Carrie is walking down the street with a bouquet of flowers, and she looks like she forgot to put on pants or a skirt, because what she's wearing looks like her boy-cut underwear. And of course she has on stiletto heels. She tells us that “four overbooked friends” got together from different parts of the city for “a power get-together.” The girls are at a park having sandwiches as Miranda tells them that her life has revolved around working and eating at Au Bon Pain, and Carrie tells them her life has revolved around CIM and a pimple on her face. Why am I not surprised that Carrie’s life revolves around her boyfriend and her face? Samantha tells Charlotte that the sandwiches she made for them are great, and that she's very happy that Charlotte isn't working so that Charlotte can be her wife. I thought Samantha wasn’t interested in lesbian relationships anymore? Charlotte is wearing a red and white bucket hat that looks like it came from Target (not that I’m saying Target is bad -- I personally love the store -- but the fun print on the hat looks Targetesque and not really Charlotte’s taste), and she tells the girls that she thought she would have more free time now that she isn’t working, but she's very stressed over decorating the apartment and tells them there are over forty types of dimmers. Yeah, I can see how that could stress a girl out. Carrie drops her keychain, and Miranda asks if she has become a janitor with all the keys she has. Carrie tells her that she needs seven keys just to get into CIM’s apartment. Seven keys? How many doors could she possibly have to go through just to get to the door of his apartment? It’s not like he lives at Fort Knox or something. I can see two different doors on the street level and then his door, so that would make three keys. How are the other four keys used? So anyway, Carrie tells them that she usually has CIM stay over, because he only has the two-in-one shampoo/conditioner at his place. So CIM gave her keys to his apartment, but won’t let her bring over some of her own shampoo? And if he is constantly sleeping over her place, who's taking care of his dog? Miranda asks if Carrie gave her keys to CIM and Carrie tells the girls she did, and Charlotte tells her “that’s big!” to which Carrie replies, “That’s the opposite of Big!” See what she did there? Miranda is all impressed, because she waited six months before she even gave her cleaning lady a key to her place. Samantha shows them all “the key to a lasting relationship” and whips out a stapled-together “booklet” of 1001 Sexual Positions that she got from some guy on the corner on her way to lunch. The girls gawk at what looks like photocopies from a Kama Sutra book and comment that, the way the people’s legs are bent around, you can’t actually have bones in your body to get into some of the positions. Samantha then tells them about the new guy she's seeing; he's the wrestling coach at NYU and is very flexible. Carrie then asks the “congregates” to look at position 91 in their “prayer book,” and when she shows Miranda, she yells out “Amen!” Those girls are so sassy with their sex/religion double entendres.
As Carrie uses her key to get into her apartment, she tells us that she found CIM “in the most shocking position of all, cooking to the oldies.” Carrie is still wearing her boy-cut panties outfit from before, but now you notice that she has a long black coat on that kind of looks like a robe. It looks like she forgot to put “outside” clothes on to go out. She gets all upset at first that CIM is messing up her clean kitchen while listening to "Copacabana" by Barry Manilow, but then realizes that he is cooking fajitas and skips over to him. He shows her that he's cooking the fajitas on his George Foreman Lean Mean Fat-Reducing Grilling Machine. Yeah, you lost weight. We got it the first time we saw you this season. You don’t have to constantly mention that you work out and eat better now. I swear, if at some point this season he starts telling Carrie that she has to watch what she eats, I’m going to throw a carton of my Healthy Choice ice cream at the television. I guess the George Foreman grill excites Carrie, because she shoves her hand down CIM’s front pockets and starts playing pinball. He turns around and starts kissing her, and as he starts to move her down to the floor, Barry Manilow sings, “Don’t fall in love!” Is Barry trying to tell them something?
