And Just Like That recap: This is the moment we’ve been waiting for

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

While watching this week’s episode, I couldn’t help but wonder … are we so back?!

To paraphrase Old Rose at the start of Titanic, it feels like it’s been 84 years since I last saw Carrie Bradshaw have a personality. But our girl was still in there! And now she’s out!

Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker) trots off to meet the girls at dinner. All is right in the world.Credit: HBO Max

Before we can get to her big moment, we have to endure some annoyingly fragmented storylines from her friends. These are stories so reliant on last week’s episode that part of me genuinely wonders if episodes eight and nine were written together and just split down the middle.

Last week, we left Miranda tossing Joy’s gin away. This week she plays dumb about where it went, blames the cleaning lady (bad Miranda!) before owning up, leaving the door open for Joy to share some of her own baggage about how she occasionally leans on alcohol as well. It’s a weight they can carry together.

Last week, Charlotte fell into an art installation. This week she’s still bent in half while Harry again has to talk about his pee. I’ve had it up to here with this show’s urine obsession. Enough! Every episode is positively drenched in the stuff.

Anthony has Gia (Patti LuPone) over for dinner and his Tom of Finland salt and pepper shakers are the final straw: Patti goes full broad as she offers Anthony money to remove himself from Giuseppe’s life. He walks in on her holding a knife, she essentially cuts him off, and leaves. Arrivederci, Gia.

Over at the Wexleys, I’m over it. We’re nine episodes in and Herbert and LTW are having the same convo they were in episode one. She’s working! Preparing for an election is making him image-conscious! Move it along or have an affair with Marion, I’m bored.

Elsewhere, I guess Adam’s done in Carrie’s garden, since the episode opens on Aidan and Duncan sitting silently out there together and Mr Karma has way more time to bury his face in Seema’s pits. I’m unsure if “woman applying deodorant in public” needed a two-episode arc.

Seema also got an office, so we could get a whole scene ramping up to the line, “From WeWork to SheWork!”

Adam (Logan Marshall-Green), the armpit aficionado. Credit: HBO Max

It’s in this scene, when Carrie visits her to have lunch, that our girl finally, finally vents about Aidan’s weirdness. She also mentions Big for the first time in years! The awkward courtyard chat with Duncan brings up so much old Aidan residual shame and guilt: her cheating on him with Big and sneaking cigarettes, him wanting her to change her life to mould itself around him, both of them seeing one another as a fresh start despite all the unresolved stuff still lingering. It couldn’t go ignored forever.

Carrie’s late-night writing session with Duncan sends all that steam shooting out. Aidan needs her upstairs eating steaks with him. She doesn’t bend to his will the way she has up to this point, and he sulks. When she climbs into bed to wrap herself around him like a koala, he’s stewing. As cold as the raw steaks left symbolically on the counter. He sends her away, telling her to shower. “You smell like smoke,” he basically spits. God, can she start smoking again?

After she blows off her own steam in the shoe department, where SJP’s IRL BFF Andy Cohen reprises his season six role as “shoe salesman”, she meets Aidan at “the place we love”.

Is this better or worse than when the courtyard was full of rats?Credit: HBO Max

Before her iced tea has even arrived, Carrie needs Aidan to finally stop blaming her for all that old stuff. They have it out. At last! She can’t believe she doesn’t have Aidan’s trust after all the enormous changes she’s made for him and with Big’s gazillions of dollars.

He has trust issues – not had. She was 100 per cent in – not is.

This scene almost makes all the Aidan drama worth it.Credit: HBO Max

Carrie has very real needs, and he’s responsible for meeting some of them, which he’s proven himself incapable of doing. The way she has been ground down as a result, shrinking herself into this easy, tiny, flexible thing, waiting for him to want her, has been gruelling to watch. This scene almost makes it worth it. I wish it didn’t take Carrie this long to come back to herself, but God, I’m glad she’s here.

At the manse, as a song from Taylor Swift’s most verbose era plays (I bet The Woman loves Tortured Poets Department), Carrie removes all the Aidan ephemera from her apartment: two blank postcards and a pillow.

Carrie trots off to meet the girls at dinner to discuss their armpits and dizziness, probably. The Woman is looking ahead to the future. Maybe one in which she gets a name.

I know, I know – I’ve had one wish come true this episode, I won’t push another one.

And Just Like That… streams each Friday on HBO Max.

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