‘And Just Like That’ Season 2 Episode 7 Recap: Great Sexpectations

There are two things we have long known to be true about And Just Like That... Season 2. The first is that Kim Cattrall filmed a cameo – alone, dressed by Pat Field – that will be a part of one of the final episodes of the season. The second is that Carrie would be reconnecting with her ex-fiancé, Aidan Shaw (John Corbett) in some way. While we’re still waiting for Samantha Jones, we finally got our Aidan 2.0 storyline and it was as bittersweet as you can imagine. More sweet than bitter, and the perfect way to cap off a Valentine’s Day-themed episode.

There were a half-dozen great lines delivered throughout the episode (and a few that I wish never to speak of again) that felt true to the original show, so I’ll use the best ones to dive into each story:

“Lesbian Miranda is A LOT.”

Miranda, now broken up from Che, begins the episode unsure if she’s a lesbian or not, all she knows is that she loved non-binary Che for their mind (and walking-in-L.A. jokes?) and she’s not sure what category that puts her in on the myriad dating sites or in real life. While at a Brooklyn bookstore with Nya, she stumbles upon a voiceover artist named Amelia Carsey who is doing a dramatic reading of Pride and Predjudice, and Miranda is drawn to the woman’s voice, red pantsuit, and Big Austen Energy. Amanda is big with the Audible crowd, Miranda included; Miranda instantly recognizes her voice and is aurally seduced.

She flirts with Amelia, who appears put-together, smart, and charming during the day, but when they make a real date, it turns out Amanda seems to have take a cue less from Jane Austen and more from Andie Anderson in How To Lose A Guy in 10 Days and comes across as a clueless, slobbish hot mess, as if she were actively trying to turn Miranda off.

When Miranda arrives at Amelia’s apartment, it’s tiny, the litter box is in the middle of the room, causing Amelia to step in cat poop, and the bed has no sheets because they’re still in the laundry room drying and Amelia doesn’t have enough quarters for them. This is all incredibly over-the-top, but credit to actress Miriam Shor for leaning in to the cat-litter-in-her-Birkenstocks situation and really milking it. When Amanda is out of the room, Miranda frantically calls Carrie who asks, “Well, do you have to stay?”

“I don’t,” Miranda realizes. “35-year-old straight Miranda would stay, but 56-year-old lesbian Miranda wouldn’t!” and off she scurries.

This is the most confident and self-possessed that we’ve seen Miranda thus far this season, and this storyline also brought us a wordplay volley for the ages between Carrie and Miranda when Miranda explained her sexual awakening.

“Seriously, her name’s Carsey?” Carrie asks Miranda. “Is Ms. Carsey your Mr. Darcy?”

When Miranda then explains to Carrie that she’s only looking for a hot one-night stand, Carrie says, “So you have great… sexpectations? I know that’s Dickens but I can’t pun Mansfield Park.”

“I’m done with Dickens,” Miranda declares, finally realizing maybe this is the nature of her sexuality.

“Wow. Lesbian Miranda is A LOT,” Carrie concludes. I will gladly take Single Miranda’s Lesbian Awakening over Miranda, Che’s Girlfriend any day of the week.

“I’m having a mevening.”

Nya Wallace, do not make “mevening” happen. When Nya’s other friends suggest they all go out for girls’ night on Valentine’s Day knowing it’s the first one Nya will be living through as a divorced woman, Nya rejects their invite, telling them she plans to make herself a chocolate soufflé and enjoy the night alone. “I’m having a mevening,” she explains. (If that doesn’t read well on paper, it’s a portmanteau of me + evening and I hate it. Nya doesn’t get much to do this season, but I appreciate that with her one minute of screen time, she relishes her time to herself.

“Hot, hot, hawt.”

Remember how Anthony built a thriving bakery business, Hotfellas, during Covid? Well, it turns out that Drew Barrymore herself is a fan of his bread and wants to have him and one of his beefy, buff delivery men on her show on Valentine’s Day. But after Anthony learns that all of his employees use HGH to artificially enhance their muscles, he fires them all. (Not sure why, as they’re not competitive bread delivery men, but alas, now that Drew is calling he explains, “I run a clean business. It’s a morning show, orange juice and juiceheads do not go together.”

With no hotties to join in at Drew, Charlotte finds a sexy Italian poet named Giuseppe who can fill out the uniform… and boy does he ever fill it out. Like, he is smuggling baguettes over here. Giuseppe flummoxes Drew and everyone else, but he also helps Hotfellas’ business explode, so Anthony begs him to stay on as an employee, at least temporarily.

“That’s not so much a booby trap as it is a booty trap.”

LTW’s arch nemesis this week is for once, not a canceled car service, it’s her son Herbert Jr.’s girlfriend Baxter, whom LTW thinks is too handsy with her son. When LTW and Herbert don’t allow Herbert Jr. to enjoy Valentine’s Day in a suite at the Mandarin, they compromise, allowing him to stay home. But Lisa, who Herbert Jr. calls “uptight” (oh yes, he did), thinks this is just a license for him and Baxter to have sex in her bed, which she booby, I mean booty traps. When LTW returns from dinner, the traps, and her son, are untouched. It turns out, Baxter is less interested in sex with Herbert Jr. than she is with taking photos with all of Lisa’s purses and posting the pics to Insta. For Lisa, it’s not the sex that’s throwing her, it’s Baxter’s boundary-pushing. And now, taking photos with Lisa’s purses?? That is a bridge too far.

