‘And Just Like That …’ Season 3, Episode 9 Recap: Smoke Gets in Your Eyes

Season 3, Episode 9: ‘Present Tense’

The moment I think a lot of us have been waiting for finally arrived this week, and honestly, I’m spiraling.

While most of me was running a victory lap as I watched Carrie rip into Aidan and leave him dumped on the street, a sliver of me felt a heartbreak I’ll cop to having not expected, despite having rooted for this outcome all season.

Perhaps it has to do with how much of the past was brought into the present this week — a development telegraphed by the episode’s title, “Present Tense.”

If you’re a longtime watcher of this whole shebang we call the “Sex and the City,” there was a lot of fertile ground here for you in terms of callbacks to the original series. And if that was an intentional device used by the show’s writers to tug at my heartstrings and make me feel things about Aidan I thought I had let go long ago, well, it worked.

Let’s start with the smoking. Smoking was practically a tertiary character in this episode, beginning with Aidan and Duncan’s morning coffee and smoke (Duncan only, of course) on the terrace. Carrie walks in on them, and her face immediately drops. Apparently, she tells Seema later, she drew a “clear boundary” with Aidan, asking him not to engage with Duncan at all. Not even speak to him. But there was Aidan, chit-chatting away with his new pal while Duncan puffed on his pipe.

Why the boundary? This is never really defined. As demanding as Aidan has been this season — requesting five years of celibacy from Carrie while he worked out his Wyatt issues — this rule from Carrie felt like, strangely, too much. To have no interaction with the downstairs neighbor is as unrealistic as, well, a five-year, no-contact relationship. So I guess they’re even.

Still, it’s worth noting how repulsed Aidan is by Duncan’s pipe smoke, and how casual he is about openly judging it. This is nothing new. If we travel back in time to the Y2K era in which “Sex and the City” aired, we’ll recall that smoking was a big issue for Aidan when he and Carrie began dating. A dedicated smoker, Carrie quit for Aidan. Sure, she said it was “for her,” but we all knew that was a front. She quit because Aidan said he simply couldn’t date a smoker; he was more controlling back then than I think many of us realized — or, at least, called out.

For Aidan, where there’s smoke, there’s fire. Years ago, when Carrie cheated on Aidan with Big, she also picked up smoking again — and used it as a front for why she was sneaking around. Carrie recounts this to Seema, confessing that Aidan had valid reasons for not trusting her.

Now, Aidan is suspicious of what might be going on between Duncan and Carrie, and Carrie can feel it. It doesn’t help that she prioritizes working with Duncan on his book over steaks with Aidan. Like a neglected puppy, Aidan shows up at Duncan’s door looking for Carrie, practically begging her to come back upstairs. He even offers to bring the T-bones down for all three of them to share, but Carrie declines, over and over.

It’s easy to have sympathy for Aidan in this moment until you remember that, while Carrie is thrilled to finally have him in “their” house for more than a few days, she shouldn’t have to drop everything else in her life just because he decided to show up. Aidan originally asked for five years away from Carrie, and now Carrie can’t even ask for five hours?

Eventually, Carrie returns home to find uncooked steaks on the kitchen counter and Aidan lying awake in bed. She apologizes for being gone so long and snuggles into his nook, but she is met with rejection. She smells like smoke, he tells her, disgusted. “Go take a shower.”

It might be the coldest he has ever been to her.

Wordlessly, she goes to the bathroom, and then to a guest bedroom.

To Aidan’s surprise, Carrie is still angry the next morning, and another callback is worked into the dialogue as the two spar over who is going to leave and take a walk. (This is the same fight they once had after moving in together.)

They separate, until Aidan texts Carrie to meet for lunch, where the fight immediately picks up again. Aidan tells Carrie she is right: He has trust issues when it comes to her and other men. “Has.” Present tense. They don’t even make it to the beverage service before Carrie storms off.

In a scene reminiscent of the dramatic Big breakup of “Sex and the City” Season 6, Carrie lays into Aidan right there on the street. She yells that she has given him everything he has asked for, and it isn’t enough. She blurts out the thing that we, the audience, have been saying since this season began, which is that the five-year, no contact arrangement — which even Aidan couldn’t live up to — was ludicrous from the start. Even so, she screams, she was 100 percent in. “Was?” Aidan presses. “Was.” Carrie confirms.

They’re over. And they should be over. Their relationship has oscillated all season between nonexistent and overbearing, and we all want to get off this ride.

But as they both tear up and confess that they’re sad, and as they hug while Taylor Swift’s “How Did It End?” swells in the background, even I, a neo-Aidan hater, was sad, too. For years and years — through countless rewatches of the original series, through the movies, through all of Season 2 of this absurd sequel, I was Team Aidan. Like Carrie, I have decades of emotional investment in Aidan, and when he came back into the picture all this time later, I, too, thought they might make it this time.

I’m not saying a tear welled in my eye, too. But I’m not saying it didn’t.

But Carrie doesn’t wallow, and neither should we. By the closing credits, she is out and about in a gorgeous, sexy, white cocktail dress, meeting up with Charlotte, Miranda and Seema, returning to that familiar four-top life, her single era, her friends and herself.

Things still taking up space in my brain

Oh yeah, apparently there are other characters in this show?

Despite Miranda’s flirtation in last week’s episode with a return to drinking, this week she has the uncomfortable conversation with Joy in which she confesses to being an alcoholic. Joy’s initial response, while seemingly insensitive, is honest: She fears she will feel bad about herself for having a drink or two in front of Miranda, and she doesn’t like feeling bad about herself (relatable), which may be why she drinks in the first place. But all the truth floating around in the room is disarming. They’re both flawed, and they’re both willing to accept each other for it. It’s a tender moment.
Of all days for Seema to try the deodorant crystal Adam gifts her, it’s the one when she has to hoof it across town in a suit jacket for an important meeting. Of course she is smart enough to carry a backup aluminum-based one, just in case.
I wasn’t sure Patti LuPone would be back, but lucky us! And in a hilarious twist, Gia drops the act over dinner at Anthony’s place, and the accent. “How much?” she asks him, would it cost to get out of Guiseppe’s life. Anthony doesn’t take the bait, though, so back to Italy she goes, which means we’re not getting a musical performance out of her. What a miss.
The way Herbert behaves over his weight loss is annoying and tone deaf. Women have dealt with the pressure to slim down since the dawn of modern times, and they manage not to make it everyone else’s problem.
Harry and Charlotte are aging ungracefully together — a mess of surgery recovery and vertigo and in their mess of a bedroom — but I’m glad they have each other.
OK, back to Carrie and Aidan because apparently I’m not done. Aidan is truly brazen for telling Carrie she shouldn’t blame him for still having trust issues when he was the one who just weeks ago slept with his ex-wife. This is wildly hypocritical and unfair, and I will remember that anytime I feel sad that they’re done.
The O.G.’s know that the Andy Cohen cameo was more than a cameo. Andy Cohen and Sarah Jessica Parker are longtime, real-life friends. Before he was a household name, he made a brief appearance in the original series as a shoe salesman, which he reprised in this episode. It was another callback in a long list of them this week.
It’s still weird to hear Carrie refer to Big as “John.”
This episode was a cool 29 minutes, down from 32 last week. Episodes 8 and 9 have been big improvements from all the previous ones this season, all of which were over 40 minutes. Maybe there’s something to be said for keeping it tight?