Being either Team Big or Team Aidan has become as much a part of Sex and the City fans’ personalities as whether they’re a Carrie, a Miranda or a Charlotte. It’s a divisive topic - a lot can probably be determined about your own love life if you champion the nice but, let’s face it, boring Aidan Shaw, or if you prefer the toxic, cigar waggling, BDE of Mr Big aka John J Preston (RIP) .
If you always wanted Carrie to end up with Aidan, being his ‘booth bitch’ and weekending in his upstate cabin (which he probably now describes as ‘off-grid’), then this week’s episode of And Just Like That has no doubt delighted you. That’s because Aidan, played by John Corbett, made his return (wearing a divisively high necked, nipped in at the waist, waxed Belstaff jacket). He ambled back into Carrie’s life over a badly organised Valentine’s Day dinner which smelt of a bad romcom but was also a nostalgic nod to Carrie’s disastrous 35th birthday dinner (‘Did you know there’s a Mexican restaurant at University and eleven called El Cantinoro?!’). As they hug, Carrie asks him, ‘How do you look exactly the same?’.
I know what half of you are going to say: can’t the And Just Like That writers leave Aidan Shaw in the past where he belongs?! Isn’t three tries - not to mention a fumbled kiss in a Dubai hotel lobby - at making a relationship work enough?
I was always more of a Big fan, even when he was at his most unbearable, and when I first heard that John Corbett, who has played the plaid-clad Aidan since Sex and the City’s third season, was making a return, my scepticism was piqued. Aidan’s blouses and cord necklace style weren't really Carrie, in my eyes, and he tried to control Carrie more than any other man she was with. Surely, I thought, after Big’s Peloton-related death Carrie can take a step forwards instead of a step back?
And yet, watching the episode last night, I had happy tears in my eyes. And Just Like That has been a wild ride for SATC fans. Following Big’s shock death in the first ever episode, we’ve often been led on a journey which we didn’t sign up for, with its worst moments including - but not limited to - Miranda and Che’s kitchen scene, Steve going deaf in season one but not in season two, and an unhinged CGI snowstorm.
They dove back in far more quickly than was feasible given his marriage had failed and her husband had died, but watching Aidan and Carrie thrash out their feelings for one another on the steps of her apartment, for the hundredth time, I felt, fleetingly, like everything might be alright with the world for a moment. As Aidan told Carrie she’d hurt him too much in her apartment for him to go inside again, we could have been back in season four, when he yelled, ‘You broke my heart!’ It felt right. Aren’t we watching a Sex and the City reboot, so we can feel that warm nostalgia? We’re certainly not watching it to see Nya Wallace eat a souffle.
The episode ended with a passionate kiss between Carrie and Aidan, and having seen her muddle her way through her romantic life as a widow - from an unsolicited dick pic to a boring episode long relationship with an app creator whose name I can’t even remember - I’m ready to see Carrie Bradshaw give some heart again.
Carrie has actually already inadvertently answered the critics of her relationship with Aidan. At the end of season four, when Carrie finds the very act of Aidan hammering through her apartment wall to make a life with her unbearable and ends things, Aidan tells her, ‘I love you, Carrie. There's no one I could love more. I want to live my life with you.’ To which Carrie later ponders, ‘Maybe there are no right moments, right guys, right answers,’ she says. ‘Maybe you just have to say what's in your heart.’
Carrie taking a step backwards into her former life with Aidan might feel like a cynical move to lure viewers back in (in fact, during the writers podcast, Michael Patrick King, the showrunner, says they never considered a return for Aidan when Big’s death was playing out in series one), but for lots of die-hard SATC fans it actually feels like a return to something magical and very watchable. Now, we just have to patiently wait for the return of Samantha Jones.