And Just Like That’s final insult
'It wasn't meant to be' and other thought-terminating cliches
[Please skip this one – or save it for later – if you don’t want spoilers for the finale of And Just Like That Season 2]
Like a lot of Sex And The City fans, I’ve been hate-watching the re-boot/sequel.
There’s a whole other post to be written about why I can’t stop watching, in spite of my better judgment. (Something, perhaps, about it being a uniquely female fantasy world, which is still quite rare in film and TV? See also: Barbie).
I don’t know. What I do know is that the final episode last week dropped an unforgivable clanger. Even Kim Cattrall’s glorious 70-second cameo couldn’t take the sting out of it. Because the finale did what I feared it was going to do: it completely fumbled a miscarriage storyline.
I feared where we were heading, after the penultimate episode had left us with a recently - and ambivalently - pregnant Lisa Todd Wexley (Nicole Ari Parker), heading to the hospital with her husband Herbert (Christopher Jackson) after telling him that she’s bleeding. The dread I felt was disproportionate – and not just because I’d only very recently said those same words to my own husband.
No, my dread was because I knew they were going to get this wrong. Which meant, I also felt disproportionately bothered about it. Quite grumpy, actually.
After all, this was supposed to be my silly little show that I retreated to when my silly little brain couldn’t cope with much else, while pausing it every 5 minutes to share my silly little theories with Dan.
They weren’t supposed to intrude on my actual, real life. Because, unlike the original, this show has shown it can’t be trusted with women’s actual, real lives.
Dan’s pre-finale prediction was that the bleed would be a false alarm. That all would be fine and it would make LTW realise how much she wanted this baby after all. I think it says a lot about the re-boot that I actually thought he might be right.
But, in the event, the show did at least have the courage to follow through on the miscarriage. Unfortunately, this is what Herbert says in response to his wife’s guilty, teary question: ‘Did I wish the baby away?’
(Brace yourselves.)
‘It wasn’t meant to be’.
Urrrrghhhhhhhhhhhnnnnnn.
It’s so bad, the writers have him say it twice.
As ‘what not to says’ go, that has to be up there with: ‘It wasn’t in God’s plan’.
Which was, of course, Herbert’s next line. (Well, close enough. He actually says: ‘God has other plans for us’.)
Even being generous and assuming that the latter line genuinely speaks to who these characters are – a touching invocation of their hitherto unmentioned faith, perhaps – it’s still deeply unhelpful.
It just gives licence to others to trot out these sorts of phrases when confronted with pregnancy loss in their own actual, real lives, when, really, they already need no encouragement.
‘It wasn’t meant to be’ frequently tops online listicles of what not to say when someone has a miscarriage. It comes up again and again in waggly-finger ‘don’t say this’/‘say this’ routines on TikTok and Instagram Reels. These unhelpful ideas are already prevalent enough (so much so, I named every chapter in my book after a different, common example).
‘It wasn’t meant to be’ – along with my personal favourite, ‘everything happens for a reason’ – are classic examples of what the psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton coined ‘thought-terminating cliches’. This kind of expression almost always acts as a roadblock to further reflection, sparing others from inconvenient emotional discomfort. As Lifton wrote: ‘the most far-reaching and complex of human problems are compressed into brief, highly reductive, definitive-sounding phrases, easily memorized and easily expressed’.
LTW’s miscarriage also falls into the unfortunate TV trope of the ‘convenient miscarriage’, given that in the previous episode her husband had been semaphoring the possibility of an abortion. (I say semaphoring, because nobody actually says the word ‘abortion’ out loud, at any point. 🙄)
Other commenters have argued that not granting LTW an abortion, on the basis that she was on the cusp of a career breakthrough, had long thought she’d ‘moved out of Babyville’, and was less than thrilled about the pregnancy, was an act of cowardice by the show’s writing team.
For me, it’s less cut and dried. On one level, yes, it would have been powerful to show this particular character seeking a termination: already a mother, happily married, wealthy, with her shit unquestionably together. And in post-Roe America, no less.
It would also have a certain symmetry to it – echoing a storyline from the original show in which Miranda planned to terminate her pregnancy, but ended up changing her mind at the last minute (literally in the doctor’s office). There would have been something satisfying about this show, in 2023, being able to go where a show in 2001 perhaps still couldn’t.
But, equally, there could have been value in exploring the hazy, grey space that exists between the binary that all miscarriages are of much-wanted pregnancies and all terminated pregnancies are unwanted.
In England and Wales, at least, there has been a steady increase in the last decade in the number of women over 35 having abortions. Almost 60 per cent of women who have abortions have other children. Miscarriage, as we are often reminded, is more common as we age. Therefore, I don’t think it’s illogical to assume that there is going to be overlap between those two categories: women who intend to end their pregnancy, but who end up miscarrying. Yet we rarely hear those stories in a meaningful way, not just as a convenient exit route for screenwriters.
There’s stuff to excavate here. Any pregnancy, however tentative, has the potential to rearrange your entire life from the moment you become aware of it. And, however wanted, there will also be small pockets of disappointment or anxiety at what you are unable to do as well as have a baby. Work commitments, travel plans, the money you won’t be able to earn, the dress you were planning to wear somewhere: all those pieces, big and very small, get picked up and scattered. And if that turns out to be temporary, if the pregnancy doesn’t work out, those abandoned pieces don’t necessarily go back into quite the same place as before. Having them back is no consolation, in my experience.
It wasn’t all bad, of course. The actors did their utmost with it. The moment Lisa heads to the bathroom, on the verge of tears, after an unwitting Carrie coos to her new kitten: ‘Say good night, baby’. That felt very real to me.
And Herbert almost redeemed himself by being too overcome with emotion to speak in that excruciating dinner-party activity, when everyone is asked to say one thing they’re ‘letting go of’. Perhaps that moment was supposed to show how hollow his earlier words were. I don’t know.
Look, I realise it might seem silly to give so much headspace to a TV show.
But there’s a long tradition of silly little TV shows, books, and films aimed at women trojan-horsing in progressive ideas and nuanced realities of women’s lives while the dominant culture is happily distracted by the sex, the shopping, the big knickers, or Patrick Swayze with his top off (I mean, fair).
That’s what the original Sex And The City did at its best. Consider Charlotte finally steeling herself to go to Brady’s first birthday party, just after losing a baby she’d been told she only had a 15 per cent chance of conceiving in the first place.
Or the utter believability when Miranda – then a single woman, with a demanding job in a law firm – states: ‘I can't have a baby. I could barely find the time to schedule this abortion.’
So when the opportunity to do something similar feels squandered, well, that doesn’t feel silly to me at all.
I know I should probably let it go, but…I’m sorry, I can’t. Don’t hate me.