‘And Just Like That’ Season 3, Episode 7 Is Gaslighting Us

For those of us who have stopped worrying and learned to love And Just Like That, the absurdity of the Sex and the City sequel is part of the fun. Over the course of three seasons, we’ve guffawed our way through Mr. Big’s death by Peloton, basked in the pure cringe of Miranda’s romance with Che Diaz, and stanned Charlotte and Harry’s dorky The Americans standom. Just a few episodes ago, we indulged shoe-maven-slash-ankle-masochist Carrie’s refusal to remove her stilettos at home after incurring the wrath of her downstairs-neighbor-slash-inevitable-love-interest, Duncan Reeves.

But in Thursday’s seventh episode of Season 3, AJLT crossed the fine line separating the willing suspension of belief from full-on gaslighting. All season, Carrie—a recovering sex columnist, erstwhile podcaster, and sometime memoirist—has been dabbling in historical fiction. Episodes are often framed by Sarah Jessica Parker’s voiceover, in a callback to SATC’s quippy narration, reading snippets of the novel that mirror her character’s own life. They are bad. Which isn’t necessarily a problem; as the “I couldn’t help but wonder” meme demonstrates, we all know Carrie is a hack. No, what finally finished me on this subplot was this week’s exchange of manuscripts with Duncan, a highbrow biographer. His rhapsodic response to her pages destroys any illusion we might’ve had that Carrie’s stilted prose is an inside joke between the show’s writers and its audience. Apparently, we’re supposed to believe the novel is good.  

The episode opens with a distressed Carrie showing up at Duncan’s door. “I hate you,” she tells him. “Your first chapter is thrilling. It’s polished and it’s ready to publish and how am I supposed to hand you my work-in-progress now?” But, of course, she finds the courage. And by the time she visits him again, to deliver a (rude) last-minute party invitation, he’s devoured it. The verdict: “It’s brilliant.” (I mean, sure, it may well be publishable, given the success of language manglers like Colleen Hoover and E.L. James. Brilliant, though?) “The opening sentence: ‘The woman wondered what she had gotten herself into.’ It just stopped me dead in my tracks.” (Same. But only because it reminded me of every formulaic “attention-grabbing” intro from every undergrad creative writing workshop since the beginning of time.) As for the plot? “The way it flows is so propulsive.” (We wouldn’t know; AJLT only gives us the vibey, introspective passages.)

Now, maybe Duncan is trying to flatter his way into Carrie’s conveniently nearby bed. He seems too prideful for that, though. (That said, his whole deal makes little sense to me. He comes to one of the most expensive, not to mention distracting, cities in the world just because he doesn’t know anyone there, to hole up in an overpriced basement and write about Margaret Thatcher? Has this man never heard of renting a cabin in the woods?) Besides, the idea that he’d be lying feels like the kind of 4D-chess plot AJLT typically avoids. So let’s assume he’s genuine.

Could he possibly be correct? We all know art is subjective, after all. So we owe it to Carrie to take a closer look at the most substantial chunks of the novel AJLT has provided to date. Consider the passage we watched her type out in her back garden, during a work session that was soon interrupted by a cavalcade of rats:

Sitting in the sunlight, the woman felt the fog of the last few nights lift. She realized her tossing and turning and insecurities were remnants of another time. This is a new house, she reminded herself. A new life. This wasn’t her past… It was the present. May, 1846.

Here we have several classic elements of bad writing. There’s an overreliance on weather as a metaphor for the mood of a protagonist who is, pretentiously, only ever identified as “the woman.” The thoughts to which Carrie’s close third-person narration gives us access are rote exposition masquerading as an internal monologue—one so shallow, it suggests that our nameless heroine is very stupid. Who has to “remind herself” that her house is new or that, good lord, she’s living in not the past but the present? Alas, in the absence of time machines, everyone who’s ever walked the earth has been doomed to live in what is, to them, the present. Also: surely there are more eloquent ways to inform the reader that your story is set in May, 1846.

Episode 5 featured an even longer excerpt:

The woman threw open her windows to let the city in. She could hear the horses coming and going with their carriages, each one bringing an exciting possibility. The unexpected cool breeze on this hot afternoon reminded her that each day need not be an echo of the one before. There are endless adventures to be taken, if she simply dared to decide to take them. Putting one foot in front of the other, she stepped off the expected path and vowed to go wherever a day might take her.

So. Another weather metaphor, this one a veritable non sequitur; what does a summer breeze have to do with spontaneity or repetition? For that matter, is a carriage horse more likely to be “bringing an exciting possibility” than it is to be ferrying mundane deliveries or facilitating neighbors’ quotidian routines? Poetic license must be granted to figurative language, but that doesn’t mean an analogy can be fully nonsensical. Meanwhile, the final two sentences are painfully inspirational therapy-speak—which would be cringe-worthy enough in a contemporary novel but sound jarringly anachronistic in the context of a 19th century period piece. (To really be pedantic, there’s also a verb-tense misalignment that would give a copyeditor nightmares: “There are endless adventures to be taken, if she simply dared to decide to take them.”)