And Just Like That spoilers follow.
We did it, Joe. We made it to the end of another season of And Just Like That, only to discover the Sex and the City spin-off will be back soon for a third helping. We're not even shaking our fists at the HBO powers that be, because despite its litany of faults and baffling choices, we love this show.
That is in part because of the utter anarchy of the thing. Sex and the City had the fuzzy formula of a boyfriend-of-the-week structure, episodes where all four women's storylines often cohered around a common theme and a core friendship that seemed fairly functional and even aspirational.
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What we have now is a series of television that will, out of nowhere, despatch a character to be a Shinto monk forever more or flog Carrie's beloved, albeit now unrecognisable, brownstone walk-up to some random jewellery woman they keep trying to make us care about.
Yet those narrative curveballs were small fry compared to the truly bizarre turn Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker) and Aidan's (John Corbett) romance takes in the season-two finale.
After a sumptuous and sappy 'Last Supper' in Carrie's flat, Aidan appears like a gangly Romeo throwing some convenient pebbles – or perhaps a handful of Carrie's curbside cigarette butts – at one of her windows.
Despite laying down the gauntlet to Carrie, saying he would never set foot in her flat ever again, Aidan breezes through the door to tell Carrie he's going to be breezing right out of her life.
"I can't believe we're back here again," says Carrie, but this time round the problem isn't her infidelity or his possessiveness. It's Wyatt: Aidan's problem child who we've only met on surly FaceTime calls to see what looks like a noughties Justin Bieber haircut.
"I won't lose you again. Just give me some time." 'Time' you say, thinking maybe a couple of months for Wyatt to recover from his joyride injuries and cleanse his system of the magic mushrooms after-effects. No, no, it must be five full years. As we said earlier: bizarre.
Aidan does a fairly charming little bit with a finger snap to show how quickly those 1,825 days are going to fly by, but Carrie's face is understandably forlorn.
With ten minutes to go before the credits roll, And Just Like That takes us on a cast montage of sex, first-date drinks and an iPhone-installation process. Carrie and Aidan are among the characters having nudity-clause-permitting sex, in what looks like her new Gramercy Park townhouse. So, apparently, they patched things up after Aidan's unreasonable new stumbling-block to their relationship.
Watching him leave, Carrie looks neither joyful nor distraught, but clutches her new emotional support cat with a face of resignation.
There's no sense of where they stand or how they're going to approach this enforced five-year separation. Is Carrie allowed to send him more emails? Are they expected to take a vow of celibacy for five years? Perhaps all this was thrashed out in a conversation we didn't get to see, in which case those behind the scenes might have forgotten how television is supposed to function.
While Sex and the City episode themes would refract in interesting ways through one another, the And Just Like That finale gives us a "copy my homework but change it a little" duo of storylines from Carrie's woes over to Seema's (Sarita Choudhury) goings-ons with Marvel film man Ravi (Armin Amiri).
There's a whole shebang between Seema and Ravi about him shooting in Egypt in front of the Sphinx – which we need not retread – but the by-product is that Seema claims Ravi is pulling away from their relationship because she said "I love you" first.
The issue at hand here isn't just that these two characters have microscopic levels of chemistry or even that the secretive showrunners again didn't bother to write any scenes in which we see them falling into the love they now ardently profess for one another. Instead, it boils down to the question of what And Just Like That wants to say about the relationship between a woman's sense of self and her romantic life.
In Seema's case, they don't seem to know. At the outset of season one, Seema was the empowered single woman who would like love if it came by, but would also be just as fine without it. She was the closest thing we had to Samantha "I love you, but I love me more" Jones.
Now, she's become an uneasy mixture of this with lashings of insecurity, which only seems to reinforce ugly conventions of single straight women and their neuroses around finding a partner.
Seema frets Ravi is pulling away. Then he invites her to Egypt. Then she says, "I'm not giving up my career and this person that I've worked so hard to become, for a man. Full stop," and refuses to come.
