“And Just Like That” exits with a woman alone at the end of her story

Our last holiday meal with Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker) and Miranda Hobbes (Cynthia Nixon) on “And Just Like That” opens with hope and ends, strangely enough, with validation. Between those extremes, poop happens. A dinner for 13 guests planned by Miranda and her son Brady (Niall Cunningham) suddenly shrinks to six, including Carrie, three adult toddlers who never learned manners, and Mark Kasabian (Victor Garber), a wealthy, single gallery owner whom an absent Charlotte (Kristin Davis) secretly decides to foist on Carrie.

Mark is awkward and can’t read Carrie’s subtle signals of disinterest, a classic “Sex and the City” lost cause.

But the moment that drives him away also demonstrates the moral of the story. Mark flushes Miranda’s toilet and it overflows, sending a previous occupant’s feces all over the tile. He rushes out, awkwardly alerts his hostess of the situation, assures her he’s not the culprit and hastily departs in disgust.

Carrie, however, can’t help but smile. We’ve watched her fret about spending life alone for most of the previous two episodes, and here is an eligible, wealthy bachelor who thinks he has a shot with her. But he exits as soon as the going gets crappy in a very real way, marking him as another man who refuses to roll up his sleeves and help bail a lady out of a tough situation.

Miranda manages the clean-up solo, and Carrie has the answer that’s eluded her all this time. Left on her own, a woman can handle the worst surprises just fine.

(Craig Blankenhorn/Max) Cynthia Nixon in “And Just Like That”

“And Just Like That” is a high-profile test case of how a property rich with promise and goodwill of its fans can squander nearly all of it by grasping to recreate the magic of a long-gone past. “Sex and the City” was a late ‘90s fantasy long wrung out by generational reappraisals and a prequel series, “The Carrie Diaries,” barely worth remembering.

This spinoff launched in 2021 on a wave of yearning for escapism and gentle nostalgia, both of which series creator Michael Patrick King and his writers leaned on too heavily without adequately thinking about what life for Carrie, Miranda and Charlotte would be like today. The most glaring and awkward update was to have Miranda and Charlotte force themselves into the lives of Karen Pittman’s Dr. Nya Wallace and Nicole Ari Parker‘s Lisa Todd Wexley, because they needed nonwhite friends. (Pittman wisely peaced out after the second season.) Sarita Choudhury’s Seema fit more naturally into Carrie’s life since both are single, and Carrie missed Samantha. Didn’t we all.

The show got rid of Mr. Big (Chris Noth) straightaway, only to squander his widow’s shot at a fresh start by returning Aidan (John Corbett) to the mix and stalling out our girl’s momentum. Throw in Miranda’s temporary madness with Sara Ramirez’s nonbinary, not funny comic Che, and this midtown express rattled off the rails well into the third season.

Eventually, Miranda found her Joy (Dolly Wells) while Carrie found satisfaction in trading her Upper East Side jewel box for a Gramercy Park pre-war palace. (That the character most worth cherishing in his series is a piece of real estate is telling.) She made this upgrade with Aidan in mind, a man who would have never matched the interior. But the new place also inspired a historical work of autofiction about a character only identified as “the woman” set in 1846.

Once she and Aidan were finished, so was the woman’s love story. But even this offered the writers a fresh page. Once Carrie shares her manuscript with her editor, Amanda (Ashlie Atkinson), her reader takes issue with the book ending on the image of the woman standing alone in her garden.

Certainly normal by today’s standards, Amanda admits, but in the 19th century, a woman alone at the end of the story, she says, “would be a tragedy, would it not?”

This is the question that should have guided “And Just Like That” two seasons ago. Imagine what that show could have been like! Alas, imagining is all we can do now, since all further adventures for Carrie and company will take place in our heads and fanfic forums.

“And Just Like That” takes its permanent leave of us on Thanksgiving, a beloved occasion for overindulgence for most, just another Thursday for pragmatists, scoffers and heathens like Adam (Logan Marshall-Green), Carrie’s gardener and Seema’s lover.

Granted, “Party of One” isn’t a terrible way for this show to exit. Rather, it hints at all the show’s underutilized possibilities.

The day was originally billed as gathering all our favorites around the table at Miranda’s new apartment, but, for various reasons, everyone else bowed out to do their own thing. It’s just as well, since Miranda invited Mia (Ella Stiller), the deeply unpleasant, gassy woman Brady knocked up and who, like him, has no interest in a relationship.

Anthony (Mario Cantone), newly engaged to Giuseppe (Sebastiano Pigazzi), decides to stay at his place so he can try to call the whole thing off, fearing that his younger fiancé wants a caretaker.

(Craig Blankenhorn/Max) Sarita Choudhury and Logan Marshall-Green in “And Just Like That”

Charlotte Goldenblatt (Kristin Davis) and Harry (Evan Handler) renege because Harry doesn’t want a stranger’s food; also, after weeks of complaining about the sad state of his flaccid meat, it finally stands at attention. This calls for a different kind of stuffing than the side dish Charlotte drops off at Miranda’s later on. Unfortunately, in all her excitement, Charlotte forgot to alert Mark to that cancellation.

