While out in Washington Square Park, Carrie and Sebastian run upon a crowd watching a hawk eating a pigeon. Disturbed at seeing such a thing, Carrie goes home and talks to Tom and Dorrit about how savage the city is, with Tom mentioning that you have to have a killer instinct in order to make it in Manhattan. Carrie will have to continue honing her own killer instinct due to being accepted to NYU, something she learns when the mail comes that day.
When Carrie heads to her internship, she hears from Larissa that Bennet had blown off work for the past five days after being given ample time to deal with everything he’s going through right now. It’d be one thing if he was clubbing and getting good material for the magazine, but as he’s barely even bothered to check in or clue Larissa in on how he’s feeling, he has until 6:00 to turn in a 500-word piece on parachute pants or else. Before Carrie begins working on the article for him to keep him out of trouble, Samantha stops by to tell her friend about her new job – looking for a yellow parakeet named Gabriel for a $500 reward. She claims she’s going to print up her own fliers with her name on them and offer a $50 reward for the bird’s return, that she could use other people to find the bird and give them a cut of her eventual reward.
Meanwhile, Maggie and Mouse are at the diner, with the former going over lingerie possibilities for Pete’s three-day trip into town during spring break. But soon enough, Donna sits down at the table and clues Maggie in on the fact that none of the choices are acceptable due to the fact that she always ends up confusing sex with love and that she would screw things up with Pete if she tries to jump his bones too early. Her advice to Maggie? Wear granny panties and don’t shave your legs so that you won’t have the temptation to take your pants off. She goes on to say that Maggie should stay out of bed with Pete until he likes her for her and not because of what she can do for him in the bedroom. Larissa gets the piece on parachute pants that Carrie wrote in Bennet’s name and she loves the way it was written, only she doesn’t know that Carrie was the one behind it; she thinks Bennet submitted it from home. Although she thought she was doing a good thing for a friend, Carrie suddenly finds herself feeling bitter that she’s not receiving the proper credit for her hard work, which she tells Sebastian once she arrives at his apartment. He doesn’t feel the same way, though, asking her if she would have claimed credit for the article if Larissa didn’t care for it and sating that you can’t want anything in return when you do something for somebody. That opinion may be influenced, though, by the fact that his father is arriving in town for circumstances he doesn’t yet know.
As Samantha gets picked up by a guy while putting up fliers for Gabriel, deciding to go to his place for Rosette and a better view of the city, Tom arrives at a meeting with Penny, a lawyer for another company, and finds that she’s incredibly frazzled, a clumsy, disorganized mess who forgets her glasses are on her head and claims to have overslept. He retracts his killer instinct when she runs from the room due to her eyes burning from leaving her contacts in from last night, while Maggie greets Pete at the bus and doesn’t kiss him like he wanted. He shows up fairly dressed up with the intention of taking her to the Normandie Inn, a romantic restaurant in town, and sensing that going there would lead her to do things she wasn’t ready for, Maggie claims to be hungry right then and drags Pete off somewhere else so they can have a bite.
Bennet comes into the offices of Interview and Carrie tells him that she took his messages and scheduled his appointments, in addition to writing the article on parachute pants. He’s grateful for her covering for him like this, but when Larissa compliments him and he lays on the bragging thick, Carrie gets annoyed. She pulls him aside and chastises him for not even bringing her up or suggesting that she helped him out, but Bennet claims that his head is foggy from everything he’s been dealing with and decides to ditch the rest of his day to go home and crash. Elsewhere, Tom and Penny sit down to begin their negotiations and he realizes that when the two bumped into one another and her papers scattered, she picked up one of his important files and is using it on purpose to get her client a better deal. While Tom now knows that he’s been played and that the clumsy act was just that, Maggie’s wolfing down chili cheese fries at the diner and grossing Pete out; making things worse is Mouse, who feigns surprise at Maggie being there with Pete and sits down at the table with them to eat some fries.
Carrie talks with Lyle at Interview about a ballet gala that night and an interview with a prima ballerina that Bennet was supposed to do. Since Lyle saw Bennet at Da Silvano with a boy on each arm and a bottle of wine, Carrie decides to take his tickets to the event and go after the interview herself, though when she gets there with Samantha, she begins doubting whether she should have done that or not. 
Samantha assures her that Bennet was the one who dropped the interview and that she was merely the one who picked it up before talking up and eventually introducing Carrie to PhD student Elliot, her hookup from earlier. Unfortunately, Elliot also introduces Carrie and Samantha to someone – his wife Sally, which makes Samantha head to the other side of the room for a drink. Carrie goes to comfort her, since it was obvious by the way Samantha talked about him that she liked him, and Samantha reiterates that their time together was only biological in nature.
