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Why is it that the things we try so hard to keep we end up pushing farther away? This is the question Carrie should have asked at the end of this episode, but instead we spend an hour chasing a hamster, talking about a stuffed bear, and loosely tying things together with a metaphor about labels.
Carrie is still forbidden to date Sebastian, but her dad won't tell her why. Dad Bradshaw is too busy buying tampons and the wrong frozen foods for his daughters. Carrie figures out that the Kidd family has used her father as a lawyer, so she goes snooping into her father's poorly-hidden box of confidential files. Carrie learns that Sebastian had an affair with his Art History teacher (sexual in nature, but this is back in the ‘80s when it was fine if not awesome).
Meanwhile, Maggie is sad about her breakup with Walt and tries not to be a drama queen (or tries to be one, I'm not quite sure) about it. Maggie ends up slicing open a giant stuffed panda bear with a knife, but it still didn't make me care about her as a character.
Mouse plans to meet with Seth, the guy who hit it and quit it, in the city for a date. Carrie goes to the city with Mouse, to get away from teacher-loving Sebastian, and drags them to another one of Larissa's crazy ideas — a performance art show in which a porn star sits on a throne and shows her vagina. Mouse and Seth leave, probably realizing they weren't essential to the storyline, and agree to call each other boyfriend and girlfriend.
Back at the vagina thing, the porn star encourages Carrie to reclaim her power by showing her vagina. The porn star also tells Carrie not to let a man control her decisions, but all Carrie heard was, "blah blah blah porn porn porn." Carrie does not show her vagina, but tells Larissa she's going to reclaim her power by insisting that her father allow her to see Sebastian. Larissa's all, "OK. Fabulous. I'm British," and that's the end of that chapter.
Elsewhere in the city, Carrie's father, Tom, is learning from his gross friend that telling women about your dead wife is a better pick-up line than telling them about tampons and all your problems. Tom is not a dynamic enough character to take this idea any further, though, and abandons the singles bar/this plotline.
Carrie tells her father that she has decided she is going to see Sebastian. Her dad still says no, and Carrie tells him that she peeped his file and knows everything. This makes her father understandably angry with Carrie. Carrie, still failing to see any repercussions, tells Sebastian all about it too, and he gets overwhelmed and ends whatever it is they were starting to get into. Good riddance, I say.
Oh, and while all that was happening, Dorrit stole a hamster from the pet store, named it Morrissey, lost the hamster, thought she stepped on it in a moment I think was supposed to be funny but failed, then found it again and manipulated her father into letting her keep it. The winner of this episode is Morrissey, for not allowing anyone to step on him, and for reclaiming his power by showing his vagina.
Want more? The full recap starts right below!I was hoping that this week's Carrie Diaries, coupled with the premiere of RuPaul's Drag Race Season 5, would be about throwing shade. The title of the episode is "Read Before Use," but Carrie's narration at the beginning explains that a different kind of reading is fundamental. She's talking about the importance of reading labels. I'm glad Carrie will keep letting us know what each episode is about, because I don't think I can pick up on the subtlety and nuances offered by The Carrie Diaries
But Carrie is right, in this instance -- it is important to learn which labels each one-dimensional character holds because a show like this really doesn't have time to build depth. So there's the Jocks and the Class Clowns, and the Bitches (Donna) and the Bad Boy (Sebastian). The only one without a label seems to be Carrie, which is suspicious because a girl that pretty and interesting by comparison should at least be Popular.
Carrie mislabels Sebastian as "The Boy of My Dreams." In case you missed last week's riveting episode, Carrie's friend, Mouse (the Nerd), gets us caught up. Carrie's dad won't let Carrie see Sebastian because of some country club, white collar, one-percenter snobbery. Carrie mistakenly thinks her dad sees her as perfect and too good for any boy. Parents just don't understand, and neither do kids.
