Carrie tells us there are a million reasons to celebrate in the city, and Steve no longer having cancer is one of them. The gang, except for Charlotte and Trey, is at the bar playing pool, and Samantha is playing like she knows exactly which pocket to put her balls in. Get it? Balls? You better, because you’ll be hearing that word a lot in this episode. Samantha then starts going on and on about having "only one ball left…just one little ball." When she wins the game, Steve goes to the bar, and the girls and CIM take Samantha to one side and tell her to quit talking about "one ball." Samantha finally gets the hint, and asks if she offended Steve. CIM tells her he wasn’t offended, but is a little embarrassed. The girls, except for Samantha, don’t understand why Steve would be embarrassed about having only one ball. Gee, I don’t know, maybe because he had two his whole life and now he’s missing one? How would they like to go around for the rest of their lives with one boob? CIM thinks that he might think he was less of a man if he only had one ball, and Miranda doesn’t think it makes a difference. Samantha then tells CIM about this one time she was with a guy with balls so big she could barely get one in her mouth, but he was "a big pussy." CIM is very amused. Miranda isn’t into balls, and asks Carrie if she is. She starts to shake her head like she isn’t, but then looks at CIM and tells him she is really into his balls. It's good to see that Carrie isn’t breaking her "no honesty" rule with CIM to tell him what she really thinks. Samantha tells them that guys are totally into their own balls, and they tell her to lick them and pull them. Miranda is all "you pull the balls?!" like she never even thought that there was something you could actually do with balls. Samantha tells them, "They love it!" like she's teaching CIM something too, and then starts to tell another story about a guy she was with when Carrie interrupts. CIM wants Samantha to go on with the story, but Carrie won’t let her. Carrie is such a party pooper. Carrie then theorizes that "balls to men are what purses are to women." Since when are balls sacks that you shove wallets, keys, and a can of mace in? Oh, Carrie then tells us, "It’s just a little bag, but we feel naked in public without it." Since when do men go out in public carrying their Gucci balls? I can think of many things to compare balls to, and a purse is not one of them.
So then some guy comes up to Samantha, and she acts like she's his best friend even though she can’t remember his name or the fact that they had sex. She asks him how he is, and he tells her that he just designed the latest Richard Wright hotel, which I guess is very impressive, but I really don’t know much about hotels in the city. Samantha tells him she's been trying to get a meeting with Wright for months, and asks who is doing Wright’s PR. He tells her Brad Rosen is doing the PR, and she thinks Rosen is a hack and asks the guy to get her a meeting with Wright. If I were this guy, I would be all "Bitch, you didn’t even remember my name or the fact that we fucked. Why should I do you a favor? Suck my dick and maybe I’ll call the guy." Instead, the guy tells her he will do what he can, and then leaves. Samantha turns to the girls and shrugs at them like "I have no idea who that man was."
Carrie then tells us that Charlotte and Trey had their own celebrating to do. They are eating Chinese food, and Trey tells Charlotte that he told the contractors that he expected them to get some job finished on time. Charlotte is all happy at how forceful Trey was and says, "Sometimes they just need to hear it from a man." Huh? Why do I think that Charlotte’s years working in a gallery would make her able to assert herself with some contractors? Are the writers trying to make Charlotte look pathetic now? So then she tells Trey that she went to the doctor because she was frustrated that they had not become pregnant yet, and the doctor told her that the easiest thing to do at that point was to have Trey's sperm tested. Actually, I think the easiest thing to do at this point is to relax and let nature take its course. They’ve been trying for what, three months? Her body needs to adjust to not being on birth control and get itself ready to become pregnant. In real life, I think a doctor would have told her to come back in a year if nothing happens. Trey gets all offended and asks her not to talk about sperm while they're eating. He also reminds her that it has only been three months, and there was no reason to assume that it's something wrong with him. Charlotte’s spine softens, and she tries to tell him that it is less intrusive to test him than it is her, and she is sure his sperm is just fine. Trey gets upset and tells her he's lost his appetite. Now, Carrie told us they were celebrating something; what is it? The fact that Charlotte can’t get work done on time and can’t conceive as well? Woo hoo! Party!
