Fans were a bit bewildered by the season two finale of And Just Like That, which ended with Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker) and Aidan Shaw (John Corbett) putting a pause on their relationship. A five year pause. The rules around their “break” implied no visiting of any kind between Carrie’s new four-bedroom Gramercy Park apartment and Aidan’s Virginia farm. Many viewers were wondering what exactly that means, and showrunner Michael Patrick King tried to explain it on this week’s Writers’ Room Podcast.
King started by saying why Carrie wasn’t the one to break things off.
“She’s not going to hurt him because she knows she can’t. And we also don’t want the fans to think we did that again,” King said. “So he’s going to hurt her. And the only way we knew that he would ever pull away from her is if the bigger love — and every parent would assume that this is a bigger love — is the responsibility and love for your children.”
King does say that the idea they won’t actually see one another for five whole years is a “debatable point.”
But, he added, “What you all think about what happened and what you all think their individual states are, we wanted to end with that moment of believing the truth of we’ve made this connection and it’s going to stay there… I knew it was going to end before anything that Carrie and Seema would be sitting on a beach in Greece looking out at the horizon, that it would not end with Carrie and Aidan. Our only little tip to you, the audience, the people who are watching and wondering what we’re thinking. There’s a little, tiny thread of what we’re thinking.”
In the final scene with Seema (Sarita Choudhury), Carrie references the five years and says, “Well, I may get some time off for good behavior.”
King says of the moment, “You would only say that if you’re already going, ‘It’s not gonna be five years.’ She’s very cute, but she does go on to say, ‘There will be others.’”
The writers apparently struggled with how to end the final scene.
“We try to end with these poetic lines… and when I tried to write something poetic for this, it was just too forced,” he said.
The season ends with Carrie’s voice over saying, “And just like that, I ordered two more cosmopolitans.”
Aimée Lutkin is the weekend editor at ELLE.com. Her writing has appeared in Jezebel, Glamour, Marie Claire and more. Her first book, The Lonely Hunter, will be released by Dial Press in February 2022.