Some time after the kitchen nookie, Carrie is sitting at her laptop, typing about whether exchanging keys leads to home-cooked meals and great sex, and CIM comes over and starts reading what she is typing. Carrie covers up what she has typed and asks him to leave, because she isn’t finished and doesn’t want him to read it yet. That totally reminds me of last week, when I was at my parents’ house using their laptop to write my recap, and my mother would stand a few feet away from me to marvel in the fact that I could watch television and type at the same time, and then she would sometimes come over and try to read what I was typing. And then my father would come into the room and ask me how many paragraphs I had written, and when I told him what page I was on, it would boggle his mind that there would be more than five paragraphs to write about for a half hour television show, and he'd ask me what exactly I was writing. Then my brother came over and asked me why I would pause and rewind scenes over and over again. And then he asked me how I had the balls to recap Sex and the City in front of Mom and Dad. I told him that once I'd sat with my parents and watched the "funky spunk" episode from last season with them, I felt pretty secure that nothing I wrote about could really shock them. Needless to say, it was a feat in itself that I actually got the recap done last week, and I totally feel for Carrie about having people read what you haven’t finished writing. So CIM walks away, and Carrie tries to write again, but she gets an error message on her screen. She tries pushing some keys and nothing happens, and CIM comes over to help. He tells her to “breathe, and reboot.” He hits three keys, which were probably the Control, Alt, and Delete keys, and the computer screen makes a frown face and goes black. CIM tells her to get her manual, and Carrie tells him she got rid of it “in a feng shui attack.” CIM thinks the laptop is “faking [her] out” and starts punching some keys. Carrie starts to get testy and tells CIM he doesn’t know what he's doing and to stop touching her laptop. CIM gives her a hurt puppy look.
Carrie tells us that, “two meltdowns later,” she took her “’98 laptop” wrapped up in her “’99 pashmina” to Techserve. Carrie and CIM are sitting in a waiting room, and Carrie has her laptop all bundled up in a pink shawl, I guess because she's afraid it will catch a virus if she takes it out in the cold. CIM tries to massage her shoulders, but she just bitches at him and tells him to not touch her. Her number is called, and she runs over to the tech guy with her laptop and tells him she was having a problem with it and CIM did something to it to make it worse. CIM tells him he did Control-Alt-Delete, and the tech guy tells him that only works on PCs, and since she has a Mac, they are incompatible. So far, Barry Manilow and the tech guy have given them hints. What’s ? An anvil with a note on it falls from the sky? The tech guy asks what happened before it crashed, and she tells him that she was typing when she got “the bomb,” and he asks her when was the last time she backed up. She tells him she doesn’t back up, and CIM is all, “You don’t back up?!” Carrie gives him a stink-eye that he can’t see. Tech Guy asks if there is anything else he should know, and she tells him about the mean face that popped up before the screen went black; Tech Guy tells them that was a “sad Mac,” which means that the motherboard has been affected. He tells her he is going to keep her laptop for a few days and try to run some tests. He gives her a receipt and tells her he will call if he finds anything, then calls out the number in line. Carrie is not happy.
Carrie is now at a restaurant or something and is using a payphone to call Miranda’s cell phone to tell her about her computer. Miranda is in a waiting room of some sort and asks Carrie if she backed up her work. Carrie then goes into her own little comedy routine about never hearing anyone mention the word “back-up” but apparently everyone is running home at night to back up their work in private. I refuse to believe that someone like Carrie doesn’t have every piece she wrote on a disk or printed out and filed somewhere. Carrie then asks where Miranda is, and Miranda tells her that she is in a hospital in Philadelphia because her mother had a heart attack. Carrie feels bad about blathering on about her computer, and then asks Miranda why she didn’t tell her she was going to Philadelphia. Like the first thing Miranda is supposed to think of after getting a call about her mother is “Gee, I need to get in touch with Carrie because she needs to know where I am at all times.” Miranda tells her she only had a few minutes to get to the train on time, and adds that doctors have been telling her different things about her mother, but her mother was conscious just long enough to “veto [her] lipstick.” Because that's what sick mothers do. Carrie offers to come down to Philadelphia to help Miranda out, but Miranda tells her she is fine. Miranda’s sister walks by and snaps at her that the doctor is waiting, and that she can’t use a cell phone in a hospital. Miranda tells her she has to go, and Carrie tells her to keep her posted.
Carrie tells us that “Charlotte’s afternoon was filled with ovulating and decorating” as we see Charlotte sitting at a table with a large calendar, counting days. Carrie then tells us Charlotte is “twelve days into her cycle, and three rooms into her lighting project.” Charlotte goes over to the light switch and dims the chandelier brighter and dimmer, back and forth, smiling serenely as Carrie tells us that she became a “dimmer expert.”
