This And Just Like That review was written during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. Without the labor of the writers and actors who are currently on strike, tv series like this one would not be possible, and Autostraddle is grateful for the artists who do this work. This And Just Like That recap contains spoilers for season two, episode ten, “The Last Supper Part One: Appetizer.”
If you’d told me when this season started that I was going to be more crigned out by Che Diaz than Aidan Shaw, I would have cackled in your face like one of those Hocus Pocus witches! Alas. Remember when that queer kitten rescuer, Toby, came into the vet’s office and flirted with Che, which made Che realize they still wanted to do stand-up? Well, Che has followed through with their dreams of chasing this queer Toby by working out a whole new set and booking a night at the comedy club.
For some truly ungodly reason, Che thinks it’s both hilarious and also a good wooing tactic to make their entire routine an absolute evisceration of their relationship with Miranda — and they’ve invited Carrie to partake in the fun of watching them drag her best friend to hell. Just one example of Che’s “jokes”: “We were both kind of in the same place: She was confused about everything, and I was confused about why I was fucking her.” It’s mean and not funny and unfortunately Carrie and Dr. Nya have kind of goaded Miranda into going to the show because she has a pattern of cutting her exes out of her life once the relationship is over.
Of course Miranda can’t sit there and watch the first queer person she ever had feelings for mock her sexual awakening and their relationship, which transformed her entire life, so she leaves in the middle of the performance. Che chases her out and they have a blow up about where Miranda’s saying “basic respect” and Che’s saying “artistic freedom,” and they think they’re having the same conversation, but they’re not, and really never were. Che leaves with Toby. Miranda’s never going to forgive them for this breech of trust, and I’m never going to forgive AJLT for doing this to Sara Ramirez, so that’s just another grudge me and Miranda have in common.
I should also mention that Che is wearing the literal jacket Kendall Roy wore to rehearse his performance for his disastrous 40th birthday party on Succession, the one that included him singing, rapping, and getting fake crucified on a wooden cross — so I guess maybe I’ll blame him for this. Maybe Che bought this thing at RealDeal and it was still haunted with Kendall’s twattery.
Carrie, who bumped into Steve down at his new clam/hot dog(?) restaurant on Coney Island, has decided to invite both him and Che to “The Last Supper,” which is what she’s calling the 16-person dinner she’s having catered by a Michelin starred chef in her old apartment before she moves. She really wants Miranda to attend, which is almost as infuriating as Che’s stand-up! Imagine Miranda having a dinner party and inviting Berger or something! Imagine her doing it in a place where her current partner WON’T EVEN STEP FOOT! Miranda would never! But Carrie Bradshaw is gonna Carrie Bradshaw, that much has always been true.
By the end of the episode, she’s rethinking this huge place she Aidan have purchased and also probably regretting selling her place to her cool downstairs neighbor, Lisette the Jewelry Designer, for fifty dollars. Aidan’s son, Wyatt, is 14 and has not been super happy with the fact that his dad keeps blowing off the family to fly to New York to be with his girlfriend every ten minutes. He gets into a fight with his mom, hitchhikes out to Aidan’s farm, drinks a bunch of beer, gets in Aidan’s truck, and wraps it around a tree. Big time broken bones (collar, legs), and Aidan has an absolute guilt-filled meltdown about how he failed his child. I don’t want to feel bad for him, but I do, because I have a horrible evolutionary trauma-induced reaction to other people crying. It makes me lose all sense of reason and dismiss every bad thing I ever thought about them. Goddammit! I hope Wyatt will be okay. I’ve been in that situation with my own dad, but without the drunk driving; it sucks. Also once Wyatt is healed I can go back to hating Aidan, and all will be right with the world.
Charlotte’s out here being a total boss at her gallery, selling extremely expensive art to actual Sam Smith, which is so impressive her co-workers want to take her out to celebrate. However! Her family has still not accepted that she is a career woman again, and they’re calling her nonstop at working asking her to bring forgotten notebooks to school, etc. She gets so fed up with their disrespect that she throws her phone into a pitcher of margaritas and when she gets home she yells at them that she was a WHOLE PERSON before she met/birthed any of them, and she’s gonna be a WHOLE PERSON again. Not just some side character mom/wife, thank you very much. Kristin Davis continues to steal this season for me.
Lisa Todd Wexley is having similar struggles with Herbert, but hers are exacerbated by the fact that she’s pregnant (and can’t have an abortion for some unnamed reason, which is weird). She yells at him in the night for not getting a vasectomy like she asked him to do after their last child. She’s so close to achieving a huge dream as a documentary filmmaker — how is she going to balance all this stuff and a newborn baby too? In the end, it becomes kind of a moot but heartbreaking argument, because LTW wakes up Herbert to tell him she’s miscarried.
At least things are going well for Miranda at work? Someone needs a W around here before we end this season. Oh, and speaking of endings: Stanford is a monk now. I don’t even want to get into it, but it’s a terrible send-off for Willie Garson, who died when the first season was filming. And just like that, it’s just incomprehensible!
Miranda has the worst luck at comedy shows. Also, why is everyone on Miranda’s ass about not talking to her exes. Let’s normalize never talking to be again if it genuinely does not serve you.
Seriously! Yes! There are plenty of legit reasons why someone wouldn’t want to remain friendly with an ex partner. If that is a boundary for Miranda then her friends should respect that.
