Episode Six: are we sluts?

This is the episode where Miranda has chlamydia, clamidia — fuck it, the clap — and she has to call everyone she’s ever slept with and tell them to get tested. It’s weird, because she calls a guy we, the audience, have seen before, and he has the same personality, job situation, and break-up history with Miranda, yet he has a different name. What’s up with that? Oh, and he’s the one that gave it to her.

Carrie is wearing her “coat of many colors” for the third time in this season, and I love it. “Kiss and Tell” says it’s from Bergdorf Goodman, and it’s so cute and patchwork-like and not at all in-your-face Carrie fashion.

When Steve and Miranda are in bed talking about their “numbers,” the book Steve is reading is the Beginner’s Guide to Aquariums. Nice bedtime reading, buddy.

Episode Seven: drama queens

It is unsettling, this whole “relationship without drama” thing. Samantha tells Miranda, who is also in a state of domestic bliss: “your relationship is my greatest fear realized.” It used to be mine, too, but you get used to it. You get fat and happy and you wonder how you ever survived all those bad relationships.

Carrie is complaining that she doesn’t feel the “stomach flip” with Aidan, and Miranda says that “the stomach flip is really just a fear of losing the guy.” I don’t know about that, but it kind of makes sense.

This episode marks the return of Big. In TV time, he was gone for like, ever, but in DVD time, I barely missed him.

Episode Eight: the big time

We learn two interesting facts in this episode.

1) Carrie last her virginity in the 11th grade to Seth Bateman on a ping pong table in his basement after half a joint.

2) Samantha is “a little older” than the rest of the girls. She says this like it’s news to them, but it clearly isn’t.

Carrie and Big have the same run-in on the Gab party boat as they did in the “modelizer” episode: she has her mouth full of canape and someone accidentally shoves her into him.

There’s this whole theme about “time” with Big: he keeps saying he needs to do things in his own time during the first two seasons. In this episode, titled ‘the big time,” he finally comes around and realizes he wants Carrie, so he shows up at her apartment. Aidan has gone to set the TIMEr on the coffee maker and realizes Carrie doesn’t have any filters so he runs down to “the Korean.” That’s a totally mundane thing to do, set the coffee timer, and I think it’s only in the episode to get Aidan out of the apartment and get us thinking about time in order to set up the return of the notorious B.I.G.

Episode Nine: easy come, easy go

This is the first of the four episodes with commentary, and I watched them all twice. This is also the beginning of “Carrie’s descent into hell,” says Michael Patrick KIng. The idea was to drag everybody’s favorite good girl through the mud to make her more relatable.

I’m not sure how I feel about this commentary. It points out a lot of things I had kind of noticed and made them official (Natasha always wears white, Carrie’s smoking is symbolic of her relationship with Big), but it also reveals the man behind the curtain, and I think I may have been happier with just the wizard projection.

Regardless of the commentary, this episode is in the running for favorite of the season. In fact, I think I’m going to call it my “favorite serious episode” of season three.

Episode Ten: all or nothing

“That’s Miranda’s cat, Fatty. Cat’s a regular; he doesn’t get billing but the cat is perfect. The cat is huge and fat and never, ever does anything wrong.”

That’s MPK talking about Miranda’s cat in the commentary, during the scene where Steve’s puppy is barking at Miranda’s bedroom door. Miranda is sleeping next to the cat and it’s glaring at the door and looks supremely pissed.

Lots of animalia this episode — it’s the one where Carrie loses Pete. Honestly, how the hell did a dog find it’s way back to it’s owner’s girlfriend’s apartment in NYC? No way. Worse, when Aidan says “he found his way back,” the voiceover says “and so had I.” Lame!

I also learned from the commentary that the theme music for the affair is a deconstruction of the Sex and the City theme by Groove Armada.

Episode Eleven: running with scissors

Ha. The Japanese business man thinks Carrie’s a hooker. Ha.

It cracks me up when Carrie voices her delusion that everybody is going to get out of the affair alive and Miranda says “I don’t watch Lifetime television for women.” She doesn’t just say the network, she’s says the whole tag line. Funny.

And if I had any lingering doubts about the voiceover being Carrie’s column, this episode was the coup d’grace. Natasha and Aidan could have just read Carrie’s column and learned about the affair.

In the very end, Carrie says “I’d found a way to let myself out of the mess,” meaning the affair with Big. Um, no? You don’t get credit for that one. You got caught, you didn’t end it through courage and conviction. What kind of person would keep sleeping with a married man after his wife breaks a tooth chasing her out of their apartment? No one. Nope, that summary statement was way off the mark.

Episode Twelve: don’t ask, don’t tell

Charlotte is such a brat. There are times when I like her, but they are few and far between. MPK says in the voiceover that they made her so bratty in these “Trey” episodes so that when her perfect little marriage blows up in her pretty little face, she’ll be forced to grow up. Good.

Miranda’s speed date calls her Mandy. I, too, am starting to realize that I am Miranda. With Carrie’s job.

Episode Thirteen: escape from new york

Totally forgot about these episodes. Hollywood wanted to make a movie out of Carrie’s column long before the SATC book was written into the plot. So if the movie mentions turning the column into an HBO show, like I want it to, then we will have circumnavigated an entire postmodern circle: column, movie, book, show. It makes me dizzy.

I think Matthew McConaughey is acting like he’s on speed. It’s just so funny, because last Sunday was the episode of Family Guy where Stewie demonstrates how hard it is to tell MM that he sucks, and they kept playing that clip on 101x all week.

Wow, this is going to be an entry all about other TV shows/popular culture. I guess that’s the influence of Hollywood.

Samantha invites her dildo model over for “dim sum and then some.” That same joke was used on Veronica Mars. Sidenote: I hate dim sum. I think it’s disgusting.

Also, my favourite british TV show, Coupling, used the dildo model plot device as well. The character Patrick, whose god-given attributes are a running joke throughout the series, finds out that an ex took the best part of him with her and marketed it as “the Junior Patrick.”

One last thing: the “perverted Nancy Drew” phone call where Carrie tells Charlotte how to test Trey’s impotence is the only time in the show where she sounds like an actual “sexpert.”

Episode Fourteen: sex in another city

Well, I caught an error in my Kiss and Tell book: Carrie obviously sleeps with the Vince Vaughn character, but he’s not in her “did” column. I’ve been going through that book as I watch these episodes, and I’m realizing that it’s kind of shoddily produced.

A word about the lightening bolt necklace Carrie is wearing in this episode. The “Carrie” necklace is the famous necklace, right? She wears the lightening bolt in maybe two episodes, right? And if the lightening bolt is attributed to any fictional character, it would be Harry Potter, right?

I was once talking to this girl and she was wearing a lightening bolt necklace and I said “oh, is that a Harry Potter thing?” And she rolled her eyes and said “no, it’s a Sex and the City thing.” Grrrrr.