I no longer believe And Just Like That … takes place in a Lynchian dream. I now believe it exists in an Ari Asterian horror movie. The inkling first struck me during Patti LuPone’s multi-episode guest arc as Giuseppe’s mother, a woman doggedly trying to undermine her son’s sex life. It was like a reprisal of her role as the overbearing mother who irreparably fucked up her son in Beau Is Afraid, only Sicilian rather than Jewish. But even with Patti out of the picture, this week’s episode took the fear factor to a fever pitch, as scene after scene felt uncanny, unsettling, and very, very wrong. This episode was so scary, in fact, it got the whole show canceled. I’m talking perverts, psychos, and Thoroughly Modern Millie. Here are the ten moments of “Better Than Sex” that made me fear for my life, from least to most disturbing.
A hereditary freak-out
Steve’s back! The once and future king of Sex and the City returns for a scene in which Brady tells his parents he got a girl pregnant. Actor David Eigenberg does not waste his moment in the spotlight, yelling at the dinner table like Toni Collette. I guess this one is scary because I don’t like to see Steve upset.
Energy aggravator
This isn’t the first episode in which AJLT dabbled in the mysterious or supernatural (see: Big communicating from the afterlife via lamp, LTW’s Lazarus father), but “Better Than Sex” really amps up the occult energy. Charlotte wins a 50-minute Zoom session with energy healer Rhonda Portante at an auction, but the healer keeps her camera off and the entire scene is shot like a slasher flick with the perspective from the unseen mystic’s side perched over her shoulder the entire time. When her identity is eventually revealed, Rhonda Portante is none other than … Susie Essman! But her character is so soothing and meditative it seems as though the Susie we know and love is, frankly, possessed. Terrifying.
Schrödinger’s hamster
Over in Lisa Todd Wexley land, her head-to-toe Burberry-clad daughter has accused her of not spending enough quality time with the family hamster, which makes no more sense onscreen than it does written out here. Of course the hamster goes missing right before LTW’s husband, George Washington, loses the city comptroller election, presumably to an offscreen Brad Lander, so she comforts her family with a sentence never heretofore uttered: “We’ll order a big ol’ pizza, the kind with the goat cheese that we love.” It’s the small details like these that make a character come alive.
Thoroughly modern willies
Everything is chaotic and noisy at Charlotte’s house. Construction guys are banging and drilling in her endless, Shining-like hallway. Harry’s got the TV on max volume. And Charlotte’s energy Zoom has been interrupted by aggressive tap dancing. It turns out that Rock’s been cast as the lead in Thoroughly Modern Millie and has just three weeks to rehearse with LTW’s son. The whole sequence is highly disorienting.
Ghost driver
Seema and Carrie go out to dinner. In the establishing shot of the restaurant interior, you can see a strange man with a haunted look on his face standing completely still, unblinking and staring, just outside the windowed restaurant door. For a full five seconds, this man in the background of the shot just stands there, leering. Close up on Seema seated near the door, talking, and he’s disappeared. Next shot, he’s there again like a jumpscare, and in focus! Turns out he’s the chauffeur she rehired and is not meant to be threatening at all. Guess I was just on high alert from all of the other weird stuff going down.
Gas-leak hallucinations
Early in the episode, we’re thrown in media res into Anthony and Guisseppe in the throes of passion … just as a handsome firefighter comes knocking at their door to tell them there’s a gas leak in the building. You could read the episode’s plot from here on as a gas leak-induced vision, or you can draw a comparison to the chilling exhaust-pipe murder-suicide that opens Midsommar. Whichever way you interpret it, you should take into account that Anthony keeps saying “Down, boy” to his boner throughout.
Plant mom
I’ve already been so beaten down by this episode that by the time Seema’s crystal-deodorant boyfriend introduces her to his mother — he literally says, “Seema, meet my mother” — and gestures toward a potted plant, I just have to sigh and accept it. The plant is his dead mom, he says, and then clarifies that her spirit resides in the plant. Like the spirit tree from Avatar. And then, of course, Seema knocks the plant out of the window, killing his mom again.
Don’t trust the Brit in apartment two
We can all agree that Carrie Bradshaw’s book sounds awful, right? This episode opens on her narrating it: “Autumn was here and as the leaves turned gold and air turned crisp, the woman returned to herself … She had done all she could. She had done all she could. She had done all she could.” Immediately we run into Duncan Reeves, the pretentious biographer who lives in her garden unit, gushing about how good it is. He especially loves the repetition at the end. This fundamental disconnect between what our ears and brain are hearing and processing and what the show is telling us to be true is dizzying.
Jonathan Cake, who plays Reeves, is simply not a good enough actor to sell his genuine love of the book. He begs Carrie to spill what happens next and says things like, “She’s such a unique character!” It comes off as so disingenuous that only one thing can be true: Duncan Reeves is lying, and he has nefarious intentions for Carrie. He is some sort of psycho, or stalker, and his murder lust or fetishistic obsession was activated by her click-clacking her heels all over the upstairs unit. He flatters her and says how brilliant the book is because Carrie is fool enough to believe him. Thus she lets him into her life, her home, her bed, and her innermost sanctum, her shoe closet, where whimsical music plays while he says thing’s like “Sparkle sparkle sparkle!” and talks into a shoe like a telephone. There is no way that any man has ever behaved about Carrie’s shoes like this, ever, and it’s a complete high-heel-turn from how he felt about her shoes earlier in the season. Even after their makeout and sex scene I had the profound feeling that this man might actually try to kill her.
Gas-leak hallucinations, again
In an episode full of all kinds of commotion, the most consequential plotline is Miranda’s son Brady getting a two-time hookup pregnant. He doesn’t even know her last name, but that doesn’t stop Miranda from putting on what amounts to a detective costume and finding this girl at her workplace. Mia is the shampoo girl at a hair salon with a dark and confusing aura, a demon out of Miranda’s worst nightmares who farts whenever she moves and blames the gas on her pregnancy. She tells Miranda very bluntly, “I was going to get an abortion until I realized the baby was going to be a double Libra. Such a vibe.” When Miranda reveals herself to be Brady’s mom, Mia splashes her with the spray nozzle, says “You have to be a Taurus!” and loudly farts herself down the hall. She’s drinking a Diet Red Bull the whole time. There’s no way that’s medically advisable in her condition.
Ensouled jack-off puppet
By far the most disturbing and compelling horror plot I’ve seen this year happens when Anthony stays with Guiseppe at his apartment after the gas leak. Guiseppe’s roommate is a creepy old man who enters his room unannounced with an Annabelle-ish marionette carved and painted in Guiseppe’s likeness. He has come to announce that he is nearly finished with his latest creation. Guiseppe tells Anthony that he isn’t creeped out because the old man is asexual, to which Anthony answers, “A sexual what?” A sexual deviant, it turns out: Toward the end of the episode, Guiseppe spies through a crack in his roommate’s door at night and finds the marionette staring sadly back at him while the old man cradles it and jacks off.
With only two episodes left in the series, there’s a chance this horror franchise will end on a cliffhanger. At least until a 2035 reboot of the reboot, And Just Like That … Puppet’s Revenge.