Carrie then tells us that Samantha’s new man was an expert in positions, as we see Wrestling Guy and Samantha both wearing the wrestling singlets with the low-cut tank tops and running onto a wrestling mat. Samantha then jumps onto Wrestling Guy and straddles him. Then they try to make it look like she's somehow whipping out his dick and she herself is somehow exposed in the crotch and then they start wrestling around and having sex. Carrie tells us that the Half-Nelson move in wrestling was very similar to position 411. The two of them are humping while still clothed, and Carrie tells us, “One Half-Nelson, one full orgasm,” as Samantha moans and yells and smiles. What the fuck? Are we supposed to believe that people can actually have good sex while wearing spandex with no cut-aways in the crotch? What is it with the crazy sex while wearing as much clothing as possible? It's making me think that the writers and producers are considering syndicating the show, so they're easing out the nudity little by little. I’ve also noticed that the witty banter between the girls isn’t so graphic lately. I mean, two episodes ago they didn’t even come out and tell Miranda her jogging friend gave her a rim job; they made some baby-talk name out of it. thing you know this show is going to end up on FOX or UPN all sanitized and shit, and what fun is that going to be?
Carrie is sleeping when the phone rings, and it's Miranda calling from the hospital, all red-eyed and sad. She tells Carrie that her mom died -- she was stable that night, so they all went home, and then they got a call that she was crashing, and by the time they got to the hospital she had died. Carrie tells her she's sorry, and Miranda tells her she wishes she hadn't gone home. Carrie tells her that her mother knew on some level that she was with her, and Miranda blurts out that she wasn’t with her, that no one was with her. Carrie asks what she can do, and Miranda tells her that she will be fine. She then tells Carrie that the funeral is on Tuesday and she doesn’t have anything to wear because she wasn’t planning on going to a funeral. Carrie offers to go to Miranda's apartment and bring her something to wear, but Miranda tells her that she will go out and buy a “shitty black dress I’ll never wear again.” Miranda tells Carrie not to do anything for her, then tells her she has to go. Carrie tells her again that she's sorry, and Miranda chokes back tears and thanks her and then hangs up. God, Cynthia Nixon is such a good actress. Just watching her made me choke up. Carrie tells CIM about Miranda’s mother, and he asks her if she's okay. She gets out of bed and walks to the bathroom, and he asks her when the funeral is so he can go with her. She closes the bathroom door and puts the water on in the sink and tells him she doesn’t know when the funeral is and that he doesn’t have to go. Then she sits on the edge of her tub and looks like she's about to cry.
Carrie walks into the girls’ regular breakfast restaurant wearing sunglasses and her nicotine patch and tells Samantha and Charlotte about Miranda’s mother. Charlotte asks how Miranda is, and Carrie starts to cry and tells them she doesn’t know. She tells them that she feels so awful because she didn’t know what to say, and she could tell that Miranda was trying to act brave about the situation and she thought she said all the wrong things. Charlotte gives her a tissue and tells Carrie she's sure she said the right things. Samantha sits back as a wave of sadness takes over her. Charlotte then goes into Martha Stewart mode and tries to decide whether to send flowers, a fruit basket, or muffins. When she and Carrie look at Samantha for her opinion, they see her staring into space. Carrie asks her if she's okay, and Samantha snaps out of it and tells them she's fine, that flowers are fine, and to tell her who to write the check to.
Carrie tells us that, after breakfast, “Charlotte showed her support of Miranda by becoming the Martha Stewart of death.” Charlotte is in a big store that makes up gift baskets, and she is bullying the guy making the basket about the colors of cellophane and bows that need to be used, all while making a call on her cell phone using a hands-free earpiece and microphone. Except she's holding her phone instead of having it in a case clipped on her belt or pocketbook, therefore not really making her experience on the phone hands-free. She is talking to Samantha about taking the train to Philadelphia, and Samantha doesn’t realize that sending a fruit basket or flowers isn’t enough. Charlotte isn’t using the clip on the microphone cord that attaches to your shirt so you don’t have to hold the microphone up to your face to talk as she tells Samantha that she should call Miranda to let her know she's thinking of her. Samantha doesn’t know what to say to Miranda and doesn’t want to call her. Charlotte gives her a bunch of Hallmark sympathy card lines to use, and Samantha cuts her off and tells her she will call Miranda and then hangs up. She looks sad again, and then makes a call to someone not Miranda and says, “Wanna wrestle?”
