While Aidan is in the Poconos procuring a pane, Miranda shakes out of her months-long delusion/couch surfing experiment and taps Seema to help her finally find a place to live. It turns out Miranda has really specific and high standards for a woman whose Airbnb neighbor threatened to chop her up with a meat cleaver. Seema finds her a perfect apartment, but the whisper listing requires her to bid over asking, something Miranda, a high-powered lawyer, is ethically opposed to. The horror movie read here is that Miranda’s brain has been taken over by an illogical parasite. She’s delirious. She’s confused.
Miranda isn’t quite a beggar, but she still doesn’t really have the option to be a chooser. Another apartment Seema shows her is also wonderful, but doesn’t allow dogs, which is a problem because Miranda’s new beau, Joy, has two dogs, Sappho and Socrates, who’ve quickly become fixtures in Miranda’s life. Considering a few scenes later Miranda is surprised, albeit pleasantly, that Joy calls her her girlfriend, it is wild that Miranda is choosing apartments with Joy’s dogs in mind. It’s also wild that Miranda is introducing Joy to Brady without having had the “what are we” talk, but Miranda has been nothing if not wayward this entire season. (Illogical parasites.) In the end, she comes to her senses before she’s swallowed whole by the NYC real estate market and decides to bid over asking for the perfect, dog-friendly apartment.
The most compelling plot line of the episode took both me and Lisa Todd Wexley by surprise. While she was editing away with her editing bae and had her phone on silent, Lisa’s father had a stroke and passed away. Fans with the keen ability to remember a single plot point from previous seasons might recall the continuity error surrounding Lisa’s father. In season 1, she offhandedly mentioned he was dead. In season 2, he showed up at a dinner party at her house. Was any explanation given? Is it sensible to wear Manolo Blahniks at all hours inside your own home? Does anything in this show make sense?
Anyways, he is sadly, once again, dead, and Lisa beats herself up for her work taking precedence over her father’s last moments. Her grief quickly transforms into anger when her father’s assistant at his famous Newark Free Theater, Lucille (the incomparable Jennifer Lewis), invites her to her own father’s homegoing celebration. Decked in a black-and-red leopard-print pleather jacket and name-dropping Michael Kors more than twice, Lucille promises Lisa the celebration will be tasteful. In reality, this translates to Lucille opening the ceremony by singing Pippin’s “Magic to Do,” and an ensemble of the theater’s Post Office Players doing some sort of interpretive new-age performance. Despite the theatrics, all of the women gather to commemorate the late Mr. Lawrence Todd…again.
Back to the horror story of the broken window pane. It turns out Aidan’s fixation on fixing it stems from the guilt he feels for keeping a big secret from Carrie. He has betrayed her! No, it’s not that he secretly hates the table he spent $6,000 on (!!!!) and no, it’s not that he’s planning on asking to spend another five years not defining their relationship. It’s that he’s slept with….his ex-wife, Kathy!!
But that’s not even the most distressing part. Carrie is seemingly unfazed by this. She is, in fact, remarkably level-headed. This is her opportunity to escape this man-child monster, and she babbles on about how she understands how something like this can happen. I mean, I guess it’s good she’s admitting that, because she really is the crowned princess of crossing relationship boundaries—and she did once invite her ex-boyfriend, whom she was still in love with, to Aidan’s upstate cabin back in 2001.
The confession leads to them actually discussing the parameters of their insane situationship, which leads to them having sex (underwire bra stays ON!), which leads to a Carrie voiceover carrying the window metaphor to its natural conclusion, “Despite the shatter, the woman knew the break wasn’t fatal.” I think I speak for all of us when I beg for the break to be fatal. Be done with this relationship. Flirting via Margaret Thatcher manuscript notes would be better than whatever this is. Kill it.
Carrie not running from her psycho boyfriend; Lisa’s dad rising from the dead only to fall back down; Miranda’s season-long dissociative state—we’re in the middle of a Manhattan horror movie! Will Charlotte be the final girl? Hopefully.
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