As an Asian, Mouse knows all about never being able to meet her parents' expectations. Maggie, the other friend, is a Slut, so her parents have very low expectations. She fears that her parents will blame her for her breakup with Walt, but I kind of feel like they might not care all that much. Are parents really that invested in their teenagers' relationships? Are viewers? These teens seem to think so.
Carrie and Mouse label Maggie as a "Drama Queen," and when the acting doesn't quite measure up, the dialogue insists this is a true facet of Maggie's personality. Speaking of drama queens, Carrie is spending more time with Larissa than makes sense with her internship schedule. Larissa, perennial giver of bad advice, tells Carrie that if the boy isn't bad, he's no good.
Cut to: Carrie's dad buying tampons. What a bumbling, tampon-comparing fool. He asks a woman in the feminine hygiene aisle for help. He tells her all too soon that his wife is dead and he is raising two daughters on his own. They strike up a friendly conversation, reminding me that this is right around the time when women would have been more careful talking to attractive, sympathetic strangers. But maybe, for this woman, enough years have passed since Ted Bundy's incarceration that she could finally go out and talk tampons without feeling like it would lead to something even bloodier.
Celia, this woman who does not watch the news and is bold enough to recommend a tampon size, gives Dad Bradshaw her number in case he has any more questions about the female anatomy (wink). He does not, but Celia's stealth grab of some female lubricant on her way out of the aisle seems to have its intended effect.
At Boring School, Sebastian is boring. He wants to make plans with Carrie or something. Then he asks her to listen to the new album by The Cars, and Carrie quickly deems it "fantastic." I am decidedly un-wooed.
At home, Carrie asks her father to re-consider his judgments on Sebastian based on his family. They are totally two star-crossed lovers who were too busy making out in the pool to find out how Romeo and Juliet ends. Irritatingly to Carrie and us, her father won't say why she is not allowed to date Sebastian and instead asks her to drop it. I hope it's something good like an affair or a drug deal or a murder. Is one murder too much to ask of this show?
Evidently, the Kidd elder is one of Carrie's dad's clients. What does he do again? Legal ...? Whatever, more importantly, Dad forgot to buy Dorrit's Stouffer's French Bread Pizza, which is not three things but one, which must have been discontinued because Mr. Bradshaw didn't know to buy it anymore. Update: it is apparently a real thing and I can see why it is Dorrit's favorite. I guess I'll just have to make my own out of Stouffer's, french bread, and pizza.
Dorrit, enraged, goes to the pet store and looks at a hamster. I'm sure this will come into play later. That night, Carrie snoops in her dad's "confidential files," which he keeps at home in a closet real confidential-like. Carrie accesses the Private Legal Information and discovers that Sebastian got kicked out of his last school for having sex with his Art History Teacher. The verdict: guilty. The sentence: like, a million high-fives.
Mouse is meeting up with that Seth guy who burned her a couple episodes ago and I don't think I care. I'm also not really caring about Maggie going around her room throwing out things from Walt and finding a slutty dress for Mouse to wear to meet Seth. Maggie calls Carrie and in the midst of a Sex and the City standby, (going through closets and evaluating the pieces within), Carrie discovers the hamster in Dorrit's closet. In the third plotline we couldn't care less about, Dorrit got that hamster and named it Morrissey ("like the lead singer of The Smiths" for all you non-'80s kids out there).
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Dorrit uses her intel about Carrie's date with Sebastian as leverage to keep the shoplifted hamster. Carrie meets Sebastian in a park, where they wear headphones and kiss to "Who's Gonna Drive You Home." Carrie stupidly asks Sebastian where he learned to kiss like that and he tells her he had a good teacher. Zing. Carrie rips her headphones off and runs away, an over-dramatic habit that only serves to stretch out this storyline.
Carrie goes with Mouse to meet Seth, because she couldn't get far enough away from her Vili Fualaau back home. Seth is a total hottie with a naughty body, and somehow he and Mouse get dragged along on another one of Larissa's Wild New York Adventures with Carrie. This time they're going to Franklin Furnace, home of cutting-edge performance art. The art is a porn star showing her vagina. Yiiiiikes.
