“Sex and the City” has always been a sex-positive show — after all, it’s right there in the title. But its spinoff “And Just Like That” Season 2 takes that theme to a whole new level, exploring a mother’s commitment to her daughter’s sexual health when Charlotte (Kristin Davis) trudges through a snowstorm to deliver condoms to her daughter in Episode 6.
“We talked through our whole season, so I knew that was coming,” Davis told TheWrap of her early conversations with showrunner Michael Patrick King. Our interview was conducted prior to the SAG-AFTRA strike. “Though I had blanked it out a little bit, which I think has to do with the fact that I have an 11-year-old daughter myself.”
For Charlotte, “Bomb Cyclone” starts with her daughter Lily (Cathy Ang) confidently declaring over the breakfast table that she’s going to lose her virginity. Initially, Charlotte is shocked and doesn’t know how to handle Lily’s newly revealed goal. But it isn’t until Lily calls her mom asking for condoms that Charlotte becomes the progressive mom she’s always wanted to be.
Despite her personal trepidations around the plot, when Davis actually started working on the episode, she “really loved” how it was written.
“I wanted to do justice and find that fine line,” Davis explained. “We know Charlotte, and we know her history with her own sexuality hasn’t always been smooth. You know what I’m saying? I think that Charlotte is really trying with her children to be her best self, to rise to the best level that she can be for them.”
The actor especially loved the conversation Charlotte has with Lily about how she was never able to talk to her own mother about sex. Davis found that moment particularly relatable to what “my generation has gone through.”
“We’re just trying to do it from scratch because we don’t really have a lot of experience from our own moms with that,” Davis said. “I just love how it ended up. I love the whole storyline.”
Charlotte’s growth as a mother isn’t the only scene-stealer in Episode 6. After Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker) is asked to speak at a conference for grieving partners cheekily referred to as Widow Con, she also has to brave the snow. Because Carrie is Carrie, she goes out in the storm the only way she knows how: in a designer ballgown that doubles as a winter coat.
The moment costume designers Molly Rogers and Danny Santiago saw Moncler’s puffer gowns in collaboration with Valentino’s Pierpaolo Piccioli, they knew Carrie was going to wear one.
“We thought about it for so long that we started having doubts. We didn’t know if she could walk in it. We didn’t know if it was heavy. We didn’t know anything about it,” Rogers told TheWrap.
Production moved the scene so many times that by the time it was ready to shoot, Rogers and Santiago asked themselves, “Should we be looking at something else?”
“But I’m glad it’s there,” Rogers added. “What else are you going to put that in but this TV show?”
