It’s Halloween?! How the Bizarre Time Jumps Save ‘And Just Like That’

It’s at this point in the summer, when the heat becomes unrelenting and our electric bills are through the roof due to excessive AC usage, that we start daydreaming about fall. The leaves turning colors, hot cider (warmed in your own microwave, like a heathen), and turning the AC up a few degrees—you know, because climate change has made autumns more balmy than crisp.

But those are just fantasies, little joyful reveries that we keep tucked in our pocket while we try to forget the fact that our shirts are hermetically stuck to our backs. When the autumn we’re yearning finally arrives, we’ll probably think, “Wow, it seems like just last week that I was dripping with sweat, wishing it could be October.”

Well, in the And Just Like That universe, they take that literally.

This week’s episode of the divisive Sex and the City spinoff series started off with a mind-boggling time jump. When we left Carrie Bradshaw and company, only last week, Charlotte York and Lisa Todd Wexley had just shipped their children off to summer camp. It was one of the major plots of the second season’s fourth episode: With the kids out of school and away at camp, Lisa and Charlotte could get it on with their equally bald husbands.

Out of nowhere, Episode 5 opened with Miranda returning home to her Brooklyn townhouse, decorated with paper ghosts on the windows. “Well that makes sense, because until recently, Miranda was shacked up with Che Diaz in Los Angeles,” I thought to myself. “That’s actually a funny way of illustrating how long she’s been away, since last Halloween.” But no, we have hopped from what was conceivably June in the last episode all the way to the end of October. Not only is Miranda carving up a damn pumpkin, but all of the girls meet up at a Halloween costume fundraiser event in the second scene of the episode. By that measure, it’s basically already November!

Skipping ahead five months is a jarring choice, but less surprising given that And Just Like That was built on jarring choices. The decision to kill off Carrie’s will-they-won’t-they love of two decades was the first of those shockers, and it eventually triggered what the show found to be its modus operandi: the time jump. Season 1, Episode 7 kicks off with a Bella Swan-esque montage of Carrie writing her latest book, as time passes outside of her window. We see all four seasons come and go, until an entire year has flown by, and the book—about her grief in the wake of Big’s death—is finished.

That episode is also where the first season of And Just Like That finally found some stable ground. Prior to Episode 7, the show had been relying on cameos, easter eggs, and fan service, with very little in the way of moving the actual story forward. (Unless you count Miranda bizarrely becoming not only kind of racist but also an alcoholic, which I do not.) The show was floundering, as lost trying to traverse Carrie’s grief as the character was. With the jump forward in time, the series could shake itself out of a rut and refresh its characters, as well as set a precedent for what to do whenever the well of ideas in the writers’ room starts to dry up.

Some might consider a time jump to be a copout. And granted, it is a very easy way to arrive somewhere new in the story without having to do any of the narrative footwork to get there. But on And Just Like That, a time jump is actually a welcome tool. Sex and the City existed outside of time. Think about it: Do you recall a lot of season-specific or holiday episodes of Sex and the City? Sure, there’s that episode where Carrie goes out to Aiden’s farm house in the summer (where Samantha wears one of the greatest hats ever put in front of a camera), and plenty of Hamptons parties. But for the most part, Sex and the City was timeless. It’s part of why the original series holds up so well today—again, within reason.

But as Miranda, Carrie, Charlotte, and our now dearly departed Samantha grew older, we became more attached to them—not just their sexcapades. It was gratifying to see them navigate their dating lives in the same exhausting cycles that we all go through. Then, in the first Sex and the City movie, audiences watched the beloved foursome navigate their marriages, relationships, and friendships through a single calendar year. For the first time, we saw how these characters spent their holidays, including Valentine’s Day. It seems shocking now that, in the six original seasons of a show all about love and sex, we never saw the characters deal with planning activities for the much-dreaded V-Day, but it’s true.

And that’s precisely what separates the old from the new. Sex and the City, the series, was a respite for the modern, lovesick woman. Viewers watched it and saw versions of themselves, in four different archetypes. The plotlines all eventually became cohesive, yes, but there are plenty of standalone episodes—even later on as the series was winding down and was tying its loose ends together. However, the Sex and the City films—and now And Just Like That—don’t subscribe to this same concept. They are far more plot-driven, with characters’ push and pull on each other affecting real change for more than the length of one episode.

The time jumps keep And Just Like That chugging along at a consistent pace. It’s far more difficult to pinpoint the cracks in a foundation when something is in perpetual motion. The hop from summer to fall might be a bit discordant, but it only takes a moment to accept. It’s what we get out of it as viewers that really makes it completely worth it.

These forward leaps make the show’s version of New York feel fuller; the characters seem busier, and their lives are all the more rich. Why stay stuck in one season for a show’s whole season? Carrie Bradshaw feels so much more real when she’s swaying with joy in the brisk autumn wind, like any true lover of layering would be. If a split-second instant of confusion at the top of an episode is enough to keep this show from caving in, by all means, keep time jumping. Let’s see how Miranda and Che spend Arbor Day.

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Read more of our And Just Like That coverage HERE.

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