Spoilers ahead for the premiere of And Just Like That… season three.
In the first season of Sex and the City, Cynthia Nixon’s Miranda dates a Catholic guy who insists on taking an immediate post-coital shower to wash away the sins of their carnal relations. By season three, her housekeeper Magda (Lynn Cohen) places a Virgin Mary statuette in the nightstand where her vibrator once rested. But nothing could have prepared her for the premiere episode of And Just Like That…, in which Miranda has sex with a nun—named Mary, naturally.
That sister of the cloth is played by none other than Rosie O’Donnell, a coy in-joke; though she’s one of the most famous lesbians in Hollywood, here she’s playing someone who has never had sex with a woman. “It felt so, I don’t know, electric, and yet still so natural,” Mary tells Miranda in the afterglow. “I never dreamed that my first time could be both those things.”
Nixon recently told Vanity Fair that she personally contacted O’Donnell about the role. “There had been parts that had been written with her in mind before—none of them had ever worked out,” she says. When O’Donnell signed on, it gave Nixon the rare opportunity to have a fellow queer performer play her onscreen love interest. “It was like that when Sarah Paulson and I got to act opposite each other in Ratchet,” she says. “I’ve had a lot of wonderful female, straight co-stars [as] romantic co-stars—but it was a really special treat for me and Rosie.”
When Miranda meets Mary, she’s at a romantic low point. Still recently divorced, out as a lesbian, and now broken up with the pickup artist formerly known as Che Diaz, she struggles to find her place in the dating pool. Between sips of a “Phony Negroni,” Miranda and Mary lock eyes from across a lesbian bar—two of the only “randos” left at closing time, as another far younger patron puts it. But there is a spark between them, which is promptly snuffed out by the whole virgin-nun confession.
“So, you deflowered the Virgin Mary?” Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker) says upon learning about Miranda’s hookup. It feels like this entire storyline was devised by series boss Michael Patrick King solely to have Carrie deliver that line. Or maybe this one: Miranda asks if she can “ghost a nun.” Carrie gamely replies: “It would be a Holy Ghost.”
The only problem with that plan? Mary, a Canadian visiting New York City for the first time, can’t stop texting Miranda with invitations to ride the carousel in Central Park or venture into the Times Square M&M store. “I don’t know which is worse,” Carrie says, “that you slept with a nun, or a tourist.”
Despite all of her punny judgment, Carrie faces her own relationship curveballs in the season three premiere. Most of her friends are highly skeptical about the sure-to-be-futile five-year pause on her relationship with Aidan (John Corbett), who’s trying to be present for his ne’er-do-well teenage son in Norfolk, Virginia, while Carrie decorates the spacious Gramercy Park home she thought they’d live in together. She’s also fielding late-night calls from Aidan, who drunk-dials her with a Bridgerton-esque come-on: “I ache for you.” They fumble through two awkward bouts of phone sex, suggesting that their planned relationship break is already off to a rocky start.
At least Carrie’s and Miranda’s respective storylines, alongside Seema Patel (Sarita Choudhury) falling asleep with a lit cigarette in bed while waiting for a FaceTime from her Marvel director boyfriend Ravi (Armin Amiri), harken back to the original Sex and the City. We want to see these women enter into comically fraught, episode-long entanglements that enrich our understanding of each character, then free them up for new romantic adventures.
By the episode’s end, Seema pulls a Samantha, telling Ravi some version of “I love you, but I love me more.” Carrie finally begins to interrogate the limits of her unconventional arrangement with Aidan. And Miranda gets reflective about all the changes—some better received than others—she’s undergone in the last few years.
Trudging into Times Square, Miranda meets up with Mary to gently break things off. Mary, fresh off seeing the Broadway show Wicked, is flying high. But Miranda urges her to embark on her next phase with caution. “So, I gather you’re at the beginning of a new journey, and I know how that is because I just got off a crazy chapter myself,” Miranda says. “But don’t do anything solely based off what you’re feeling right now. Don’t leave God for me.”
Miranda never utters the words Che Diaz out loud, but the implication is undeniable: Don’t blow your life up for the person who guides you through your sexual awakening. That’s exactly what Miranda did after that now infamous finger-bang with Che in Carrie’s kitchen—divorcing Steve, briefly moving to Los Angeles, and sleeping with a comedian who spends bedtime doing Cameo requests. Mary assures Miranda that she’ll never lose her religion, then breaks into an a capella rendition of Wicked’s closing number, “For Good,”—a ludicrous moment that, given this show’s track record, barely even shocked me.
I don’t know if the bonkers storylines of And Just Like That… will change anyone for the better. But they’ve certainly changed me for good.
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