Aidan’s ‘And Just Like That’ Return Has Given The Show New Life

SPOILER ALERT:This review contains spoilers from A Hundred Years Ago, the eighth episode of Season 2 of And Just Like That,now streaming on Max.

I was as skeptical as anyone when it became clear that Aidan was returning to And Just Like That.

The Sex and the City character, Carries other great love and one who, in his status as an obvious second choice to Big, wasnt really so great, seemed to have run out of dramatic possibility a while ago. His appearance in Sex and the City 2, with a credibility-straining chance meeting in Abu Dhabi, seemed only to be happening to cast into relief what worked, and what didnt, in Carries marriage. Aidans own qualities as anything other than not-Big didnt meaningfully enter the story.

With And Just Like That, Maxs continuation of the Sex and the City TV and movie franchise, the writers seem to have finally figured out what to do with Aidan: Embrace his not-Big-ness. In Thursdays episode, Carrie has lost herself in her nascent relationship with Aidan (her third attempt at this, not counting the liaison in the Emirates), settling into a giddy and gleeful haze that friends of hers, to one degree or another, can see is an attempt to hide from reality. Its not Aidan shes in love with. Its the concept of not being alone.

Which makes And Just Like That as brilliantly frustrating as its been in its two-season run. Weve been living with the stories set up in Sex and the City for some twenty-five years now. And like any friendship, or any relationship, of such long standing, the pleasures of engaging with the characters now are double: The comfort of familiarity, and the realization that even those we know best can still surprise us.

Youre still you in there, somewhere, Miranda tells Carrie at a meal they share, one in which Carrie seems unable to stop herself from gushing on about the excitement and possibility she feels. (The tell that Carries still Carrie? Her recollection that she hated Aidans house upstate.) Carrie spins a narrative for her friends about how Aidans property in Virginia might resemble the house from Howards End, which means its all fated. Her ability to find the stuff of great literary romance in her dating life is no surprise, but her lack of self-awareness jars us, a bit: A confession, post-lunch, to Miranda that she is re-evaluating her whole life and regretting her marriage to Big jangles. It feels wrong.

Wrong, but not out of character. Carrie has spent the run of And Just Like That grieving, and grief does strange things. Carrie is neither precisely repeating the beats of her past relationship with Aidan nor totally forgetting their history; shes refracting it all through the reality of the past years of her life, ones in which shes been painfully lost and alone. (What these years have been like for a now-divorced Aidan, we can for the time begin only to guess.) Of course Aidan looks like a lifeline. He comes from a time when her life had a sense of possibility.

And of course newfound optimism makes her feel, well, a bit off-kilter. The whole ensemble does a good job of selling a friend group thrown off-balance by a new, fast-moving relationship: John Corbett and Sarah Jessica Parker, together, build something wed never quite seen from Aidan and Carrie, a certain shared mania. (Their frantic, breathless redecoration of Ches apartment, where theyre crashing, struck me as exemplary; theyre in a necessarily temporary place that theyll spare no expense converting into a pretend forever home.) Corbetts performance comes to make clear why Aidan showed up for their reunion dinner in a bizarre, bondage-inflected ensemble: He cant stop performing for Carrie. Cynthia Nixon is predictably strong in the voice-of-reason role Miranda still occupies with authority (despite having recently rushed her way through a chaotic relationship herself). And Kristin Davis, expressing confusion through a sort of exaggerated delight, continues her recent strong run.

But its Sarita Choudhury who gets the best bits of the episode, a fine reward for a performer whos tended to be better than her material in the early going of the show. Choudhurys Seema is legitimately put out at Carries having outright forgotten their plan to summer in the Hamptons together, and is unwilling to adjust their plan to accommodate a friend who has eyes only for her boyfriend. The show itself is putting viewers through what its like to be Carries friend: For weeks, Id been excited to watch Carrie and Seema going to the beach, an option thats been foreclosed in favor of Crate and Barrel trips and musings about Howards End.

Carrie is a frustrating character, and her less-positive qualities what some might call her humanity are what have brought drama, tension, and life to Sex and the City and now And Just Like That. Aidan has provided her a backdrop for the ongoing soap opera (or, perhaps, the ongoing E. M. Forster novel) of her life; hes also reflected back every bit of incautious, overzealous commitment to the bit, with the pair reinforcing one anothers instincts toward ratcheting-up the relationship perhaps before its really time.

The show has set up a fascinating conundrum: What makes Carrie feel vibrantly alive for the first time in years is distancing her from the support systems that sustained her through that same time. Bringing Aidan back is, from what looks like the midpoint of his and Carries third try at things, anything but playing the old hits: Its allowed And Just Like That to develop its characters and their world, and generated real and painful moments for a character who needed them. I hope Aidan and Carrie stay together for as long as the show can maintain this quality. And I cant wait to see how a revitalized series figures out how to break them up again this time.