Okay, I’m going to try as hard as I can to type this section without getting blood all over the keyboard, because my eyes are bleeding. CIM and Carrie are standing in front of her sink brushing their teeth, and CIM is wearing too-tighty whities, and Carrie is also wearing men’s tighty whities and my grandmother’s Cross-Your-Heart bra. I know CIM has lost a good amount of weight, but he isn’t toned enough to pull this off and it just looks scary. And Carrie -- well, if I wanted to look at a senile old lady wearing her husband’s Jockeys and an industrial boulder holder I could have gone down to Westminster-Canterbury. They are brushing and spitting in turn, and Carrie asks CIM if he likes his balls pulled. Oh, my ears! I don’t need to hear this conversation either! He asks her how he would know. Dude, you are in your thirties. You’re telling us that no woman you have been with has ever gotten aggressive near your balls? Whatever! So then there's a minute of the two of them facing each other and shuffling around, and she's going to try to grab his balls and pull on them but he is afraid she will hurt him, and he still has toothpaste spittle around his mouth, and then the phone rings, which ends the insanity.
CIM answers the phone, and it's Big! Big is all, "Uh, hey man, it’s me." Like CIM would know exactly who is calling by the sound of his voice. Big apologizes for calling so late, and asks to speak to Carrie. CIM gives the phone to Carrie, and when she finds out who is on the line, she tells Big that they were about to go to bed. Big tells Carrie that Willow is "fucking with [his] head" and that he really needs to talk. Carrie tells CIM that Big needs to talk to her, walks out of the bathroom, and closes the door as CIM stays in the bathroom and sulks. Big whines about how "she can reach me, but I can’t get her." And instead of Carrie coming back with "welcome to my relationship with you when we first started dating!" she just agrees with him that it's fucked up that he can’t get in touch with her. He complains that he follows Willow around all the time and that she's yanking him around, and then he makes Carrie listen to an answering machine message Willow left of her singing "I’m in a New York state of mind." Big asks her if he should call Willow again, and Carrie tells him not to and then tells him she has to go; she hangs up and walks back into the bathroom and apologizes to CIM. CIM wants to know why she had to run into another room to talk to Big, and she makes up some excuse about how she didn’t want to make CIM feel uncomfortable by talking to Big, and CIM tells her that she's the one that's uncomfortable about it. She agrees, and tells him she doesn’t want him to feel threatened by Big. CIM is all "I can take him!" and then babbles on about how when the Green Hornet and Batman fought each other, everyone thought that Batman was going to win because he was bigger, but the Green Hornet won because he had more moves and had Kato (Bruce Lee, not O.J.’s friend) to help him. He tells Carrie that he is the Green Hornet and Pete is Kato, and then he runs and finds Pete and starts wrestling with him, which makes my eyes start bleeding again, because no man should wrestle a dog while wearing tight underwear that gets wedged up his butt. And since when would Carrie let Pete stay over in her apartment?
The girls are at their restaurant, and Charlotte wants to know what superheroes have to do with Big and CIM, and Carrie tells her that "in order to deal with Big, [CIM] had to turn himself into the Green Lantern." Miranda corrects her and tells her it's the Green Hornet, and Carrie doesn’t care if CIM turns himself into the Green Bee, as long as he learns that there's nothing for him to be concerned about. She then asks if she should get Big, CIM, and herself together to talk about it, and Miranda asks her if she "had a big plate of crazy for lunch." Ahh, old Miranda is starting to come back to us. Carrie blathers on about how she wants CIM to know that he is the one that she loves and that she and Big are just friends, and Samantha tells her that guys don’t talk, they fight. Because of "all that crazy testosterone. God bless it." Yeah, Samantha, we get it. You like men. Charlotte immediately changes the subject by telling the girls that she's going to get Trey’s sperm tested. Miranda asks, "Is it not doing well in school?" Let’s hope the writers can give Miranda all the good lines for the rest of the season, to make up for the last nine sad episodes for her. Charlotte tells them how Trey got all upset when the subject of his sperm came up, and Miranda wonders what the deal is with men getting upset about "that area."
Carrie sits at her desk in front of her laptop, staring into space, as she tells us she was thinking about her friends and wondering if men and women were not as different as we think they are. She asks her laptop "Are men just women with balls?" They are, if they have breasts and ovaries as well.