Lisa Todd Wexley sends her regrets, choosing to cook and soothe her husband Herbert’s (Chris Jackson) depression after his election loss. Carrie, who orders way too much pie for the occasion, delivers desserts to all the party shirkers, and the last we see of LTW and Herbert is them enjoying carbs and each other’s company.

Elsewhere, this particular Thursday ends with Miranda and Joy eating their dessert slices, a sweeter close to a day that began for Joy at the emergency vet because one of her dogs swallowed a children’s toy. Where Charlotte’s saving grace is that her character remained largely unchanged, Miranda’s chaotic shift into a middle-aged awakening to her queerness was torture. This outcome grants Nixon’s character some grace and the relief that she’s found herself again.

But we’ll miss Seema more than the rest. The long-suffering veteran of the midlife singles scene has found her person and exchanged “I love yous,” only to slam into the reality that Adam may never marry her. She mentions her plan to attend a bridal fashion show with Charlotte, LTW and Carrie, and he snidely deems marriage to be a joke, urinating as he says it to accentuate his disdain.

Up to this moment, Adam has accepted Seema as she is, although for a short spell, he tried to get her to trade in her deodorant for some crystal nonsense. One of the things that does it for her is the way he works out an erogenous zone in her armpit.

(Craig Blankenhorn/Max) Kristin Davis and Nicole Ari Parker in “And Just Like That”

But this exchange opens a very real and painful conversation during the fashion show — a very nice goodbye kiss for all the fans who watched for the fits. Viewing all the bridal gowns inspires Seema to wonder aloud whether her wedding dreams are residual programming from her girlhood, or if she’s right to want to wear one of those dresses someday.

“I feel Adam,” she tells Carrie. “I’ve felt him more than I’ve felt any other man. But do I feel chosen by him? Is that even his responsibility? Or is it a flaw in me?” We could have spent a few episodes investigating that with her. That will never happen.

A few seats down, a disillusioned LTW cynically wonders whether weddings and marriages are ever about women like them instead of their husbands: “It’s about their feelings, their disappointments. What to say, what not to say.”

Then she asks Charlotte, “If you knew what you know now – like, the way it really is — would you still get married? “

Charlotte naturally answers without a pause, “Oh, absolutely.”

“Me too,” LTW says with a smile.

So yeah, sure — the secret to happiness in relationships is compromising one’s desires, which is not the note we might have expected the “Sex and the City” universe to close on. Still, the louder message that life will go on for Carrie and her fabulous friends – contentedly, in the main – isn’t a terrible way to go. But by ending where it should have functionally started, our fashionable novelist leaves viewers wanting, too.

This is something of a habit with this show and this universe, where enough is never truly enough. “Sex and the City” at least managed to eke out a satisfactory close by providing the illusion of Carrie choosing herself and getting Big in the bargain. In a voiceover soliloquy about relationships, she lands on the realization that the most exciting, challenging and significant relationship of all is the one you have with yourself. “And if you find someone who loves the you you love, that’s just fabulous.”

All these years later, Carrie waits for the show’s last gasp to wrestle with the question that has defined modern dating for millions of single people. “Who will I be alone? Yes, I’ve lived alone a lot, but I’ve never lived alone without the thought that I wouldn’t be alone for long,” she tells Charlotte in “Forgot About the Boy,” the second-to-last episode functioning as the first installment of the two-part series finale.

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Carrie goes on to explain that after the shock and the total devastation of Big’s death, “I thought, ‘Aidan, maybe Aidan.’”

Then came Duncan (Jonathan Cake), her downstairs neighbor and writing partner with whom she enjoyed a one-time sex collab before he headed back to England. Permanently. He was very clear about that. And yet, she still hoped.

“I have to quit thinking, ‘Maybe a man,’ and start accepting, ‘Maybe just me,’” Carrie concludes. “And it’s not a tragedy. It’s a fact. And I have to start accepting it, full stop.”

During that same episode, King and his co-writer, Susan Fales-Hill, answered the question of whether Carrie could go home with a solid no. They achieved that by having her attend a soiree at her old place, only to find that the young woman to whom she sold it, Lisette (Katerina Tannenbaum), has divided it into two spaces she shares with a fellow artist. It wasn’t about the rent, she explains. She simply didn’t want to live by herself.

Carrie can relate. And yet, King’s reluctance to test the extent of his lead’s self-love and rekindle her dormant sense of adventure (let alone allow his heroine to endure a hot flash or a mood swing) leaves all the people who hung onto this series hoping for a line of commiseration or any true dazzle dangling in blank space.

Our final glimpse shows Carrie returning to her castle and dancing to Barry White while diving into a pumpkin pie she’s kept all to herself. She’s alone, gloriously, at long last . . . and too late for the rest of us to savor what her next steps will be.

All episodes of “And Just Like That” are streaming on HBO Max.