Episode Three: the perfect present
Just in case we forgot that Carrie and Berger are essentially the same person, he tells her that he has a standing breakfast with a bunch of writer buddies. There ya go.
When Carrie “breaks up” with Big, it’s sooooo sad to look at his face. Foreshadowing!
Episode Five: lights, camera, relationship!
A $25,000 advance from France. Nice.
Episode Four: pick-a-little, talk-a-little
Oh dear God. This is the “he’s just not that into you” episode. Boo. Hiss.
I didn’t think it was clever the first time around, and if I had known that the writer of this episode was going to write a book with that line as the title, I would have hated it more. No! Bad writer. But this guy obviously thinks he’s on to something clever, and now he’s being validated by Hollywood because they’re making this shit into a movie. Groan.
And about that sassy horse…this is the worst of the worst annoying SJP episodes. When Berger first says that line to Miranda, Carrie squeals. Then she tells Berger about the “scccccu-rrrrunch-eee.” Then she has to butter him up by saying how much she loved to book, referring to the “lampposts…landmarks…mileposts.” And she’s supposed to be a writer?
And finally, there’s the hat, which Berger insults and she retorts “it’s fabulous,” yet she takes the damn thing off. Wonder if the London premiere hat was a nod to this episode, when someone finally calls Carrie on her bullshit fashion.
I’m on a hater roll, so here’s some Charlottey goodness: “I gave up Christ for you,” “Set the date! Set the date!” and “Do you know how lucky you are to have me?”
On the plus side: You can barely hear it, but Smith tells Samantha he was “fucked up for like eight years in Seattle.” Oooh, a Kurt Cobain backstory to go with the Kurt Cobain hair. Seriously, I know Smith is on the show to give viewers my age a little eye-candy, but this guy is so hot that he’s painful to look at.
Episode Six: hop, skip and a week
This is the “Berger leaves Carrie with a post-it” episode. I’m annoyed because I don’t think the Berger arc was ever resolved. If they’re so much alike, then shouldn’t there be more soul-searching on Carrie’s part? Instead, it’s all just about what he does wrong. Maybe he was in the show to demonstrate how perfect Carrie has become and now she just needs to find the perfect man. I don’t know, but they didn’t do justice to Office Space guy.
Episode Seven: the post-it always sticks twice
Okay, I’m going to try to tread very lightly here. There’s this whole Sex and the City tour industry, and places that are featured on the show can kind of become NYC destinations for tourists from the “fly-over regions,” such as where I currently live and blog. MPK even said in one commentary that because the SATC girls went to Raw and didn’t like it, the raw food movement never caught on. Ass. But that’s a whole other can of worms.
The reason I bring this up is because of Bed (“If that last place was called Bed, this should be called Smell”). It’s a real club, and I know this because two fellow Texans I know have been there. One of them said it was really exclusive and you had to be selected to get inside. Oh, God, how do I say this without being a bitch?
If it was featured on a TV show, and probably owes it’s staying power to said TV show, then I really don’t think it’s a place where real New Yorkers are clamoring to get inside. I mean, Bed? A little gimmicky, don’t you think? And I love my friends and I think they are great, but I’m not a member of the “glitteratti” and neither are they. If two gals from Texas on their second trip to NYC are chosen to move beyond the velvet rope, then I’m tempted to say that the “exclusivity” is a facade, or is artificially created in order to skew the pussy ratio inside the club.
Oh, what am I saying? I’m just totally jealous that I’ve never been to Bed.
Miranda says she was wearing her skinny jeans the last time she smoked pot, which would have been in the 80s, but she smoked pot with Carrie and Samantha in Hot Child in the City.
“Carrie, don’t Bogart this split,” — awesome.
Episode Eight: the catch
Hate this episode too, but not because of the show. It’s because of the trapeze.
There was this travel show called Five Takes that I watched once because a co-worker was going to be on it, and the group was visiting New York. They had to pick one thing to do, and some idiot girl forced the whole group to do the flying trapeze because she had seen it on Sex and the City. I hate people like that. Can you not fly on a trapeze anywhere else in the world? Everyone else wanted to do something Manhattan-specific, and this bitch won out because it’s an art director’s dream. It’s like going to a seafood restaurant and ordering chicken.
Otherwise, I love the “Charlotte’s second wedding” episode (“I’m having a Jewish wedding and I look like Hitler!”). She hits Miranda in the back of the head with her bouquet, which is strangely similar to my own encounter with a hostile bouquet a couple of years ago.
