‘And Just Like That’ Season 2 Episode 5 Recap: Che-denfreude

The seasons on And Just Like That… appear to be changing quickly: last week, it was the beginning of summer, a time of kids being in camp and Harry celebrating the Fourth of July with fireworks (finally) erupting from his penis, but this week, it’s already Halloween! The perfect opportunity for a charity costume party, thrown by Charlotte. I’d like to thank the writers of this episode for using this as an opportunity to not only give us an excellent TLC-based dancing scene between LTW and Anthony, but also by making this episode an homage to The Americans. I’ve said it before, but I do think Charlotte is getting some of the best storylines this season, and I’m here for her obsessive Keri Russell fandom.

At the party, Carrie is dressed in her ’70s best as Helen Gurley Brown, while Charlotte and a wig-wearing Harry have perfected the art of the couples costume no one will understand by dressing as Elizabeth and Phillip Jennings, the spies on The Americans. (“It was on FX for seven seasons?” we later hear a frustrated Harry explain to a man dressed as Batman.) LTW is dressed as the Bride of Frankenstein, and she’s disappointed when Herbert, now a candidate for City Comptroller ,finally arrives but isn’t wearing the George Washington costume she rented. (I see you and your Hamilton references, AJLT!) Herbert calls her out for being “undignified” while doing a killer dance to TLC’s “Creep” and she calls him out for letting his campaign turn him into a fun-killer. (To make it up to her at home, he dons the George Washington costume and they have some apology sex, like our Founding Fathers would have wanted.)

At the party, Seema offers to take her fellow singles, Nya and Carrie, to her favorite place to meet men, a fancy hotel bar.

When they do go out, Nya meets a man named Ian that she has an off-camera tryst with, while Seema meets a guy with erectile dysfunction who uses a penis pump. This was not information volunteered to her when she agreed to go back to his room.

The next day, while Carrie is listening to Seema describe her night with the ED guy, she stops in the middle of a bike lane and a cyclist swerves to avoid her and he falls. Carrie offers to bring him to urgent care. (I do love the fact that Carrie only knows there’s a nearby urgent care on 14th Street because she once saw an Olsen twin go in, which is a classic New York City way to identify points of interest. I once saw Debbie Harry eating chips and salsa in a since-closed Burritoville, something that happened 20 years ago and is always at the top of my mind.)

Carrie is apologetic to a fault, and her guilt is made worse when she sees that the man, whose name is George Campbell (Peter Hermann), has not only broken his wrist, but his credit card is declined when he tries to pay for the medical care. Carrie assumes he’s poor, so she tracks him down to bring him a huge lunch spread as an apology (and also because, I guess she thinks he’s literally starving?). But when she enters his palatial house on East 29th St. in Manhattan’s Murray Hill neighborhood, which is a safe haven for tech bros, she learns he too is a tech bro. He makes apps. He’s not broke. He just closed out his credit card for fraud. Despite seeing how well he lives, Carrie proceeds to explain that she thought he was poor, which seems unnecessary, but that is why she brought him 5 kinds of soup.

Carrie is charmed by not-poor George and sparks fly, but literally any time they try to kiss, they’re interrupted by George’s own fun-killer, his business partner Paul, who seems to take work much more seriously than George. Carrie’s short-lived fling with George ends when Paul calls looking for a pitch deck that was supposed to be messengered to him (A hard copy of a deck? What decade is this?) , which George forgot to do, and Paul, on FaceTime, screams at George and then tries to explain to Carrie that George is the creative one and he’s the business guy. None of this explains why Paul is so mean and angry at George all the time, but Carrie realizes Paul and George are work spouses. George explains they’re like Lennon and McCartney (a metaphor that feels complicated by the fact that the writers named the characters Paul and George – maybe don’t give everyone in this scenario the name of a Beatle?), but Carrie, who clearly didn’t watch The Beatles: Get Back, says that makes her Yoko and she’s not here for it, walking out on George.

