And Just Like That recap: Genuine tragedy and full-frontal nudity

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

Tragedies are afoot in Manhattan. In this week’s episode, Harry and Charlotte grapple with a scary prognosis, Miranda is without a home after being threatened with a weapon by her neighbour, and Carrie has to take her shoes off. How will she survive?!

I think we need to get LTW and Seema’s drawn-out plot points out the way first, before we get to the meat of things.

Let’s get this over quickly. Credit: Max

Rapid-fire recap: the Wexleys are not communicating well, and we, the viewer, have no idea what’s going on because they’re arguing about random logistical conversations we never heard. Meanwhile, Seema tries to girlboss her way into a business loan at the bank and is told she spends too much.

At a glamping weekend, Herbert wants to be seen as a “regular guy” for the sake of his campaign while his obnoxious kids say things like, “This croque monsieur is divine!” Seema anxiously smokes with Carrie’s hot flirty gardener who, yes, asks a South Asian woman if she’s ever done yoga. She finds out (off-screen) her loan application was rejected.

When LTW tells Charlotte she has a crush on her new editor, Marion, Char hardly reacts because she’s silently stewing in a mineral pool over the tragic news she’s been sworn to keep to herself: Harry has prostate cancer.

I’m devastated.

Pray for Harry (Evan Handler). Credit: Max

Turns out AJLT has been planting seeds for this over the whole season, beginning with his incontinence at the club (my favourite Lana Del Rey album). Hell, they might’ve even started back in season one when Charlotte was on her knees in front of her husband’s huge prosthetic and trilled to her intrusive kids, “I’m checking Daddy’s penis for cancer!”

On a nighttime dog walk past the Guggenheim, Harry shares the news and tries to soothe a terrified Char with the facts: De Niro survived this! He is not going to die for a long time! But he doesn’t want anyone knowing and is keen for life to proceed as normal, so Char just has to swallow it.

Over in the Gramercy, Carrie’s back narrating life in her empty, echoing apartment from the perspective of “The Woman” in her vague historical fiction novel. Her newly arrived downstairs neighbour isn’t the only one in hell.

The Woman (Sarah Jessica Parker) is troubled.Credit: Max

This storyline was triggering to me, someone with a heavy-footed upstairs neighbour and fear of confrontation. The only possible cure for my ills might’ve been seeing the montage of Carrie stomping about in fabulous outfits as her tenant (?) tosses and turns in a dark, water-damaged apartment downstairs, but sadly it was shot only from the calves down, before Duncan Reeves, revered writer of doorstop-sized historical biographies, bangs on the door to declare, “You are always walking in heels! Have you no rugs?!”

At brunch, Carrie does the unthinkable when describing the scenario to her friends. While announcing that she has rights, she evokes the title of a legendary Sex and the City episode: “A Woman’s Right to Shoes”.

Remember that one? It was in that blissful season six period after Berger but before we had to endure Petrovsky? When the show said so much about single women and their coupled-up, new-parent friends who judged them for their expensive footwear proclivities? And it did it all in a compact half hour? I dream of those days.

Where was I?

Turns out Duncan is like the Ron Chernow of this universe, and he’s also “a lot of fun” according to the disembodied head sending texts as Samantha Jones. He lives it up in London for half the year, then comes to New York to write about Margaret Thatcher, fuelled only by stew, for the other six months.

The endless back and forth of “please walk a bit quieter” / “no I shan’t I have to wear heels always” is just another example of the show’s writers’ memory loss, considering Carrie was already forced into flats in season one after her hip surgery.

Miranda was an awful visitor then – remember her and Che in the kitchen, grunting into each other’s mouths while Carrie tried to pee in a Snapple bottle? (My god, what is this show?) – and she remains one now.

Here’s Miranda (Cynthia Nixon)! Hide your Mexican Coke.Credit: Max

Once Carrie remembers she has “the extra rooms” and offers her lifelong best friend a place to crash, they’re both on their absolute worst behaviour.

Carrie expects Miranda to take HER shoes off and says, “I know how to walk in mine.” Miranda stalks around the house fully nude like one of the bad guys in It Follows and makes no attempt to cover up. She eats Carrie’s yoghurt and banana. Carrie knocks a Coke (“My last Mexican Coke!“) onto the new table (I can’t even get into the Aidan’s-thumbs-down-table of it all any more, we need to have some standards) and mops it up with Miranda’s work papers (?!) and then Miranda mops it up with Carrie’s silk scarf. These women both need brain scans.

By episode’s end, Seema’s looking for an apartment for Miranda, and Carrie’s made nice with Duncan, and finally has a real, human reaction when she takes her heels off.

As always, all I care about is Harry.

And Just Like That… streams each Friday on Max.

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