Her strength in that moment would be a triumph, had it not come on the heels of so much moping over the fact she told him she loves him first, or meaningless insinuations that he's dallying with the harem of women in his DMs. It's a level of self-doubt and paranoia we would not have associated with this character.
Seema and Carrie's storylines coalesce as the episode concludes on a beach in what is said to be Greece, but the nondescript locale bears nothing to disprove our theory it was just filmed in Malibu.
"So, I'm waiting five months and you're waiting five years," says Seema, from under the brim of a fabulous sun hat. "I might get time off for good behaviour," Carrie teases.
"What if they never come back?" Seema wonders. "Oh, there'll be more," Carrie smirks. "Men?" No. "Cocktails," says Carrie.
It's a flirtatious and sun-drenched ending we certainly could not have imagined we would reach after the dim and musty podcast studio beginnings of the season. But vibes aside, And Just Like That is trying to have its Cosmo and drink it too.
Because what is the show trying to say? The answer could feasibly be 'nothing' or 'they don't know', but let's assume there is meant to be some coded message in here somewhere.
Carrie and Seema are the feistiest women on the show and have been on something of a journey both individually and with each other as they grapple with being middle-aged and single.
Sex and the City couldn't get out from under the pressure to give Carrie her Mr Big ending – even if the voiceover told us that "the most exciting, challenging and significant relationship of all is the one you have with yourself," it was while she got a call from the elusive commitment-phobe John James Preston (RIP).
Similarly, this final beat on the Greek (Malibu) beach tries to assert these women do not need these men and, frankly, don't care if they're here or not. But everything about the moment contradicts that, because the picture might be of two women living it up, but it's in the fairly depressing context of them waiting with bated breath for their partners to be ready to be with them.
The only reason Carrie and Seema are here together is because Aidan is busy putting Wyatt on the naughty step and Riva is barking from behind his vape at some overworked runner at the feet of the Sphinx.
We were meant to have had the single girls' trip to sunny climes earlier in the season, to the Hamptons, but the whole thing fell to pieces because of Aidan, showing how so much of what these women do is dictated by the men in their lives – even if they're at pains to try and prove that is not the case.
Carrie in particular has been framed like a war wife whose husband has gone off to the Western Front, now on tenterhooks awaiting his return.
This isn't to say And Just Like That can't pander to the predictable plotlines of romance, but trying to frame this as something other than an unreasonable Aidan taking Carrie for a chump and hitting pause on her for five full years feels disingenuous.
As with Sex and the City before it, And Just Like That has a profoundly hard time deciding what it wants for Carrie: to be or not to be single. When Aidan returned, we wondered what this lost love of yore could bring for a character whose on screen life sings when she's dating random cameo characters like Bradley Cooper or Justin Theroux.
This might be something And Just Like That's keepers have come to realise and so, in giving Aidan a Wyatt fandangle, they may be chancing on a single Carrie spell with a five-year expiry date to coupledom. If so, they again want it both ways.
And Just Like That is indeed coming back for a third season, so perhaps we will return to find Carrie has realised five years is in fact an unreasonably long time. Or maybe we'll return to a time jump to that Carrie and Aidan reunion.
Then again, if we come back to find Kim Cattrall has returned to the cast to take the Samantha mantle off wobbly Seema, maybe we won't even care much either way.
And Just Like That, the sequel to Sex and the City, airs on Max in the US and Sky Comedy and NOW in the UK.
Previously Deputy TV Editor at Digital Spy and, before that, a TV Reporter at The Mirror, Rebecca can now be found crafting expert analysis of the TV landscape, when she's not talking on the BBC or Times Radio about everything from the latest season of Bridgerton or The White Lotus to whatever chaos is unfolding in the various Love Island villas. When she's not bingeing a boxset, in-the-wild sightings of Rebecca have included stints on the National TV Awards and BAFTAs red carpets, and post-match video explainers of the reality TV we're all watching.