Double yiiiiikes, Morrisey got out of his box when Dorrit left it open to decorate the lid. Meanwhile, Maggie destroys a giant stuffed animal, not filled with drugs, from Walt. And in the scene over, Carrie's dad, whose name might be Tony, meets with his oily New York lawyer friend who wants to take him to a singles bar.
Larissa pressures Mouse and Carrie to donate to the vagina show. Mouse runs away, scared. Carrie gives in to peer pressure more easily and sees a porn star's vagina. Carrie, who has obviously not spent time with a hand mirror yet, evaluates the vagina and faces her fear. Then, the porn star pulls Carrie up on stage and tells her not to relinquish her vagina, then asks her to show it to the crowd.
Tony (Tony? Tom, apparently) tries his luck at the singles bar with the old tampon story. Tampon talk is not as charming at a bar, it turns out, as it was to that weirdo at the store. Tom also talks about how his daughters don't get along and is just about to lose the hot piece he's talking to when he mentions that his wife died. This information is like catnip for women, you see. The woman gives Tom her number on a napkin kiss and pretty much promises him sex. Tom's creepy friend encourages Tom to use his dead wife to his advantage on the field.
"It's the greatest pick-up line of all time," Douche Friend tells Tom. But Tom is too boring and good-hearted. Then, two terrible plots collide as Dorrit searches for Morrissey (oops, she stepped on a cupcake and thought it was a hamster. Comedy!), and Maggie shows up at the Bradshaw house with the remnants of the stuffed panda. Maggie starts acting more like a hoarder than a drama queen, associating memories with material objects, and the comedic effect of the scene goes down like a fart in an elevator. Lucky for Maggie, Dorrit knows how to hide things in giant stuffed bears.
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At the Franklin Furnace, Carrie doesn't show her vagina. If this was an appropriate companion piece to Sex and the City, Carrie would have showed her vagina and forgotten that she is on her period and it would have been a real thing with everyone seeing her tampon or whatever. But instead, Carrie teaches Larissa a lesson about what showing your power really is, and like any conflict on this show, it is immediately shrugged off and resolved.
Going home on the train, Carrie realizes that it's time to take what she wants and what she wants is Sebastian. A poor choice to make in a moment of important revelation, but I'll go with it since the show seems to think we want Carrie and Sebastian to get together.
Dorrit sews up the bear for Maggie, Seth calls Mouse his girlfriend because he is into young Asian chicks.
Carrie tells her dad that she has decided to see Sebastian. Dad/Tom/Tony is still resistant but Carrie tells him what she found out and how. God forbid there be any lingering tension on this show. Tom points out that Sebastian is the cause for all of Carrie's reckless behavior, and the way she breached attorney-client privilege because Tom doesn't know how to store confidential files.
Carrie argues that Sebastian is "not just some boy," and Tom promises her that he is. Then, still drunk on dead-wife attention from the singles bar, Tom tells his daughter he doesn't know how he can ever trust her again.
"You're not the Carrie Bradshaw that I know," Carrie's dad tells her. She is not the Carrie Bradshaw we know, either, but we're dealing with it. Just when you thought things had gone to Hell in a handbasket, Dad finds Morrissey and gets to have his Danny Tanner moment. Spoiler alert: Dorrit gets to keep the hamster.
Oh, but the episode can't end with the resolution of Dorrit's hamster saga, our central conflict. Carrie stupidly tells Sebastian she knows about him and his teacher, apparently not having heard that whole thing about how her dad could lose his job. Sebastian is unaware that his parents hired a lawyer for him, then gets mad at Carrie for telling everyone. Then he gets even angrier and asks Carrie why she analyzes everything. Carrie offers to stop analyzing everything, for Sebastian, and Sebastian tells her it isn't going to happen. Too much talking and snooping and talking for Sebastian; not enough sexing. Sebastian leaves, as Carrie wonders who's going to drive her home.
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