Well, there was no wedding. No marriage proposal on a bridge over the Seine in the moonlight (okay, we got close). No extravagant saved-by-my-man rescue scene (again, we got close). In other words, we escaped without having to swallow a Harlequin romance ending on a show that we've loved for flipping the fairy tale into something far more familiar.
At least, we think we did.
Taken on the surface, last night's expanded 45-minute series finale of "Sex and the City" on HBO did manage to wrap up the lives of its four smart, sexy, funny women in -- okay, let's face it -- a pretty neat little package.
Charlotte got her baby. Samantha embraced love and it embraced her back. Miranda, always stingy with her emotions (at least when it came to men), found herself in a place where the depths of her love for new husband Steve were achingly visible.
And Carrie, well, Carrie got herself back. And, yes, she got Big. You know, Big -- the guy who broke her heart and strung her along and always let her down and yet always, always made her laugh and made her feel alive and made her glow. The guy we pretty much knew she was meant to be with, but weren't sure we could accept as her fate. Couldn't Carrie just be happy on her own?
As they have done so well over the years, though, the writers flirted with the traditional notions of women and romance. When Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker) mentions to Big -- who, cliche, just happens to arrive in her hotel lobby at the perfect moment -- that Aleksandr (inadvertently) slapped her face during their hotel-suite confrontation, he goes on a classic I'm-kicking-some-Russian-you-know-what rampage. He tears up the stairwell toward Aleksandr's hotel room, swearing , rushing to that classic "you can't stop me" moment when Carrie . . . trips him with one of her omnipresent four-inch heels. And they both wind up on the expensive Four Seasons carpet, laughing hysterically.
Happily-ever-after moment
And then there's the moment we both longed for and dreaded. The moment when Big (Chris Noth) declares his intentions for Carrie. It's night, they're on a bridge, she's chilly, and he, of course, notices her shivering and removes his coat, draping it around her bare shoulders. In other words, we are being primed.
In an intentionally twisted way, of course.
"This is so surreal," Carrie says. "How did you even get here?"
"It took a really long time to get here," Big says, dropping one of those classically awful double-entendres. "But I'm here."
Then he says it: "Carrie, you're the one." And she smiles. And he smiles. And she says something romantic-movie-classic like "Oh, kiss me!" and then there is kissing and forehead rubbing and the romantic music kicks in and she says, "I miss New York. Take me home."
And inside you're swooning and groaning simultaneously.
And then they cut to Charlotte (Kristin Davis) scooping Chinese food from some takeout cartons.
Which brings us to the other three women of "Sex." It might have been easy for the final episode to basically skip over their lives, given that most of them were (for them) settled at the end of last week's installment. Not the case.
Charlotte's storyline was disappointing and predictable -- after finding out that the country-bumpkin North Carolina couple were not going to give her their baby after all, and suffering through brief remorse, comes word she's getting a baby from China. We find out that Samantha (Kim Cattrall) hadn't had sex in forever -- chemotherapy kills the libido -- but we also find out that, in the end, she wants monogamy. And she finds the man, Smith, who is willing to give it to her (she also gets one last orgasm scene, just to bookend things neatly).
Miranda's storyline was the most painful -- Steve's mom has a stroke, and the woman who a few weeks ago couldn't bear a honeymoon in the country because it was too intimate finds herself making room in her home for her mother-in-law. There is a scene, unusual to "Sex," where Miranda (Cynthia Nixon) is shown delicately bathing this woman she basically used to abhor. As Magda, her longtime housekeeper, later says: "What you did, that is love."
Sad Parisian B-movie
But, never fear, we had our camp, too. The first part of the show found a lonely Carrie -- abandoned by Aleksandr (Mikhail Baryshnikov), who was, as always, totally self-absorbed with his work -- wandering the streets of Paris, stuffing her face, moping about like a heartbroken chick in some American idea of a French B-movie. The only bounce in her high-heeled step -- and the only, oh-so-familiar squeal of pleasure -- comes when she's talking about newly discovered French fans of her old columns.
So it's inevitable, we know where we're going. The relationship with the Russian isn't working, she has to go home. And when she finally makes peace with it herself, this is what she tells him:
"Maybe it's time to be clear about who I am. I am someone who is looking for love. Real love. Ridiculous, inconvenient, consuming, can't-live-without-each-other love."
She doesn't say she needs marriage. She doesn't say she needs a baby. And Big has yet to reenter the picture. She just knows she needs the possibility of something more. She needs her own life -- her real life, not some Paris fantasy. In New York, where she always believed that anything was possible.
So, if we fast-forward through the sappy bridge scene, in the end we find Carrie back in New York, back with her friends, back in her beloved apartment, back writing -- back being, in other words, exactly who she is and exactly who she is meant to be.
And if Big happened to be selling his house and moving from Napa to pursue her, well, that was just a bonus.
"There are those that open you up to something new and exotic," Carrie says, in one last voiceover. "Those that bring you somewhere unexpected. Those that bring you far from where you started. And those that bring you back.
"But the most exciting, challenging and significant relationship of all is the one you have with yourself."
Just then, her cell phone rings on the streets of Manhattan. Caller ID shows the person at the other end to be "John." She answers.
Big finally has a name. From here on out, then, we're calling him "Big John."