Carrie was so wildly not understanding of Miranda not wanting to keep in touch with her exes, and she’s supposed to be straight!
Che was obviously a monster in their relationship, and I love Steve but AJLT version of his character has has monster vibes too. Why exactly should she be prioritizing her own happiness over either of them?
as someone who only knows this universe from eagerly reading the weekly recaps, i have to assume ‘clam/hotdog restaurant’ is code for sex somehow
I was happy to see Dolly Wells during Miranda’s U.N. trip. Hopefully casting a recognizable actress in that role means she’ll be back and maybe Miranda can finally move on from both Che and Steve (who should just stay in his clam/hot dog stand forever)!
I’m so tired of the miscarriage trope. It’s wild that in 2023, the only major character I can think of – who has actually has an abortion, by choice, solely because she does not want a child, and nothing bad happens to her as a result – is Cristina Yang from Grey’s Anatomy.
The only other one I can think of is Olivia Pope on Scandal.
Probably not a coincidence that both shows are part of Shondaland.
Agree. Sometimes women have abortions even when they are financially stable and in a relationship. But for whatever reason, they do not want to have a[nother] baby.
Che has always been a disgustingly selfish (and completely unfunny) person. Their behavior at the comedy show is exactly in keeping with the despicable person they have always been. Why in the world do they keep shoving this truly awful human being down our throats. During the street fight with Miranda, I kept hoping that a car was going to run Che over.
Here I was, Che starting to grow on me, thinking we might dig into their gender journey beyond Instagram infographic platitudes about “being non-binary,” and they had to go and revert back to their narcissistic sociopath ways!
How was the takeaway from their #ComedyConcert that they were totally right and making fun of somebody’s queer journey was totally cool?? Has this show learned nothing!!!
I cannot BELIEVE the gall, gumption & disrespect of Che mocking Miranda’s coming-out-journey like that. Just, wow. Especially since they themselves were until quite recently figuring out their own sexuality/identity, judging by the video Che’s watching of themselves do very heterocentric stand-up while still femme-presenting. If they want to mine their own life for jokes, why not focus on their disaster of a tv pilot? Were there no Hollywood network types to make fun of? No? Just their ex whose love for them awakened profound and life-changing realizations about herself? Ok nice.
Everything, absolutely everything about Che Diaz is brutal.
From the beginning of S1, I always thought that the take-home message re: Che was that comedians are self-centered before (if they are ever) funny. Including ones who hold marginalized identities. And this reading makes this character much more believable to me.
I also never understood why Che was into Miranda and I don’t think the series explained it well at all – thus we get Che joking (read: confessing this) onstage.
Carrie has always been a selfish friend. But I think she was right about Miranda not excommunicating Steve, since she doesn’t have a reason to avoid him.
They couldn’t even say “abortion” this time! At least when Miranda was deciding whether to carry Brady they actually, you know, said the word.
Also, losing my mind at the Anthony and Stanford storylines this episode. Who is coming up with these?!
Are we supposed to hate Che at this point? Because I definitely do. I came out later in life and I would have died if the first person I had queer feelings for irl, did this to me. And the first person I was with was also a dickhead. It wasn’t even like Miranda ended things poorly with them so why the attack? Not that that would have justified it. Mocking someones coming out story is just an evil thing to do, especially when you were in a relationship with that person. The person who moved across the country to be with you. Like…..just disgusting.
And who in their right mind would approach Che after that performance and still want to get to know them? Point to Toby. I’d be like, damn dude you have problems, g2g.
Once again, Charlotte steals the show. Her and Harry remain my favorite couple.
Last week I posted that Che and their cute baby animals were starting to grow on me…. And Just Like That they’re now one of the most disgustingly awful characters and love interests in SATC/AJLT history. And THAT is saying something!
I don’t understand what the point of that storyline was. Do the writers really think freedom of expression and the standup profession gives someone a free license to totally obliterate another person’s coming out journey, insecurities, and sexuality in public for their own success and declared self-expression? Especially since Che, who just sat through listening to a test group of people rip into their performance and telling of life story as a non-binary actor and lost their show over it, all of which sent them into a tail spin of depression and self-doubt. Are they that one dimensional? This is the problem with bad writing, I can’t tell who the writers think is in the right here. Surely they don’t think Che is and it’s romantic that Toby feeds into their narcissism??
And why does Miranda owe her exes anything? This feels too much like putting the guilt on women/partner and forcing them meet the patriarch relationship standards that states they must act a certain way or owe them something. Like Carrie giving up her apartment because Aiden doesn’t want to be mad at her… dude. Go to therapy and work on that. That’s a you problem, not a Carrie problem.
And LTW storyline this week felt like it was straight up out of the late-90s and 00s. When shows wanted to do a bold pregnancy storyline and would float the idea of an abortion, without ever saying the actual word, but then conveniently miscarriage so the problem was solved by the end of the program without actually having to do an actual abortion storyline.
Last week I said the show was starting to give me just a smatter of old SATC feelings… apparently that took a hard lean into that and just went straight into the old school mindset… and not in a sweet nostalgic way.
LTW’s husband’s statement that he would be there to “help” really go my goat.
You’re going to “help” parent and raise the child that you made equally 50/50 with your wife?
Excuse you sir.