Episode Nine: a woman’s right to shoes
Tatum O’Neal — the original girly-tomboy from Bad News Bears. Such a bitch in this episode, especially when she says Carrie must have a lot of time on her hands to still be thinking about their fight.
I love love the way Carrie gets revenge for all the “celebrating life’s choices” gifts she’s given Kyra. And that Kyra gets told to keep her children away from the Manolos. It only seems fitting that she has a child named “Allegra.” Ha! That kid is going to get teased — she’s got the same name as an allergy medicine.
Episode Ten: boy, interrupted
Since I have a lot of quotes from this one, I’m pretty much going to let them do the talking.
Okay, he’s not my favorite single-episode boyfriend, but he’s the best match for Carrie. It’s David Duchovny, and he plays her high school sweetheart (“We were in a liplock for most of 1982”). The thing is, he’s committed himself to a “therapeutic community,” because he’s “trying to figure out why somethings are harder for me than they are for other people.”
Marcus used to be a hooker, Charlotte used to be a cheerleader and prom queen, and Samantha used to be British (not really). We do get a guest spot from Ginger Spice, looking crap-tastic as always.
Miranda gets courtside tickets to a charity basketball game, and while they’re gossiping in the stands, Charlotte gets it right when she says “I don’t think that these people know those people,” meaning gay men and Knicks fans.
“It was Friday night, it was the big game, and Miranda was jealous of a cheerleader.” The girl they’re talking about, “the blond one in the front,” is whore-iffic. She keeps sticking her tongue out. Then Miranda and Robert make out in the mail room and get busted, but it looks like they’re making out in front of their lockers (because of the high school theme).
Ha. No one knows Samantha has clients that go to the looney bin “because I’m good at my job.”
Stanford and that “little bitchy pine nut” Anthony hate each other, but they co-existed peacefully at Charlotte’s wedding earlier this season. Of course, Carrie and Stanford are crowned “Queen and Queen” of the GLBT prom, but then the voiceover does that “we forgot to mention NYC in this episode” thing and tacks it on to the very end: “Anything is possible; this is New York.”
Episode Eleven: the domino effect
The theme of this episode is really hitting a nerve right now, so I’m skipping over it.
However, the “tampon up the nose to stop a nose bleed” trick may have been something Robert picked up in sports medicine, but it’s also in an episode of Beavis and Butthead. Huh huh — Heh heh. (That was my B&B laugh).
Ha, and Samantha falls into the sidewalk hatch.
Episode Twelve: one
MPK and I have differing views on why this episode is called “One,” which is unsettling because he wrote the episode. He says: only one man for you, the baby is one, the first of the Petrovsky episodes. I say: yes, the baby is one, but also Samantha finds one gray hair and Carrie meets Petrovsky at 1 a.m.
I saw an interview with the SATC girls and Oprah where SJP tells how Michail Baryshnikov came to be a part of the show. She said she had the idea while she was washing her hair, then she mimed hair-washing, then she repeated herself while everyone else just kind of stared at her. It wasn’t funny, and I think she was trying to be. Anyway, MPK repeats the hair-washing antecdote in the commentary. Is there some connection between Baryshnikov and shampoo that I’m not aware of?
Also, how can Brady be one year old? He was born two seasons ago.
Charlotte gets the best ever “damn, girl” moment on this show, when she walks out of the building in her Elizabeth Taylor get up. So pretty. I always thought she looked like an older, slightly more substantial Katie Holmes.
MPK says they have come to rely less on the voice over in later seasons. I hadn’t noticed.
I also totally spaced on the story with Miranda, how she expects her bullshit to fall away when she meets the right guy so she can say “I love you,” and then that’s exactly what happens with Steve in the laundry room. I just never made the connection. Whoops.
Aleksandr is supposed to shake up Carrie’s world, to give it a more arty, European sensibility, says MPK, and he really does serve to show how limited her world view has been until now. But I think the best thing he does is out-bigs Big, if that makes sense. The trouble with Big and Carrie is that he was so much older, so much wealthier, and, at times, belonged to a different social class. And you thought she was really reaching to be with him. Now we see Carrie (who we’re supposed to think is perfect now, since it she was the sane one in the Berger relationship) really straining to make things happen with the Russian, and suddenly Big doesn’t look so unattainable.
Mandy Shelton 