Ack! A close-up of a dog from behind, so you can see his nads up close and personal! Steve and Miranda are walking behind the dog, and Steve comments on the nice size of the dog’s testicles and adds that a dog with one testicle can't enter a dog show, and that there are testicle implants for dogs…and people. He tells Miranda he's interested in getting an implant; she is totally against it and asks him why he would want it. He tells her that women get implants all the time, but Miranda chooses to ignore him and goes on to tell him that she wouldn't be able to tell if a guy had one ball or four. Oh, if she had her hands on a man with four balls, I’m sure she would know it. Steve says that he would know, and that every time he looks down at himself, he thinks he looks lopsided. Miranda tells him women care about eyes and abs and dicks, but don’t care about balls, but Steve doesn’t really believe her. He tells her that he made an appointment with a doctor and asks if Miranda will come with him, and she asks him, "Where? Testicle shopping?" Steve gives her a cute look, and she just sighs. You know, if Miranda had a friend that lost a breast, she would be all gung-ho to help that friend get an implant. I don’t know why Miranda feels like she needs to keep Steve from wanting to feel better about himself because she has a hang-up about the scrotum, and given the fact that she has a lazy ovary, she could be a little more understanding about not being "fully functional."
Carrie tells us, "Samantha finally got her meeting with hotel magnate Richard Wright. Smart, tough, a real ball-buster." God, quit it with the use of the word "ball"! We get it already! Wright thinks Samantha’s résumé is all fluff, and yet he's intrigued. He suggests that Samantha work with Brad Rosen on the account. Samantha tells him she appreciates his offer, but she works alone. Wright tells her to "read between the lines" -- the men he does business with don't want to work with a woman, and he thinks that she's better off working with a partner that isn’t so emotional. If by "emotional" he means "two-bit whore," I could understand what he's talking about, but Samantha has shown almost no emotion except for confidence in this scene. I’m not sure what Wright is talking about.
The girls are eating again, and Samantha is bitching about Wright and the fact that he called her "emotional." She thinks that Wright just won’t hire her because she's a woman. Miranda starts to complain that all the men she works with think that the women in the office cry about the smallest things, and then Charlotte bitches about the one time in ten years working at the gallery when she cried, and how after that everyone at the gallery was afraid to get her upset because she might have started crying. Carrie, wearing a thin white tank top and black bra, tells them about the time she missed a deadline, so she went to her editor and cried and told him she was having problems at home when she was really having a fun time in the Hamptons. Miranda thinks Carrie makes women look bad. No kidding. She has been making women look bad for the last season of the show. Samantha then starts the tired old conversation about how men are considered "pistols" if they get angry, and women are considered "emotional" if they act the same way. Yeah, I heard that on Oprah about ten years ago. Get in the now! ["The sad thing is, though, it's still fucking true. Raise your voice two decibels in a meeting and all of a sudden you've got PMS. Feh." -- Sars] Charlotte brings up the crying incident at the gallery again, and Miranda ignores her and joins in on Samantha’s tired conversation about men feeling threatened about strong businesswomen, while Carrie makes tired legal jokes about what Miranda is saying, because, you know, Miranda is a lawyer and all. Samantha decides she is going to be cool, calm, and so unemotional that Wright is going to beg her to take the job. Or fuck him. Whichever comes first (so to speak). Charlotte reminds Samantha not to cry, and Carrie tells them she has to leave so she can get a ride with CIM to the non-country.
Hey, Carrie decided to bring something to read while in the non-country! A magazine! Carrie is a writer, so I knew she'd bring literature to the cabin, but since she has no class, I’m not surprised that it's an Entertainment Weekly wannabe magazine. Carrie is wearing the same outfit she was at the restaurant, and she tells us, "The day, while [CIM] was tearing down the old shed, I was tearing through the latest In Style" that Willow Summers on the cover. I can’t believe she is wearing the same outfit two days in a row. The phone rings, and it's Big. He got the number off her answering machine. That is really sweet of Carrie to give out CIM’s phone number on her answering machine, so that any yahoo can just get his number and call. Big tells Carrie that Willow broke up with him, and he doesn’t know what he did, and she won’t return his calls. He tells Carrie again, "See, she can reach me, but I can’t get her." Again, Carrie has the opportunity to put Big in his place about the way he treated her, but she just tells him that she thinks Willow is crazy. Big then tells her he feels like a fool, and asks her when she will be back in the city. She tells him she will be back Monday, but he can’t stand to wait that long to see her. She opens up a can of worms by mentioning that she would invite him there, but it's so far away. Big asks her how far away, and she tells him it's a forty-minute drive -- with traffic, it can be an hour or so. Yeah, that’s really far away. God forbid someone gets in the car and drives more than thirty miles at one time! All that time sitting in the car with nothing to do but listen to the radio and look at the scenery, for a whole forty minutes. How uncivilized. Big tells her he can get his Jaguar out of the garage and see her for an hour and then come home, and then asks for directions to CIM’s non-country cabin.