“Hollywood broke up with me, Judy.”

I had hoped we wouldn’t need to discuss Che anymore, but they’re still being thrown a storyline about being a dog…rescue…person? After a lunch with Carrie, she and Che walk out of a restaurant and Che asks Carrie if Miranda’s ghosting them. Carrie suggests that yeah, maybe Miranda is, and Che gruffly explains that she needs Miranda to come get a box of her shit out of Che’s Hudson Yards apartment they can’t afford, because they plan to Airbnb it. As they’re explaining this, a tiny stray dog scurries in front of them and under a car. Che coaxes it out despite Carrie’s protests, to which Che responds, “It’s okay, I used to do this.” “Do what?” Carrie – and all of us – ask. Che returns the dog to a rescue where they used to work and their old boss, Judy, asks if Che wants their old job back. And now I guess we’re going to have to endure a few episodes of Che-sar Milan, the Dog Whisperer.

“Real Dance Mom vibes.”

Charlotte, the most Valentine-loving of everyone, is the only one who doesn’t really get to enjoy her V-Day, on account of a pot brownie situation gone wrong. When Lily, now broken up with her virginity-taking boyfriend Blake, decides to throw an “F the Boys” party with some new school friends, Charlotte obliges and tells Harry they have to leave the house for the night to give Lily some space. Lily’s had a rough go of it at school as a result of some mean seniors making fun of her original music (“Saw that one coming… A song called ‘The Power of Privilege’ practically has a ‘Kick Me’ sign on its back,” Harry states.) So before dinner, she pops a brownie, made by one of Lily’s new pals who definitely infused it with something, and by the time she gets to the restaurant, she’s out of her mind on THC. “I suddenly feel really weird,” Charlotte says. “I can feel my blood.” In the pantheon of scenes where characters are tripping balls, this is on the lowest end (nowhere near Party Down‘s “KSGY-95 Prizewinner’s Luau” episode or Broad City‘s “Mushrooms”) but for Charlotte, it kinda shakes her to her core.

Earlier in the day, Charlotte was busy shuttling Rock around town from one modeling agency to another, and when they got home, Rock, who doesn’t really care about the Ralph Lauren ad and their modeling career, told Charlotte, “You were kind of gross today. Real Dance Mom vibes,” and explains that they don’t want to be a model or have a momager. Adding to that, Lily literally threw Charlotte out of the house when Charlotte brought her and her friends a cake for the F the Boys party, and Charlotte is feeling unappreciated and in need of a change.

If Miranda can rebrand as a lesbian and if Carrie can reunite with an ex, Charlotte can also return to the life she led before kids. “Honey, when I was in that ambulance, my life flashed before me and I didn’t like what I saw,” she tells Harry. She’s a momager and a maid, and she’s frustrated. “I’m going to call Mark Kasabian,” she tells Harry, referring to the gallery-owner played by Victor Garber whom Charlotte met at LTW’s anniversary party and offered her a job. “I have got to get back to me and that’s not just the pot talking.”

“Fuck it. This is New York. They have hotels, right?”

In a scene that feels ripped from the original series, Carrie, Charlotte and Miranda enjoy a fancy lunch while Carrie reveals that Aidan, who has responded to her email, asked her to dinner on Valentine’s Day. Charlotte suggests he’d only be asking Carrie out on Valentine’s Day if he was single, because if he had a girlfriend, he’d be spending Valentine’s with her.

When Carrie arrives at the restaurant promptly at 8 p.m. and there’s no sign of Aidan, she worries she might be stood up. 8:07… 8:20… still no Aidan. Finally, she gets a call and it turns out, he’s wondering where she is, because he’s been seated at a table at the restaurant next door for a half-hour. Carrie heads outside and when she turns around, there he is, dressed in a belted jacket that gives Canadian Mountie vibes, with that peaceful Aidan smile on his face.

They hug, and it is the warmest hug you’ve ever seen. His entire presence is a warm hug. “I thought you stood me up,” he tells her. “I thought you stood me up,” she replies. “We’re on the same page,” he says. “We’re on the same page,” she repeats.

Their conversation flows easily, and they end up taking a cab back to her place, which, remember, also used to be his place. He freezes at the sight of it and everything changes. “This feels really great, we’re back where we started, but this is where we ended,” he tells her. “That’s all bad, it’s all in there,” he says, and it seems like he’s ready to cut his losses then and there and leave. Carrie reminds him, “It wasn’t all bad, was it, Aidan?” and she begs him to stay, to reconsider that they shared some good memories inside that place, too.

“I’m never going in there again,” he tells her.

And after a moment of reconsideration, Aidan says, “Fuck it. This is New York, they have hotels, right?”

“And just like that, Aidan and I were back on the same page,” Carrie says as they kiss.

As Carrie said in last week’s episode, while reading her book to a room full of widows, “You don’t move on because you’re ready to, you move on because you’ve outgrown who you used to be.” The thing that kept Carrie and Aidan apart, the thing that divided them, was that Carrie used to be in love with another man. It wasn’t the apartment or incompatibility. It was her obsession with Big. Now that she’s outgrown who she used to be, maybe she’s finally made some space for Aidan. We all liked him better than Big anyway.

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.