‘And Just Like That …’ Season 3, Episode 7 Recap: Double Standards

Season 3, Episode 7: ‘They Wanna Have Fun’

The woman wondered if she should have invited him to the party.

In this scenario, that woman is me, and the man in question is Aidan. Why, pray tell, did Carrie not invite him to “their” house for Charlotte’s birthday party? Last we left our lovers, Carrie had agreed not to return to Virginia, but Aidan was still free to come to New York. (I can’t believe I just typed that sentence as if this were a normal relationship dynamic, but here we are.)

Perhaps Carrie was more interested in inviting Duncan, her downstairs neighbor, to the soiree instead of her “boyfriend” (still using quotes!). If Aidan isn’t there, she is free to flirt with Duncan. And she does. But more on that in a bit.

The big birthday party that is the center of this week’s episode is really just a ruse to get Charlotte to have a little fun and forget, at least for a night, about Harry’s prostate cancer — which, at this point, no one else knows about but Carrie. After a lunchtime chat in which Charlotte alludes to having a lot on her plate, and a subsequent near-slip of the secret by Carrie, Miranda gets suspicious. So Carrie tells Miranda she wants to throw a big shindig for Charlotte because her dog, Richard Burton, is terminally ill.

Miranda — now a huge dog person, apparently, after the introduction of Sappho and Socrates into her life — is simply heartbroken for Charlotte, and goes wild with the party planning. Decked in a silver jumpsuit and toting pink confetti balloons and a karaoke machine no one asked for, Miranda shows up to Carrie’s house ready to party like it’s 1999. To borrow a phrase from O.G. Carrie, I couldn’t help but wonder, how much more over the top would Miranda’s party favors have been if she knew it was Harry who had cancer?

By the end of the episode, though, she does. Rumors begin flying among party guests until Harry can’t take it, and he summons Carrie, Miranda and Lisa into a back room to confess his diagnosis. (Yes, Carrie already knows, Charlotte admits to Harry; but Harry told his personal shopper! He has no room to be mad!)

Ultimately, Charlotte says, this is the best birthday gift Harry could have given her. That, and the public admission that asking her to keep the secret in the first place was wildly unfair. Because it was.

I imagine this is the kind of episode the cast must love to shoot. Pretty much everyone was there — every supporting character — including all of Charlotte’s coworkers; Bitsy Von Muffling (Julie Halston), in her second cameo of the season; and even the mother of Giuseppe (Sebastiano Pigazzi), Gia, played by the illustrious Patti LuPone.

Yes, Mama Gia is in town from Italy to meet Anthony, her son’s paramour, and she is giving epic Hilaria Baldwin vibes, touting a charming Italian accent despite being from Buffalo. She escaped to Italy in her youth to study art but ended up meeting Anthony’s father — a man nearly 30 years her senior — and never looked back.

Which makes it pretty hypocritical that she dings Anthony — who tries and fails throughout the episode to make a good impression on her — on his advanced age.

This is the most legit story line Anthony has received this season beyond his bread slinging, and honestly, I might say it was a superfluous plotline if it hadn’t brought us LuPone. What a legend. I will take whatever the writers give us if that means she is part of the show.

While Lisa and Herbert’s son Henry (Alexander Bello) croons endlessly into the karaoke mic (to Lily’s delight), the party carries on as planned, and Charlotte seems to have fun. Mission accomplished. Duncan shows and immediately sweeps Carrie away to the back terrace for a “smoke” (she does not partake, but he puffs his pipe) and to share a drink — literally, from the same glass. Duncan showers Carrie with praise for the first chapter of her budding historical fiction book, matching the energy Carrie showed earlier when she gushed to him about his Margaret Thatcher biography. The two smile and move about the party together, and are seen later, specifically by Miranda, sipping still from that same glass.

After the party dies down, it’s just Miranda lingering in the kitchen as Carrie cleans up. Miranda makes an innocent crack about the chemistry she noticed between Carrie and Duncan, and Carrie basically flips out.

Wildly offended, Carrie insists she didn’t do anything wrong. Miranda, somewhat baffled, agrees. Miranda’s tease was a lighthearted ribbing, not an accusation of cheating. But Carrie doth protest too much.

“What are you really saying?” she says, pressing Miranda.

“The woman wondered what she had gotten herself into?” Miranda responds, quizzically, quoting the first line of Carrie’s book. Miranda, who had accidentally seen the first few pages, insinuates that perhaps the novel is more autobiographical than Carrie realizes, but Carrie insists it’s fiction.

The tiff ends, and all is well between the friends again, but one big question is left swirling. What exactly are the boundaries in Carrie’s relationship right now? Is Carrie, in fact, allowed to “laugh and have a sip of Scotch”? Recall that in last week’s episode, Aidan confessed to sleeping with his ex-wife, Kathy, and Carrie all but didn’t care — making it plain that she hadn’t signed up for not sleeping with anyone else over the course of this five-year situationship.

So maybe Carrie really is considering an open relationship? That would certainly be a fun plot twist.

Things still taking up space in my brain

Finally we get the Adam and Seema pairing we’ve been waiting for! Even an unsightly eye patch can’t keep these two apart. Sure, they’re opposites, but you know what they say about opposites. I’m excited to see where this romance goes.
Here’s one for “Sex and the City” fans: In Season 5 of the original show, Carrie visits Big in California on her book tour. Big reads her book, which is a collection of her columns, and becomes distraught about how poorly he treated Carrie in the old days — just as Carrie is trying to seduce him. “That’s fiction!” she tells him, trying to pry his mind away from the book and back into bed. But it wasn’t, and she knows that. “Some of that stuff really happened,” he reminds her. That scene came to mind during the argument between Carrie and Miranda. “It’s fiction!” Carrie tells Miranda. Is it, though?
Why oh why make Patti LuPone a guest star in this episode but then not have her sing karaoke? She could have brought the house down!
Some super-sleuth viewers noticed a glitch in the matrix when it came to Lisa’s dad. Apparently in Season 1 Lisa referenced her father’s death, yet in Season 2 Billy Dee Williams played her father, who was very much alive. Then in last week’s episode he died. Again? The explanation offered by the show’s production team, according to multiple reports, is that the dead father Lisa mentioned in Season 1 was actually her stepfather. Who am I to say that isn’t true? But the explanation I would be quicker to believe is that this was a continuity mistake.