Carrie is pacing on the front porch of the non-country cabin as CIM and Pete come back from working on the shed. CIM tells her they need to close the windows because a storm is coming, and asks who called, because he heard the phone ring. Carrie tells him it was "Batman," and then admits that she invited Big up to the cabin. CIM get pissed off, and Carrie tells him that Willow broke up with Big and he has no one else to talk to about it, and he's going to go back to the city after she talks to him. CIM tells her he doesn’t want Big in his house, and Carrie gives him a hug and tells him, "You’re my man. And I love you." And then tells him that Big is hurting, and then takes out a big pile of salt and pulls the scab off CIM’s wound and says, "Come on, haven’t you ever had a girl break your…" but can’t quite finish the sentence because she sees CIM give her a death stare. CIM tells her Big better be hurting so much he's crying when he gets there. And then some thunder rolls in. Rumble, rumble. As CIM goes inside, he tells Carrie that Big "has some balls coming up here." Yeah, balls. We get it already!
Steve and Miranda are at the doctor’s office, as we see the doctor holding up a testicle implant in the shape of an anvil because we are so sick of the ball references. The doctor lets Steve hold the ball to see how lifelike it feels, and he gives it to Miranda, and it slips out of her hand. As she picks up the implant, she says, "I dropped the ball." You know, if I hadn’t heard the word "ball" a gazillion times already this episode, I would have laughed at that line. The doctor tells them that the implants come in sizes Extra Small, Small, Medium, and Large. The consensus on the forums is that, in real life, the sizes would probably be Large, Extra Large, Gargantuan, and King Kong. Steve asks Miranda what size he is, and considering that she can’t even tell if a man has one or four balls, I can’t see how she would be able to make an educated guess on this. She guesses Medium, but Steve was thinking Large. Steve gets a little hurt that Miranda thought he was a Medium, and she tries to make up for it by telling him he is a large Medium. The doctor tells Steve that the procedure for that implant is a "clinical trial for market clearance and is still being tested for safety," but insists that it is safe. Miranda doesn’t believe the doctor and makes a comparison between the testicle implant and the Ford Pinto, asking Steve if he wants "a Pinto near [his] penis?"
Meanwhile, at another doctor’s office, Trey is having problems getting it up to give a sperm sample. Charlotte goes into his room to see how he's doing, and Trey tells her he "can’t rise to the occasion." Charlotte whips out an issue of Juggs, and Trey thinks she knew there was going to be a problem. She tells him she was just trying to be prepared, and she knew he liked that magazine. Charlotte is a riot -- she has a big smile on her face as she opens up the magazine so Trey can see the women and says, "Look! She’s got big boobs! Look! So does she! It’s the big-boob bonanza issue!" Trey tells her he is afraid that something else "down there" is going wrong, and Charlotte tries to make him feel better by talking dirty about his Scottish sperm and putting her hand down his pants. He is liking what she is doing and says, "Keep doing that. Do that thing I like. You know, give it a little tug." See what the writers did there? Carrie tells us that Trey’s Scottish sperm were just fine. Well, that was a waste of a subplot, don’t you think?
Samantha is at Wright’s office, and he tells her that she's the best person for the job but he still won’t hire her, because she slept with his architect and he doesn’t want to get involved with that. Samantha asks him how her personal life affects his business, and he says, "I think the accurate question would be, how does your personal life affect your business." Samantha tells him that if she were a guy, he would have "shaken my hand, bought me a scotch and given me a key to an office," and storms out. Wright yells at Samantha to wait as she rushes to an elevator and starts to cry, but tries not to let Wright see. Carrie tells us that, the day, Wright called Samantha and gave her the job because he "admired her balls." Now, did Samantha cry because she was insulted, or because it finally dawned on her that people talk about what a skank she is? And I doubt that a man like Wright would change his mind about Samantha just because she whined about a double standard. Another wasted storyline.