Samantha and Wrestling Guy are getting it on in her bed, and this time he is naked but she's wearing a black bra. How pathetic is it when guest stars are willing to expose themselves but the freaking headliners of a show about sex won’t do it? So anyway, they are trying various sexual positions, and Samantha is getting all hot and bothered but can’t achieve an orgasm. The more they try, the more frustrated she gets. The looks on her face during the different positions are pretty funny. Wrestling Guy finally tells her he has to pick up his dry cleaning by five, so they decide to stop. Damn, does anyone know of any guy that can keep it going as long as he did? She kept telling him to keep going and not to come, and he did -- now he’s a keeper!
Charlotte is bugging the florist, telling her that she needs to make sure the florist in Philadelphia only uses tasteful white flowers like casablanca and calla lilies and not to put any crap flowers. Carrie makes fun of Charlotte, and Charlotte tells her it's very important that their flowers be tasteful because they will be the centerpiece on the church altar. Charlotte asks Samantha if she agrees, and she tells them that she isn’t even listening and doesn’t care because she lost her orgasm. Apparently she also lost her sense of fashion, because she's wearing jeans with the elastic of her underwear sticking out and a hot pink sleeveless button-down shirt that is tied too tightly around the waist. Carrie asks if Samantha lost her orgasm “in the cab?” Samantha tells them that she's been fucking for the past two hours with no finale. I would think that after two hours of fucking, her "finale" would be a chafed cootchie. Carrie tells her it happens sometimes, and Samantha tells them it never happens to her. Carrie thinks she's exaggerating, but Samantha tells her that she has had an orgasm every time, even if she has to polish herself off herself. She tells the girls, “If I RSVP to a party I make it my business to come!” Charlotte thinks sex can be good without an orgasm, and Samantha thinks that is “a crock of shit.” Samantha starts to wonder what is wrong with her, and Carrie tells her she is going to be fine and it will pop up again when she least expects it. Charlotte tells her about an article she read where a woman was having orgasms all the time and then one day they just stopped, like she had used them all up. Samantha says that that's “the meanest thing [Charlotte] ever said to [her].” Maybe her orgasm is hiding in her bra, and if she finally takes it off while having sex, it will be free to do its thing.
Carrie tells us that Miranda “realized she needed a shitty black bra to go with her shitty black dress.” Miranda is in the lingerie section of a department store looking at bras when a saleslady asks if she needs help. Miranda tells her she's looking for a bra in 36A in black. The saleslady tells her she doesn’t look like a 36A and puts a tape measure around her chest, much to Miranda’s unhappy surprise. Miranda tells her she has been a 36A all her life so she knows the woman is wrong. The woman gives her a bra sized 34B and tells her to try it on. You know, a woman at Victoria’s Secret did that to me. You know what happened? The bra was too tight around the back, and too big in the cup. Sometimes a woman really does know what size she is. But not Miranda! Oh, no -- the writers have to make her look even more sad than she already is by having her realize she has been wearing the wrong bra size all her life. Miranda is in the dressing room when the saleslady asks her how everything is. Miranda yells out that everything is fine, and Carrie tells us that since Miranda was fourteen, she had had “a strict no-visitors policy in the dressing room. Although her mother never observed it, and neither did [the saleslady].” Neither did my mother, until she opened a dressing room door on me once, and I screamed in horror when I saw that there was a teenaged boy standing behind my mother, waiting for someone in another dressing room, and he saw me in my underwear. The saleslady marches into Miranda’s dressing room and starts to adjust the bra Miranda has on as Miranda tells her she doesn’t need any help and to get her hands off her breasts. Saleslady tells her she “isn’t being fresh,” which makes me think of the old joke: Did you hear about the fight in the bakery? Two donuts got fresh! But I digress. Saleslady tells her she thinks she knows what is best, and Miranda yells out, “No you don’t! I think I know what’s best for me!” Carrie tells us, “Suddenly Miranda realized she would never have another fight with her mother again.” Miranda apologizes to the saleslady and tells her that her mother just died. The saleslady comes toward her to give her a hug, and Miranda keeps telling her she is fine, and then lets the saleslady hug her and she hugs the saleslady back. Carrie tells us, “And there behind the curtain where no one was looking, Miranda found a kind of support that actually fit her.” Miranda then turns around and looks at the mirror and tells the saleswoman she was right and the bra is perfect, and she thanks her. I go for my second tissue so far, because the scenes with Miranda dealing with her mother’s death are so fucking good.
