And Just Like That recap: Yikes. It’s time for Aidan to go

3 hours ago 2

This story contains spoilers for season three, episode six of And Just Like That...

There’s a specific kind of whiplash that comes from episodes like this. Episodes where the full spectrum of human emotion is wielded with grace and heart, and then also Aidan is there.

It’s only a matter of time until he’s gone, right? Surely the writers aren’t baiting us with mounting evidence of Aidan being a rubber band on the brink of snapping and blowing his entire life up, only to give him and Carrie a happy ending later. I wish I had hope for that to be the case, but I’m not sure any more.

Please, let us be free of this man. Aidan (John Corbett) in And Just Like That...

Despite Carrie’s long-established security system and the whole charade about key exchanges in Virginia a few episodes ago, Aidan wanders up to Carrie’s apartment to toss pebbles at the window, smashing it to pieces.

Before he arrived, we heard he had a free week because Wyatt self-enrolled in some wilderness program in Wyoming that honestly sounds like those boarding schools Paris Hilton is campaigning to have shut down. It takes him eons to share that not only did Wyatt refuse to get on the plane, leading to a fight with Kathy, but also that sending their neurotic, combative child away really put the divorced parents in the mood and they slept together.

Because he’d been tamping all this down, it just feels like Aidan’s having an extreme reaction to replacing a pane of glass. Not that Carrie helps: she stands there twirling her braid telling him all the world events her windows withstood and can barely summon a reaction when he cuts his finger. It’s all extremely yikes.

I am dying for Carrie to talk to her friends about the entire icky Aidan situation because without her admitting it, externalising it and having the girls chime in with encouragement (Charlotte), reality (Miranda) and a biting remark delivered in a cloud of nicotine (Seema), it makes me feel like I’m imagining the weird tension between them.

“The Woman” is kidding herself. Sarah Jessica Parker as Carrie in And Just Like That...

At least Carrie calls it “so male” and “medieval” when we learn that, in Aidan’s version of the terms of their “let’s not see each other for five years but still be together” agreement, Carrie would abstain from sex with anyone but him. She can’t comprehend “why we haven’t had this discussion until now”. Girl! Same! It’s been months! A glimpse of our girl emerges in this scene, and in the next, when she keeps her bra on during sex. That’s our Carrie.

Seema says goodbye to her driver and finds Miranda a great apartment. Before her now-official-girlfriend Joy meets Brady, she says she doesn’t like kids. It takes five seconds of Brady being sweet to her dogs for that to change. A whisper of conflict, dissolved in two seconds: the And Just Like That story.

Moving right along.

Bitsy von Muffling (Julie Halston) returns to death-stare some influencers.

While heading to the cancer centre to see Harry, Charlotte runs into Bitsy von Muffling, living proof that women can be fab and funny over 50 and that the writers don’t have total amnesia about the original series. She’s just as wacky and thirsty to climb the social ladder as ever. Honestly, I’d love an Ab Fab-style spin-off following her demanding that Tiffany’s buys her breakfast – and lunch and dinner – for all she spends there.

I don’t have time to focus on the reveal that Carrie’s getting invited to influencer events because Charlotte is really struggling with Harry’s diagnosis and having to keep it a secret.

The only good plot? Charlotte (Kristin Davis) and Harry (Evan Handler) keep their secret.

It’s not the only tragedy in this episode: while working in the edit suite with Marion, LTW learns her father, Lawrence, had a stroke. No one could reach her while she was at work, and he’s gone.

Nicole Ari Parker is an incredible actor, and it’s lovely to watch her at full strength, especially as she goes toe-to-toe with Jenifer Lewis as Lucille Highwater, “failed actress turned general manager of my father’s theatre”.

On the day of the funeral, LTW’s mother-in-law, a lifelong antagonist, comes through by reassuring her that her father’s spirit didn’t want Lisa to see him in his final moments, gives her a precious handkerchief, and engages in a diva-off, calling Lucille “Coretta Scott-King styled by Liberace”.

LTW leans on Herbert to make it through the eulogy – which must be her second, considering in season one of AJLT, in the wake of Big’s death, Lisa told Charlotte she’d lost her dad the previous year. By season two, he showed up at a party, played by Billy Dee Williams. Now his funeral is a major plot point of a season three episode. It’s not fun to nitpick, but if AJLT can’t even keep straight the details of who is alive, how can we trust them with the little stuff?

LTW (Nicole Ari Parker) gets the shocking news that her dad has died for a second time.

The episode ends with Charlotte’s emotional dam wall bursting, and finally sharing Harry’s diagnosis with Carrie, soundtracked by Letting Go by Melbourne’s own Angie McMahon. I’m so grateful for this moment, grounded in the friendship between these women. We needed it.

And Just Like That… streams each Friday on Max.

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