Carrie tells us that two hours later Big still hadn’t arrived, and she hoped that he got lost. Big finally arrives, and Carrie calls his car "the Batmobile." Carrie runs out into the rain to jump into Big’s car, where he is listening to Billy Joel’s "New York State of Mind." Carrie asks him why he didn’t come to the front door, and he tells her he doesn’t want to go in and asks her if she wants to go out for a drink. Carrie is all, "Where are we going to go?" Like I said last week, there's the Mountain Valley microbrewery, the Mason Jar, and the Sheraton. Carrie convinces him to turn off the car and come inside, even though Big doesn’t want to talk in front of CIM. ["Oh, man -- so he'll barge up there uninvited, but he won't come in? What a prince." -- Sars]
Carrie tells us that, "an hour and two bottles of wine later," Big started talking. Big is looking at the magazine with the Willow interview, and he bitches and moans about Willow lying in the interview about finding someone special, and basically acts drunk. I seriously doubt that Big would get drunk from sharing two bottles of wine with two other people, given his size and the fact that he is no lightweight. Big starts to light a cigarette, but Carrie tells him he can’t smoke in the cabin. Big decides to leave and stumbles around knocking into stuff, so Carrie and CIM decide to let him sleep on the couch. Big doesn’t want to sleep there because he knows CIM doesn’t want him there, but he does it anyway.
Carrie tells us that Miranda took Steve out for dinner to help him feel better after the implant fiasco. She brings him back to her apartment and shows him a book she has in her bedroom that she wants him to read, called A Positive Outlook to Healing. I can see Charlotte giving him a book like that, but I really can’t see Miranda reading some sort of self-help book and sharing it with someone. Steve feels the same way, and Miranda tells him she doesn’t know what else to do to help him. Steve tells her he was counting on the implant, and then he asks her, "Who is going to fuck a uniball bartender?" Well, if you keep talking about your one ball and looking all sad and shit, no one! No one wants to fuck a crybaby! Just kidding. Miranda figures out a way to make Steve feel better, and she unzips his pants and pulls him on top of her and they start to do it. How nice, a pity fuck.
Carrie pours herself a cup of coffee the morning, and she hears banging outside. She looks out a window and sees CIM throwing a basketball against the side of the cabin. Big wakes up when he hears the pounding, and Carrie tells him CIM is "shooting hoops." Shooting hoops? Since when is smashing a ball against a wall "hoops"? And when did the term "hoops" come back? Carrie tells Big that he has to "go out there and make friends with him." What, is Big eight years old or something? Big tells her, "We are middle-aged men, we don’t make friends." He says they have nothing in common. Carrie tells him that they have her in common, and if he can’t be friends with CIM, she can’t stay in his life. Is that a threat or a promise? Big asks her how he should go about becoming friends with CIM, and she tells him, "You’re a guy, he’s a guy, there’s a ball. Figure it out." Yeah, like when you’re the new kid and you go to the park and you are all alone, and the other kids are playing ball, and you ask them if you can play too and the other kids are short one person for their game of basketball so they let you play, and then you tell them that you have a Sony Play Station 2 so all the kids think you're cool, and they go back to your house to play video games, and your mom brings in cookies and Sunny Delight to snack on and thing you know you're all friends!
Big goes out to where CIM is throwing the ball, and right to where he's bouncing the ball against the wall is a basketball hoop, so maybe CIM was shooting hoops, and just playing really badly. ["I think he was just passive-aggressively making noise to bother Big's hangover." -- Sars] Big’s shirt is unbuttoned and he has a white undershirt on underneath, but it doesn’t hide the fact that he inherited CIM’s big gut from last season. Big apologizes for the night before, and then says, "You play hoop, huh?" Huh? It really doesn’t look like CIM is playing anything besides "let’s pretend this ball is Big’s head." Big asks if he can shoot, and CIM bounces the ball into the mud and then throws the ball at Big’s chest, and it makes a big mud stain on his shirt. Oooh, CIM is so bad-ass. Big shoots and scores, and CIM does the mud bounce and throw again. Big throws the ball back at CIM, and CIM throws it back at Big, and then they start shoving each other like two Girl Scouts having a fight over who sold the most cookies, and then they end up rolling around in the mud, not really hitting each other. Carrie goes outside and sees the guys rolling in the mud and tells us, "There they were. Batman and the Green Bee." Carrie teeters over to them, trying not to slip in the mud, yelling at them to stop it because they are middle-aged. Pete runs over and bites Big on the ass and then runs away, which stops the mud-rolling.
Carrie is sitting at the table with Big and CIM, and they are all having breakfast together. Carrie is reading the magazine as Big tells CIM about how Willow could reach him but he could never get her, and CIM is all interested and thinks that the situation was fucked up. No, THIS situation is fucked up. You cannot tell me that after one little roll in the mud and a bite on the ass from Pete, CIM and Big are going to be buddies. Were the writers on crack when they came up with this ending?? As that famous Billy Joel song plays in the background, Carrie tells us she never fully understood why "the storm had passed." Neither do I. This is too disturbing. I need a drink.
week, Charlotte still isn’t pregnant. What a shock.