What end for Carrie Bradshaw? The doubtful conclusion of and just like that …

This time, they are real farewells. The latest episode of the Sex and the City suite offered Carrie’s new end by completely breaking the previous one. Was it really necessary?

We close (again) the book by Carrie Bradshaw. This time for good (a priori).

After six cult seasons of Sex and the City (1998-2004), two films with various fortunes (2008 and 2010), and three seasons of and Just Like That…, the columnist in Stilettos bows. But this time, no “Mr. Big” on the horizon, no flashy happy end: just Carrie, alone, in her apartment, who decides to dance on Barry White rather than being caught up in melancholy …

An hour earlier, the last episode – broadcast in recent days (to see on HBO Max in France) – begins like a nose. Carrie reserves a table for a person in a futuristic restaurant, is decked out with an inflatable doll to “do not dine alone”. Loneliness, such will be the theme of this last episode, the common thread of the Carrie epilogue.

Carrie now observes the lives of others, from a distance, while her friends sail in their intimate turbulence. Charlotte worries about Harry’s faulty desire, Lisa doubts her marriage to Herbert, Miranda finds Steve around a dinner full of nostalgia. Even Seema, flamboyant single, doubt: “I think I am in love with a man who will never get married.”

There is only Carrie who no longer seems ready to fight. Or even just believe in love. Besides, this final of and just like that… seems to have been built as the exact opposite of that of Sex and the City. A bit as if the authors regretted the happy ending offered 15 years ago. As if this (first) romanticized conclusion had something too normalized to correspond to Carrie Bradshaw.

The latest episode in the new series thus corrects the shot suddenly, through scathing outings: “I may be alone for the rest of my life” realizes Carrie, who no longer has any man in his life. Charlotte, eternal optimistic, tries to remind her that love can still strike anytime. But Carrie seems to have given up her illusions. Like an admission: after having long believed that she would always end up falling on her feet (and in someone’s arms), she must now face another truth: “Maybe it’s just me …” She lets go. Hard !

The final watch delivered her pies of Thanksgiving to her loved ones, escaping a nightmarish dinner, then returning alone. Obviously, the series cannot show Carrie in full despair. So she concludes history by imposing her heroine as a woman who is enough for herself. Carrie erases the end of her novel to register a new morality:

“The woman understood that she was not alone: she was with herself.”

End generic.

Suffice to say that this conclusion will find it difficult to convince fans, who must today wonder why having ruined the original end of Sex and the City. At the time, the series ended on the image of a modern tale: Carrie finding “big” in Paris, the man who, after six seasons of hesitation, finally became his great love. The films had extended this logic: a first opus in 2008 focused on their wedding, and a second, in 2010, which moved the couple to Abu Dhabi in a slightly embarrassing luxury exercise. And so and just like that… chose to break everything, starting by killing Big from the very first episode, breaking the promise of the “Eternal Happy End”. For three seasons, Carrie wandered between solitude, mourning, new meetings (Aidan, Adam), while rebuilding a more peaceful relationship with her friends. The last plan, she dances alone, loops the loop – but by reversing the myth. No more Prince Charming, make way for a heroine who chooses to belong.

Was it the ideal end? Everyone will judge in terms of their vision of life.

But we can still regret the scathing melancholy which crosses this final chapter of the adventures of Carrie Bradshaw, delivered to herself, almost deprived of her friends. Indeed, how can we explain that no sequence shows three of three with Charlotte and Miranda? Don’t make the slightest reference to Samantha? The end clap is sober to say the least, without the slightest romantic impulse. Life as Carrie has so often described it in the end. Twenty-five years ago, Sex and the city era, she asked in her New York column: “Can you every show it all?” Twenty-five years later, the answer seems to be: no, but you can learn to dance alone, with your heels and your laptop, and maybe it’s enough …