And Just Like That recap: Let's pray this season is kinder to Miranda

The Age

30-05-2025

As Mary updates Miranda all week with her itinerary – dinner at Tavern on the Green, riding the carousel in Central Park, a visit to the M&M store in Times Square after seeing Wicked – she and Carrie mock like only two former downtown It Girls can.
It's fun seeing them be so bitchy. Sometimes it can feel like AJLT has sanded over all these characters' hard edges and Carrie, especially, is an almost passive, pearl-clutching version of her former self. The columnist and novelist floats out of her Gramercy manse in fresh-off-the-runway Simone Rocha, as the episode opens, to send a card to Aidan with nothing but a heart drawn on it.
The timeline on this show's always been a little hazy, so who knows how long it's been since his 'let's come back in five years' ultimatum. They're in touch enough to send a few postcards, but so rarely that his late-night audio booty call comes as a surprise. Anthony doesn't know any details of the agreement, but Carrie's adopted cat Shoe has grown a lot.
After a long night of leaping out of bed to shut off her alarm, Carrie spends another day faking that she's fine with the whole thing before hopping back into bed to fake it with Aidan over the phone. He's drunk, 'in my truck in a field', and desperate to have phone sex.
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'Don't break the mood,' he tells Carrie, after honking his literal horn (car version). Carrie can't get back in the mood with Shoe watching, and her impulse to pretend is a sign – I pray – that this storyline finds its conclusion soon.
In a bed across town, LTW is getting up at 4.15am to fine-tune a pitch for PBS about a documentary project highlighting 10 unsung black women. Between the executives wanting her to replace one with the 'very, very sung' Michelle Obama, and her husband in crisis over whether he's cool, Lisa's got more story in this episode than Charlotte, who's trying to clear Richard Burton's name in a case of dog park mistaken identity (sure).
Seema's bed is lucky to be standing after she fell asleep with a lit cigarette, so exhausted was she from looking hot and waiting for her movie director boyfriend Ravi to call. (I'm with the firefighter: 'Who still smokes in bed?')
Seema compares Carrie's calm patience to her demands of Ravi, and the way she invokes the fun, loose, messy Carrie of 'then' to this version of her, who's zen about Aidan's distance and rules and dressed either like Bunny MacDougal or in a strawberry shortcake bonnet, makes me mourn the spitfire we've lost.
Thank God for Seema, who kicks her distracted boyfriend to the curb/canal by episode's end.
It's genuinely touching to see Miranda and Mary's final moments. When the nun says 'I always knew this person was somewhere inside of me. And now I've met her. Thanks to you', it fills me with faith that the rest of this season might just get a little closer to the centre of what's really going on under the glossy veneers of Carrie and Charlotte.
Not Miranda, though. If anything she could use a little more gloss. in theatres November 2025!