Now We Know What They're Doing with Aidan on 'And Just Like That'

By Dustin Rowles | TV | August 18, 2023 |

By Dustin Rowles | TV | August 18, 2023 |

For the hate watchers who love to complain about Max’s And Just Like That, there were plenty of opportunities to complain this week. To wit: Not only does Che continue to be a terrible stand-up comic, but now they’re a straight-up villain, too, unwittingly sh*tting on Miranda during a spectacularly lame stand-up set in which she didn’t realize Miranda was in attendance (some may have recognized the jacket Che was wearing). Lisa and Seema, meanwhile, continue to get short shrift. Lisa gets pregnant, has a freak-out about recalibrating her work/life balance (and abortion is never even contemplated) before she loses the baby, and is sad about that. The series tries to extract an equal amount of drama from Seema when she accidentally tells a guy she’s sleeping with that she loves him, while Nya is reduced to buying a stroller for an ex out of spite. Oh, and Anthony may finally be ready to be a bottom after a lifetime of being a top.

Maybe worst of all, we find out that the late Willie Geist character, Stanford Blatch, apparently moved to Kyoto and became a Shinto monk. It’s nice to know what happened to Stanford — who otherwise disappeared from the series after Geist’s death — but that is not consistent with the character.

It wasn’t all bad! Steve got himself a hot-dog-and-clams stand on Coney Island and couldn’t be happier. It’s nice to see him in good spirits. Charlotte continues to consistently be the best thing about And Just Like That because her character embraces the comedy. Here, after returning to work and successfully selling a painting to Sam Smith, Charlotte blows off her needy family and goes out with her co-workers for a much-needed night of drinking, which ends when she stumbles home and tells her family to cut her some slack before retiring alone to her room with her dog, Richard Burton.

But the worst part of the episode, besides Che’s stand-up act, was Aidan’s cry face. Good God, man! Get it together.

Worse still, that cry face foreshadows yet another exit from the series for John Corbett’s Aidan Shaw. Damnit. Anyone could have predicted that he wasn’t going to be around for season three, but I was heartbroken in the belief that he’d get dumped yet again by Carrie. It’s not going to happen that way, exactly, it appears. But the reason why Aidan was crying is that his son was in a bad car accident on his way to see Aidan, and if Aidan had been in Virginia, his son wouldn’t have been in the accident.

Obviously, Aidan will make the decision to return to Virginia full-time and give up the idea of commuting between his home and Carrie’s home, and he will almost certainly ask Carrie to move to Virginia with him full-time. She will say no because she is Carrie, and she belongs in the city, and Aidan will go back to Virginia a broken man. Because she has not yet officially closed on the sale of her apartment, I imagine Carrie will end up right back there, forever incapable of leaving it.

It’s a bummer. Aidan Shaw deserves better. He deserves to live forever in our season 4 Sex and the City memories. The only question remaining, however, is if he’ll return to Carrie’s apartment for the finale’s Last Supper before he returns to Virginia. With Che and Miranda seated around the same table (because Carrie is a terrible friend), it should make for a dramatic finale. We’ll also finally get to see the (brief) return of Kim Cattrall’s Samantha Jones.