And Just Like That’s Finale Was Messy, but Maybe Just Right

While star Sarah Jessica Parker and showrunner Michael Patrick King have suggested that the And Just Like That finale isn’t necessarily the end of the Carrie Bradshaw saga, it is the end for now. What began 27 years ago with the premiere of Sex and the City concluded on Thursday night, sending Carrie swanning around her elegant mansion and singing a love song to herself. It was a typically SATC-ian episode ending—wistful and happy at once, summative yet ambiguous about what might happen right after the picture fades. Maybe we’ll find out what shape Carrie’s life takes in her 60s; maybe we won’t. For now, King chose to leave her dancing in our minds.

Which is nice! But that final scene was awfully discordant with what else happened in the finale episode, a strange and erratic half-ish hour that involved noxious queer Zillennial stereotypes and a celebrated actor staring at a toilet bowl full of human excrement. That wackiness was in keeping with much of And Just Like That’s tone; for three seasons, the show favored bawdy and broad comedy over the barbed wordplay and romantic yearning that defined Sex and the City. (Which could also be plenty silly.) Yet I held out hope that perhaps, just for the last episode, And Just Like That would get a bit more pensive and focused—that it would gather its characters and plot lines together into something poignant and meaningful.

The show didn’t really do that, which was disappointing. But I’ve had some time to sleep on it, and to think about watching TV, and about endings. And I’ve come to see King and Parker’s side of things: that not repeating the wistful glow of the SATC finale—at least not entirely—was maybe the right way to go. It seems important that And Just Like That remind us of the messy ramble of Carrie and her friends, their ongoing and ever-evolving existences nattering away long after their lives onscreen are supposed to be settled—fixed things gliding off in perfect harmony, far past the end credits.

So, yes: bring on the poop. Was it perhaps a bit undignified to force poor Victor Garber to film that scene? Maybe! But maybe he also had fun. And maybe it was equally amusing for Mario Cantone to get pied in the face by hunky Gieuseppe, and for Kristin Davis to close things out with one last romp in the hay with a newly tumescent Harry. It would have been lovely to have the girls together one last time, but that is not always how life works, especially as we age and routines spin off on varying trajectories.

From a TV-watching perspective, it’s also a welcome jolt to be challenged in our expectation of what a finale should be. Obviously plenty of shows have done that before—we’ve had snow globe reveals, big time jumps, a prison sentence, a sudden cut to black. And Just Like That, in its weird way, joins that tradition. And the oddness of its finale, its refusal to really resolve things in the most easily audience-satisfying way, echoes the most stirring and fascinating sentiment of its last season.

With Big dead, Carrie was free to rekindle things with the second great love of her life: Aidan, an always drippy SATC character whose drippiness took on a sinister edge in AJLT. Carrie’s arcs in seasons two and three largely concerned the strange frustration of not quite being able to make things work with Aidan. Surely their reunion was kismet, it was meant to be, and yet the two former fianceés never quite fit into each other’s lives. They didn’t back in the day, either—that’s why they broke up, twice. But away plugged Carrie anyway, determined that, narratively speaking, this is what was destined to be.

But then, a few episodes before the end, King released Carrie from that conventional TV wisdom—from the Big vs. Aidan binary, from the fan-service demands of nostalgia reboot culture. Nope: turns out Carrie was not fated to cling to either Big or Aidan forever. There was a secret third way, or infinite other ways. That’s a rather nice and mature and self-reflective bit of writing on the show’s part—a meta acknowledgment that the series itself had fallen into the trap of assumed inevitability, and then had to climb its way out of it.

I’m glad they wised up about that and let Carrie choose herself. It’s a more fitting ending for the character than, frankly, the original SATC finale ever was. Who knows what comes next, if anything comes at all. But amidst the toilet humor, AJLT did convincingly assert that Carrie only needs herself, and her friends, and her mind, and her talent, and her shoes. And whatever else she might use to carry herself into the great whatever.