncey maybe knows MIchelle Obama! The message here is that even if you’re forced to engage in performative actions to achieve your authentic goals, it’s all worth it in the end because of Michelle Obama.

Meanwhile, Miranda continues to slander Mary the nun with abandon. Even more remarkable is that Mary has continued to reach out to Miranda despite the cold chill of silence she’s receiving in return. Mary the nun just got out of Wicked and wants to meet up with Miranda in … wait for it…. TIMES SQUARE. Can you believe?!?!? In fact, Mary’s at the M&M store. Literally name one thing in the entire world that sounds more fun than meeting up with a nun at the M-&-M store?!!!!

Hmmm…. she says she’s at TGI Fridays?

Strange of her to choose Fridays when Olive Garden is right there

My thoughts exactly

Miranda feels sorry enough for Mary the Nun that she hauls ass to Times Square to have a conversation with Mary in the middle of a busy intersection beneath the outstretched arms of a giant gorilla. Mary tells Miranda that she’s had the best week of her life ’cause she got to rumble under the covers with Miranda and see Wicked. Miranda sets some immediate boundaries:

Miranda: I gather that you’re at the beginning of a new journey and I know how that is because I just got off a crazy chapter myself — but don’t do anything solely based on what you’re feeling right now.
Mary: Like — what? What do you mean?
Miranda: I mean like… don’t leave God for me.
Mary: Miranda, I would never leave God. We’re married. Look, I always knew this person was somewhere inside of me, and now I’ve met her. Thanks to you.

I’ve seen this week people are really taking the lyrics of “Defying Gravity” and holding space for that and feeling power in that.

I didn’t know that was happening.

Then she takes Miranda’s hands in hers and literally sings, “Because I knew you, I have been changed for good.”

In that moment, Miranda is forced to do what all of us have had to do at some point in Trump’s America— literally hold space for the lyrics of a song from Wicked. I’d like to imagine she considers holding space for Mary’s innocent enthusiasm for unsophisticated experiences, but probably not.

Her search for a hot, fleeting hookup has instead placed her squarely at the center of someone else’s romantic narrative — the kind Carrie Bradshaw, once upon a time, sold to us all. As Ms. Bradshaw herself once penned: “Some love stories aren’t epic novels. Some are short stories. But that doesn’t make them any less filled with love.”

Carrie calls Aidan to confess that she faked the phone sex but she’s here now, totally in the mood, and ready to rock! Unfortunately Aidan is in bed with his son and therefore unable to pull his pork. Carrie feels frustrated, then adjusts — she’s only waiting for Aidan if she’s not doing anything for herself in the meantime besides talking to her cat and turning vintage vacuum cleaner bags into hats.

This will be her dilemma, it seems: now that she’s older, more confident, more mature, more cynical, even — will that make her need less from Aidan? Or does she still need more from him because she loves him, and wants to be with him, which means she wants to be with him, literally, and build an actual life with him, which requires his participation. I don’t know why she wants this from Aidan when she could very simply be with literally anyone else (except Mr Big RIP), but this is Carrie’s life not mine.

Carrie sits down in front of her laptop, types one sentence, and then stares meaningfully into the middle distance!

God damn I’m good

In conclusion, I feel like Charlotte and Harry and Anthony are still in the original show, the campy Sex and the City. And everybody else is in a different show that’s a lot more grounded and down-to-earth. In my opinion!

Before you go! Autostraddle runs on the reader support of our AF+ Members. If this article meant something to you today — if it informed you or made you smile or feel seen, will you consider joining AF and supporting the people who make this queer media site possible?

Join AF+!