Perhaps I’ve buried the lede, but I think Che and Miranda’s relationship is crumbling in this episode. Normally I’d start with this, but I got my hopes up in episode 3 that this might happen when Miranda lefts Che for New York, and nothing came of that, so I don’t want to get jerked around too much. Miranda is in limbo, spending much of her time in Che’s Hudson Yards apartment, but waking up at 5am to go see Brady in Brooklyn, and then heading uptown to Columbia for her classes. It’s not sustainable to keep commuting like this, so Miranda gets an offer from Nya to live in her spare room whenever she needs it. And she does need it, because things with Che start to sour. 46-year-old Che stays up till 4am playing video games and smoking pot with their friends while Miranda is trying to sleep, and no, I’m not shaming Che for the video games or pot, more for the fact that they’re this disrespectful to the person they love. This is just fucking rude behavior, but then again, Che seems to openly disdain almost everything Miranda does, for five episodes now, it’s been painful watching Miranda endure Che’s dismissive and constantly belittling comments.

But since I’m already annoyed by Che, I will say, the moment that Che sat in on the focus group for their sitcom was some real schadenfreude, a gift to an audience that has suffered through Che Pasa and walking-in-L.A. standup and now, the show is holding up a mirror to us, acknowledging what we’ve been saying all along. I don’t know a ton about audience testing, but I think it’s safe to say that it is rare that the actual talent sits in to watch what the focus groups say. But Che does, and it’s devastating.

After a group consisting mostly of Times Square tourists watched Che Pasa, they have nothing but positive things to say about Tony Danza and his hair, but the one genderqueer young adult from Brooklyn volunteered that the “Che character” is “a walking Boomer joke that felt so fake,” and Che Pasa is “a phony, sanitized, performative, cheesy-ass dad joke, bullshit version of what the non-binary experience is. It sucked.” Are they literally ripping this dialogue from the real-life Instagram comments?

Adding to the meta-ness, the focus group tester then said, “Also, they would not be able to afford an apartment that big in Bushwick,” which is exactly what I said about Che’s Hudson Yards apartment that they just moved into. When Che cries to Miranda that their target audience, the non-binary Brooklyn crowd, hated the show, they wonder how they’ll be able to keep living in their new space. I’m sorry, wait, you moved into an apartment before you got paid? Che is a red flag wrapped in a warning sign wrapped in a dealbreaker. They are a literal turducken of relationship-killers.

Miranda tries to be encouraging in the most annoying ways possible and Che is not having it. Che asks Miranda for space (the sweetest words ever spoken), and Miranda obliges, and I think we’re all hoping Miranda finally sees that this relationship is on a staircase to nowhere, much like that big pine cone in the middle of Hudson Yards.

As much as I love Charlotte, she peaked early this episode with her hyping up of The Americans. Her eventual storyline, encouraging Rock to be a Ralph Lauren model, felt thin. Charlotte is in favor of Rock being a part of a new ad campaign, while Harry is against it, fearing it will be exploitative. When Charlotte takes Rock to the shoot, Harry shows up wearing his Matthew Rhys wig and asking a crew member weird stuff like, “What’s gonna be on that green screen? Something dirty or sexy or what?” It’s insane. Charlotte stops Harry before he creeps everyone else out and explains that he needs to let her be the fun parent for once, but if Rock sees him in his creepy costume, they’re going to lose trust in him. So Harry slinks back, realizing Charlotte’s right.

For the most part, this episode was solid, but made better by the show’s acknowledgement of Ches terribleness. Miranda is definitely waking up to the fact that she and Che are very different people, Carrie proved she’s still open to reentering the dating world, and we learned that Charlotte and Harry love prestige TV. The one plot that was most ridiculous was Seema’s. After sleeping with the guy who needed a penis pump, she continued to see him, despite how awkward his pump was. But the moment Seema pulled out her vibrator, he freaked out. “Not cool!” he screamed as he fumbled out of her bed, naked.

As annoying as that plot was, it also felt true to the original show and Seema, seeming to embrace the Samantha Jones mantra “I love you but I love me more,” proceeded to self-love herself more with her vibrator despite her date’s objections.

The And Just Like That… of it all:

The episode ends on Carrie’s breakup, with her saying saying, “And just like that, George and I were over, but at least I got back up on the bike.” But if it were me, I would have ended the episode on Seema’s scene and leaned hard into the puns. “And just like that… Seema learned that a hard man is good to find, but a good man is harder to find.” Listen, I’m just spit-balling, take it or leave it. But I am available if Michael Patrick King and Co. ever need someone for their focus group.

Liz Kocan is a pop culture writer living in Massachusetts. Her biggest claim to fame is the time she won on the game show Chain Reaction.