Carrie walks into her apartment and finds CIM there with a present her for her: A new blue iBook and a zip drive! CIM shows her the handle on the laptop and tells her it's like a little purse. Carrie tells him it is a very expensive purse. Honestly, don’t you think she has designer purses that cost more than the iBook? Carrie doesn’t look too pleased and tells her she isn’t ready for a new computer, because her whole life is on the old computer and she wants that one back. CIM finally gets a hint that it's all about her, and he isn’t really a part of her life. He starts complaining that she doesn’t want his computer and doesn’t want him to go to the funeral with her and tells her he feels like “a fucking…” we don’t know what, because Carrie interrupts him and yells, “I gave you my keys, what else do you want?!” CIM looks shocked and pissed off and yells back, “Your keys? Great! Now I can get into your front door! How do I get into there?” as he jabs his finger into her chest. Carrie apologizes and tells him that she has been taking care of herself for a long time, and that's how she deals with things. He puts the receipt for the computer on her desk, then takes her keys off his key ring and leaves. If Barry Manilow and the tech guy can’t get him to realize that a relationship with Carrie is a slow painful death to his soul, you would think this last exchange with Carrie would open his eyes.
Carrie tells us that Samantha “was troubleshooting her own laptop.” Huh? Is that what the kids call it these days? Samantha is lying in her bathtub with her legs on each side of the spigot, letting the water rush down into her crotch. Then Carrie tells us that Samantha "was determined to just relax, unwind, and let the rest of the world fall away.” Samantha takes a number of dildos out of a drawer, as well as other penis-shaped paraphernalia and various lubricants. Then we see her on her bed, wearing workout pants and a tank top, with a huge massager like you see at Brookstone between her legs and a look of determination on her face. Why in the world would Samantha be wearing clothes to masturbate? This is really bothering me. It’s not like I get off on seeing Kim Cattrall naked, but when you are in a show about sex and your character is the town trollop, certain things are expected. Like actually being naked while performing sexual acts. She at least could look naked and be under a sheet, like they did in the first episode this season when she masturbated while thinking about the priest. So anyway, the phone rings; it's Charlotte, who asks her what kind of bagel she wants on the train ride to Philadelphia, and asks if she's called Miranda yet. Samantha, looking like she's in a trance, tells her she wants a whole wheat bagel, she hasn’t called Miranda because she didn’t want to bother her, and that she is masturbating and she told Charlotte she would be doing that all day. She then hangs up on Charlotte, and with a look on her face like Scarlett O’Hara saying “I’ll never go hungry again!” she goes back to her vibrator. Carrie tells us that by the end of the night, “Samantha called off the search party.” Samantha’s hair is all teased out like she is supposed to have bed head or something, but it actually looks really good. She is brushing her teeth with an electric toothbrush and looks at it like she has an idea, but then decides that no amount of fluoride could bring back her big O. Carrie tells us that, somewhere in the city, “Samantha’s orgasm remained at large.”
Carrie goes back to Techserve to see what they could find on her computer. The tech guy puts a disk in his drive and shows her what he could recover from her hard drive. It basically looks like Wingdings font all over the screen. She asks the guy how it happened, and he tells her that sometimes for no reason they just crash. He tells her she needs a new motherboard, and a zip drive to save her work. Then he adds up on an adding machine what she owes him for trying to recover her work and says, “Ouch. You saved your warranty, right?” Would the warranty even be good for a computer purchased three years ago? Good thing she has her doormat boyfriend to buy her a new computer so she only has to pay for services.
Carrie is now at home and dressed up for the funeral. She sees the keys CIM left and calls him at work and apologizes for the way she acted towards him. CIM tells her that they are going to run into things that are hard, and he just wanted to help her. She thinks that if he helps her and she gets used to him helping her, she won’t know what to do if he's not around one day. He asks her how he would not be around, and she tells him he might be out of town or busy, or their relationship might fall apart. He tells her that then they “would be a couple of sad Macs.” They're pretty sad already. Someone should tattoo “Welcome” on CIM's back.
