Now that we’ve all seen Aidan masturbating in the front of a Bronco, it’s time to talk about And Just Like That…, more of a Sex and the City spin-out than spin-off. This season sees our core three New York-ing with aplomb: Alongside the car wank overseen by Shoe Bradshaw, we’ve had the brutal extermination of Margiela heels by rats, the use of the term “guacamole beard,” phony negronis, and phony orgasms. While there’s not a huge amount of un-faked sex (the clue is in the re-titling of the series), but there is something sinfully scrumptious about Miranda deflowering a nun.

In Manhattan, Carrie’s period novel is taking shape while she pines for her Virginia-locked carpenter; Charlotte and Lisa are Laurel and Hardy-ing through the college administration system, and Miranda better fuck the brit-lawyer Joy, so help me God. Anthony still talks to everyone like they’ve just farted at a silent retreat (I just know he runs his little bread business like a prison camp). And welcome, also, to “Adam Gardens,” the burly landscape gardener who talks like a just-cracked fortune cookie.

Carrie Brad-core has also stepped up a notch in Episode 2: On the whole, she’s looking like a midnight feast and an afternoon tea, despite that alarming interlude from that sourdough starter on her head. Big’s inheritance (I would die for Carrie’s money diary) has afforded her a big, if unfurnished, house, and even bigger dresses—the Simone Rocha tulle was standout, a perfectly deft stroke in the Bradshaw fresco.

Much has been bemoaned about AJLT storylines, and I get it; we’re often watching the three women act in a way that has no correlation to our personal sense of their history. Each time we settle into the new status quo—I had to laugh when Miranda described herself as a recently-sober, recently-divorced, recent-lesbian to her son’s former babysitter—we get snagged. I think what’s missing, if anything, is a theme of the week. Carrie’s New York Star column was the sinew keeping the bones together. (I often think of the teenager theme in Season 3: Carrie gets caught smoking pot by her squeeze’s parents, Samantha gets read to shit by a mini-me, Miranda gets braces.) Emergent stories on AJLT feel believable, but disparate. Seema is the atmosphere in a hothouse embodied, but was her Episode 1 plotline really advocating dumping someone because they make you accompany them for a whole day at work? And what does that have to do with the mistaken identity of Charlotte’s dog, or Lily simmering at the piano like Vanessa Carlton?