Carrie Bradshaw’s Final Scene: A Toilet, Barry White and a Lone Ending
Riley Carter here. Okay, but like…why end a decades-long cultural saga with actual crap in a toilet?
After nearly 30 years of Carrie Bradshaw’s column-writing, shoe-collecting, man-chasing life, the “Sex and the City” legacy reached its closing chapter in the Season 3 finale of And Just Like That, and it is, quite literally, a messy send-off. The finale titled “Party Of One” gives Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker) an ending that critics and fans are already calling tone-deaf, anticlimactic, and oddly literal — not metaphorical — thanks to an on-screen shot of feces floating in an overflowing toilet.
The final episode opens with Carrie dining solo at a futuristic restaurant where the staff places a doll across from her, a moment that sparks a familiar Carrie riff about societal judgment of single women. She later tells Miranda (Cynthia Nixon) and Charlotte (Kristin Davis) that she’s been wrestling with the arc of her new novel about a woman in the 1800s, after an editor pushed her to swap a solitary ending for a “happier” epilogue involving a handsome widower. That editor-versus-author debate has always been the show’s meta voice, and here it’s a self-aware argument about whether Carrie’s life can or should end in romantic solitude.
Throughout the season, viewers watched Carrie recover from the death of Big and flirt briefly with rekindled hope with Aiden (John Corbett), then tumble into a short fling with neighbor Duncan (Jonathan Cake), who ultimately chooses work over city life. In the finale, Carrie admits to Charlotte that she may spend the rest of her life alone. Charlotte, predictably optimistic, assures her she’ll find someone, but Carrie’s answer lands with a definitive shrug: maybe it’s “just me” now, and that’s not tragic, it’s factual.
That quiet resignation is immediately undercut by the episode’s tonal missteps. Carrie’s Thanksgiving devolves into abandonment: Miranda is called away because her girlfriend’s dog needs emergency care, and Charlotte leaves when her husband Harry (Evan Handler) recovers from cancer-related intimacy issues. Left at a table with Miranda’s son Brady (Niall Cunningham), his pals, and Mark (Victor Garber) — a matchmaking setup Carrie clearly dislikes — the night spirals into awkwardness and thinly drawn new characters.
The climax of this odd evening is petty and unabashedly gross. One of Brady’s friends clogs the toilet, Mark later uses the bathroom, the toilet overflows, and the camera lingers on the mess. Yes, viewers see feces on screen. It’s a literal image that reads like a symbolic statement about the show’s creative direction: after heartfelt meditations on love, grief, and growing older, the series seems to choose a visual gag that many are calling juvenile and disrespectful to the character’s legacy.
After the bathroom debacle, Carrie returns home alone and dances to Barry White’s “You’re The First, The Last, My Everything,” smiling to herself in a quiet, ambiguous beat that asks the audience to accept her solitude as an intentional, even empowering ending. But the juxtaposition of that contemplative moment with the toilet close-up has left fans and critics questioning whether the writers intended poignancy or simply misread the tone of the original series.
Whether you view Carrie’s final acceptance of being alone as an honest, modern conclusion or a betrayal of the romantic optimism many associate with Sex and the City, the packaging feels off. The show tried to have a delicate conversation about singlehood in middle age and then punctuated it with bathroom humor that landed like a punchline at a funeral. The result is jarring: introspective monologue followed by gross-out visual, leaving audiences to decide if this is brave realism or sloppy dramaturgy.
And yes, the episode plays like a commentary on whether women can exist happily without a partner in mainstream TV narratives. But instead of leaning into nuanced writing, the finale often substitutes shock value and awkward setups for emotional payoff. Fans looking for a tidy romantic resolution or a grand reinvention of Carrie’s arc may feel cheated; those who prefer an ambiguous, non-romantic ending can appreciate the honesty, if they can stomach the toilet shot.
Okay cool, so like, yeah, that happened.
Sources: Celebrity Storm and New York Post, HBO Max
Attribution: Creative Commons Licensed
