[This story contains major spoilers to the season two finale of And Just Like That, “The Last Supper Part Two: Entrée.”]
When the And Just Like That writers started chatting about the end of the season two finale, even they admitted they were dreading reliving the conversation between Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker) and Aidan (John Corbett), the former love of her life with whom she reconciled with earlier in the season.
“She looks out the window and there is Aidan, throwing a rock up at the window, much like she threw a rock up at his window in Sex and the City when she visited him at night after his second return,” said showrunner/writer/director Michael Patrick King about the callback in episode 11, “The Last Supper Part Two: Entrée.” King, speaking on Max’s official companion podcast for the series, And Just Like That … The Writers Room with EPs Julie Rottenberg and Elisa Zuritsky and producers/writers Susan Fales-Hill and Samantha Irby, explained that Aidan coming up to Carrie’s apartment in the finale — a place he vehemently told her he would never return to, due to their history there — was not a good sign.
“The plot point is simply that Aidan believes now that bad things happen if he’s not there,” said King of Aidan’s decision to call off his long-distance commitment with Carrie in order to be present for his three sons after 14-year-old Wyatt’s very serious, drug-induced car accident. “He admits to her that he’s really the home for these three boys and that’s who he’s always been, and that this kid, Wyatt, had psilocybin in his system, he had been on mushrooms and drunk.”
King and the writers explained how this conversation revealed their ultimate plan for Carrie’s relationship in season two, which could be looked at as a make good of sorts for viewers of the original series who felt that Carrie broke Aidan’s heart (as he famously told her in the original series).
“We are now building the case for what becomes the plot of what we decided to do the entire second season which is: We’re bringing Aidan back, she’s not going to hurt him because she knows she can’t — and we also don’t want the fans to think we did that again — so he’s going to hurt her,” said King. “And the only way we knew that he would ever pull away from her is if the bigger love — and every parent would assume that this is a bigger love — is the responsibility and your love for your children.”
Aidan asks Carrie to wait five years so he can continue to be the primary parent to his youngest child. “He says to her — and this will be the debatable point — ‘Can you give me time until Wyatt is out of his teens?’ She goes, ‘That’s six years.’ And then he desperately says, ‘It’s five; his birthday is next week.’ But the question is: What is happening right now?” continued King of Aidan telling Carrie he can’t continue splitting his time between Virginia and Manhattan. “He snaps [his fingers] and says, ‘It’s only five years. We haven’t seen each other in 10 years and it went by like that (snaps). And five years …’ and he doesn’t snap he says because, ‘I already did and you didn’t see it; that’s how quick it was.’”
The episode then goes into an intimate montage for all the starring characters, a callback to how the season opened: Charlotte (Kristin Davis) and husband Harry (Evan Handler) are back working as a team; Miranda (Cynthia Nixon), Che (Sara Ramirez), Anthony (Mario Cantone) and Nya (Karen Pittman) each pursue potential new relationships; and LTW (Nicole Ari Parker) and husband Herbert (Chris Jackson) close the montage tenderly following her miscarriage, cementing themselves as an essential couple on the series.
Seema (Sarita Choudhury) and Carrie (Parker) end the second season together in Greece.
Max
Meanwhile Seema (Sarita Choudhury) and Carrie, though each has decided to let go and wait for their loves to return (in Seema’s case, she’s waiting five months for her filmmaker boyfriend, played by Armin Amiri, to return from a shoot), their final scenes in bed with their partners are light ones.
Of Carrie and Aidan, King said, “It’s the most open I’ve ever seen those two actors. They’re naked and they’re open and it’s fun. And that’s the thing that’s so interesting about how they played it. They’re deeply connected, but it’s not like, ‘I’m holding on to you because I’ll never see you again.’ This whole last night in this bed that they’ve never slept in, they’re just there with each other.”
But the season actually ends on what King called a hopeful note, with Carrie and Seema drinking cosmopolitans on the beach in Greece. “We wanted to end with that moment of believing the truth that [Carrie and Aidan] made that connection, and it’s going to stay there,” said King, sharing that he knew the final shot would be on Carrie and Seema, and not Carrie and Aidan.
“Our only little tip to you, the audience, the people who are watching this and wondering what we’re thinking,” he continued, “there’s a little tiny thread of what we’re thinking at the end [when] Seema says, ‘Well, we ran at love, where did it get us? In Greece. I’m waiting five months and you’re waiting five years,’ and Carrie says, ‘Well, I may get some time off with good behavior.’ You would only say that if you already were going, ‘It’s not going to be five years.’ She’s very cute. But then she does move on to say there will be others.”
He added, “We try to sometimes end with these poetic lines … and when I tried to write something poetic for this it was just too forced, so I thought, ‘What’s the most poetic thing Carrie Bradshaw can do?’ She orders two more drinks and says, ‘And just like that, I ordered two more cosmopolitans.’”
And Just Like That was renewed for a third season ahead of the season two finale, with work on the next season at a halt amid the ongoing WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. When speaking to The Hollywood Reporter before season two launched, the three original stars/executive producers all said they were on board to make more episodes of And Just Like That. They also said former co-star Kim Cattrall’s much-buzzed-about finale cameo as Samantha was unlikely to usher in the fourth original character returning in a big way; they and King called it a gift to the audience for the show’s 25th anniversary and said they were disappointed it leaked ahead of time, instead of surprising fans who tuned in.
King and the writers briefly addressed Cattrall’s fleeting appearance on the podcast. “Of course, it was a huge [spoiler] that the Samantha call leaked because my goal for us was to have Carrie pick up her phone, look at it, see the word ‘Samantha’ and have the audience’s head blow off,” said King, explaining how Samantha would never miss Carrie’s goodbye dinner to her apartment. “It’s hard to not imagine that Samantha would have gotten a call from Charlotte and Miranda saying, ‘Hey, Carrie’s doing the last supper and this time, it’s real; she’s leaving this apartment.’ Always in my multiverse of And Just Like That, Sex and the City, they were always talking. Always. Texting and talking. And not just Carrie, but Samantha and Miranda and Charlotte. But we laid off the texting this season because I felt we were going to the well too much.”
Kim Cattrall as Samantha in the season two finale.
Max
Poor weather in London grounds Samantha’s flight (she is “fucking furious!”) and when Carrie suggests they go out the next night, she is touched to hear that Samantha was making a one-night-only trip to not miss her friend’s sentimental evening. “You realize, oh, it’s casual. It’s not some giant moment when they’re talking,” said King. “It’s really the friendship.”
Then comes another callback, this time, as King pointed out, it’s a 20-year echo to the Soho House pool for the name Samantha gives Carrie as her British alter-ego: Annabelle Bronstein. “Then the phone call is over and something amazing happens when they say goodbye, which is Samantha kisses the phone. Which was not in the script,” said King. (Cattrall and Parker did not cross paths while filming the scene, as has been reported.) “It’s just totally a moment of an actor playing a moment, and it’s really nice.”