Meanwhile, in Philadelphia, the girls are at the church waiting to go in, when two bemulleted men in their forties walk past them and size them up. I’ve always thought the men in Philly were classy like that. Samantha turns around and gives them the stink-eye. Samantha, true to tart form, is wearing a tight black dress with the shoulders cut out and a very low neckline. She is standing to Carrie, and now Carrie’s cleavage is also very noticeable. It looks like their boobs are busting out for fresh air or something. The procession pulls in, and Miranda gets out of a limo and walks over to the girls. Carrie and Charlotte each give her a hug and tell her they are sorry, and Samantha stands back and tells Miranda she looks great. Carrie asks Miranda how she is, and Miranda complains that her family thinks that things are really bad for her because she's single, and her sister wants her to walk with her and her husband like "a third wheel" because they don’t want her to walk alone. Miranda bitches, “Because that would be the real tragedy, right? Ignore the coffin, there’s a single thirty-five-year-old woman walking behind it!” ["Actually, the real tragedy is that the writers of this show don't know that THE EXPRESSION IS 'FIFTH WHEEL'! FIFTH! Not 'third'! A third wheel? Sometimes useful! A fifth wheel? NEVER useful! That's the POINT! Of the EXPRESSION! Gah! Okay, sorry. That's my foremost usage peeve. On with the recap." -- Sars] Miranda’s sister calls for her, and Miranda leaves the girls. Okay, is there a reason why Miranda has worry about being single at her own mother’s freaking funeral? We get it! She has trouble dealing with being single at her age! We’ve heard her complaining about it for weeks! Let her have some other problems to deal with for at least one episode, especially when it's such a dramatic topic. Carrie obsessed enough about relationships this episode for everyone -- give it a rest! After Miranda leaves, Charlotte yells at Samantha for not saying the right thing to Miranda. Charlotte goes over to Betsy, Miranda’s sister, to express her condolences and make sure everything worked out with the flowers. Betsy sarcastically thanks her and shows her the flowers, as two men walk by with a five-foot wall of various white flowers with glitter thrown on them. Charlotte looks aghast and yells out, “I said tasteful!” and Carrie says, “I think now we know what $500 worth of glitter looks like.” Well, no wonder the thing was such a behemoth -- five hundred dollars buys a lot of lilies.
In the church, a priest is speaking, and the girls look sad. I think Charlotte is more upset about the ugly flowers than about Miranda or her mother. The priest says that “there are no magic words to soothe us” during this time, and Carrie, hiding her boobs behind a shawl, thinks that as a spiritual leader, he could make something up. Charlotte still can’t believe the flowers and says that they should have said “'we’re so sorry, we love you,' not 'you’re dead. Let’s disco.’” Maybe that’s what they do in Philadelphia? The priest then mentions the mother’s daughter Betsy and her husband, her son John, and his wife, Miranda. Miranda lifts her hand up from her lap like, “And now the priest can’t accept that I’m not married too?” Carrie thinks the priest is a hack, especially after he mentions that food will be served at John and Miranda’s house after the service. Miranda turns around to look at the girls, and Samantha mouths, “I’m sorry” and Miranda mouths back, “Thank you,” which is very moving, and Samantha starts crying. Carrie tells us that Samantha “found a release she really needed. She cried for everything she couldn’t say, and for things she didn’t even know she felt.” As the pallbearers are walking the casket down the aisle, Miranda walks behind Betsy and her husband and starts crying. When she gets to where the girls are sitting, Carrie rushes out and walks with Miranda and puts her arm around her. Carrie tells us, “There’s the kind of support you ask for, and the kind of support you don’t ask for. And then there’s the kind that just shows up.” CIM and Steve are standing in a back pew as they walk by, and Carrie and Miranda acknowledge them. That was really cool of them to do.
Carrie is sitting in front of her laptop, and she tells us, “After all, computers crash, people die, relationships fall apart. The best we can do is breathe, and reboot.” Then she uses her handy-dandy new zip drive to save what she just wrote. CIM walks into her apartment with his key as she tells us, “And when that fails, a little gizmo called a zip drive can provide a surprising amount of comfort. So can a boyfriend, if you can learn to let him.” More like, if you can walk all over him and then apologize so you can walk all over him again in the future.
week, Bunny strikes back!