SPOILER ALERT: This piece contains spoilers for “Party of One,” the series finale of “And Just Like That,” now streaming on HBO Max.
This is how the world of Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker) ends: not with a bang, but with a geyser of human feces.
Technically, the last we see of TV’s most iconic antiheroine is Carrie strutting through her gargantuan Gramercy home while blasting Barry White. She’s just embraced the idea, via the epilogue to her historical novel-in-progress, of being not “alone” but “on her own.” It’s an apt exit for a character who, between boyfriends, helped glamorize the idea of liberated singeldom for a generation of viewers. But for “And Just Like That,” the sequel series to “Sex and the City” that concluded its three-season run on Aug. 14, the most indelible, on-brand image from “Party of One” came a couple scenes earlier: Carrie, her good friend Miranda (Cynthia Nixon) and, for some reason, Victor Garber scrambling to deal with a toilet clogged by a lactose intolerant Zoomer named Epcot (Spike Einbinder). No gory detail was spared, down to the anatomically correct turds.
Showrunner Michael Patrick King, who directed the finale and co-wrote the script with Susan Fales-Hill, has said that the decision to end “And Just Like That” came from him, not HBO Max. Yet Carrie’s storyline was very much the exception in having the air of a satisfying send-off. Miranda’s arc is quite literally pregnant with potential new developments, with her first-ever grandchild (!) still unborn. The last line delivered by Seema (Sarita Choudhury), the de facto successor to Kim Cattrall’s Samantha Jones, is “I don’t miss the gluten,” about her Thanksgiving pie. And after spending the entire season building up to what seemed like an inevitable Michelle Obama cameo, Lisa Todd Wexley (Nicole Ari Parker) was left with just the vague possibility of a voiceover for her docuseries-in-progress.
Other characters got slightly more closure, albeit not in a way that seemed to foreclose any future possibilities. Charlotte (Kristin Davis) came to terms with her younger child’s gender identity — a genuinely empathetic, sensitive subplot on a show that could often take a hostile stance toward kids these days — and finally overcame prostate cancer’s effect on her sex life. Anthony (Mario Cantone) broke off an engagement but kept his relationship, and all it cost him was a pie to the face.
Yet the cumulative feeling given by “Party of One” is not that of a fond farewell. It’s an overpowering, inescapable strangeness — the same strangeness that’s hung over this show from the start, with the gaping absence of Samantha and characters bewildered by the passage of time. “And Just Like That” improved on this score over time, settling into itself to the point that this critic found the venture more than worthwhile. But maybe it was only right for the show to end in the offbeat, uncanny way it began, even if doing so meant fictional people we’ve known for more than a quarter century got a somewhat abrupt goodbye.
At no point in “Party of One” do we get the type of scene that has defined this franchise in the popular consciousness: four friends gathered around the table of a trendy restaurant, gabbing about life and love. In its place, we get Carrie in a robot restaurant, befuddled by technology and staring forlornly at a stuffed toy named Tommy Tomato. The humor is intentional; perhaps the contrast is as well. After all, it would be very Carrie — a frequently terrible friend to the last — to see to her own affairs while leaving everyone else twisting in the wind.
Yet it’s the shit I keep coming back to. (I apologize if this is graphic, but the episode itself pulls no punches, and neither will I.) “And Just Like That” liked to lay its protagonists low, often literally: Charlotte wilting from vertigo; Miranda collapsing, nude, while clawing her way out of a sensory deprivation tank; Carrie slipping on her bare hardwood floors; before any of those, Mr. Big (Chris Noth) falling off his Peloton as he suffered a fatal heart attack, the show’s macabre inciting incident. “Sex and the City” wound down with Carrie choosing Big, whatever her voiceover said about the most important relationship in one’s life being oneself. This time, she really is on her own — and solo life isn’t always pretty. It’s a more internally consistent ending, if a less romantic one. Whether or not you like what that means, “And Just Like That” remained true to itself to the last.