As Carrie goes off to interview 17-year-old Amelia Strong, the youngest ballerina to ever play the Black Swan, Dorrit suggests that Tom use her as a way of dealing with Penny, that he had to fight fire with fire or he would continue to be taken advantage of. He ultimately agrees to it, though he’s surprised to learn that this isn’t just a Penny thing; Dorrit outs Carrie’s ability to make herself cry to get what she wants, exposing that it’s all about using what you’ve got to get what you want. Meanwhile, Sebastian’s dad makes it to the apartment and compliments his son on making a life for himself and demonstrating the same type of entrepreneurial spirit that he once did himself. However, he reveals that the reason he’s here is less checking up on his son and more about borrowing money, as the bonds he invested in didn’t pan out and he doesn’t have much in the way of liquid assets. As such, he wants to borrow Sebastian’s trust fund as a way to get the bankers off his back, even though legally, he can’t just swoop in and take the money as if it were his. When Sebastian recoils at the thought of giving up the money for his father, Mr. Kydd reminds his son that he was always there for him and he thought that the favor would be returned.
Amelia’s happily surprised to see that her interviewer is someone her own age and talks to Carrie about feeling pressure in an industry that puts youth on such a high pedestal, as the dancer she replaced was a badly injured 24-year-old. Granted, Amelia felt as if the previous occupant of the role was done and didn’t care about it as much, but getting the Black Swan taught her the value of clawing for something, even if it destroys you or someone else in the process. She reiterates that this world is very much kill or be killed and that she wants to thrive rather than simply survive, thoughts that resonate with Carrie as far as her current situation with Bennet. Inside the party, Elliot goes over to Samantha to apologize for not letting her know about the marriage and mentions that he and Sally are in an open marriage that they’re still trying to navigate/define the terms of. However, when she mentions that she’s sleeping with Elliot to Sally when the latter comes over, Sally begins crying and runs off, with Elliot telling Samantha that she doesn’t normally see the women that he sleeps with.
Carrie’s interview with Amelia is well-received by Larissa, who plans to run it in the next issue with Carrie’s by-line. She notices, though, that there are certain linguistic similarities between the interview and Bennet’s parachute piece; Larissa always knew that it was Carrie who wrote Bennet’s article. While Maggie gets advice from Mouse to go after Pete at the bus station to stop him from going back home early, Bennet comes to Sebastian’s apartment to confront Carrie after getting fired from Interview. He feels stabbed in the back by her taking the interview and even though she says she was trying to save his job by writing the parachute piece, he storms out. At the second meeting between Tom and Penny, Penny walks into the conference room to find Dorrit and the two talk about how easy it is to manipulate Tom into doing whatever they want, with Penny admitting that most men underestimate women – particularly if they seem weak. Dorrit then steals an important folder from Penny and gives it to Tom before leaving and the two agree to begin their negotiations anew, that they’ll put the trickery behind them and allow their skills to decide who gets the better deal.
Sebastian doesn’t necessarily agree with Carrie’s assertion that she didn’t think Bennet would be fired after she took the interview. He thinks she simply went for the jugular and seized an opportunity to make herself look good, but when she denies that that was her motivation, he mentions that she’s merely an intern who lives with her father and has never had to worry about money and she counters with mentioning his trust fund. He then confesses to giving up his trust fund for his father and being too embarrassed to talk about it, since not being able to abandon the man who has treated him so poorly would paint him as being stupid and naïve. While he contemplates selling his Porsche for rent money, Maggie makes it to the bus depot in time to talk to Pete. He thinks that she was sending him signals the entire time he was in town that she wanted to break up – she didn’t dress up for him, she wouldn’t kiss him, she took him to the diner. However, she explains that she didn’t want to repeat her past mistakes and that she liked him too much to want things to go the way that every other relationship she had been in had gone. He tells her that after spending the past month talking on the phone with her, he loves her and that the physical side of their relationship can wait if it’s going to freak her out like this.
Tom and Penny work out a deal that leaves no side happy and the two end up making out on the desk in the conference room, while Sam runs into Elliot on the street as she’s putting up fliers. Even though he’s still interested in her, she tells him that since she likes him, she can’t share him, especially not with an open marriage that didn’t look to be as open as he claimed it to be. Sebastian writes the check to his father, who claims this to be a loan; Samantha finds the bird, brings it back to its owner, and rejects the reward; and Carrie gets upgraded to Bennet’s desk at Interview, complete with her own computer.
Additional thoughts and observations:
-“I’m not sure whether to throw up or take a picture.”
-“What do you think it says? Spicy mama?”
-“I bet you don’t even wear glasses.”
-This episode felt pretty true to who Carrie has been throughout the series (ambitious and intelligent without much in the way of street smarts) while both softening the edges from her prickliness last week and showing that she’s got the self-awareness to know when she’s being ridiculous. I was fully prepared to rant when she went after Bennet for not mentioning her to Larissa, but between her acknowledging that that was a stupid idea, the interview with Amelia (Sasha Bunhead!) going quite well, and Bennet throwing a fit over his (justified) sacking, I’m very much okay with how the episode treated Carrie’s professional life. I do, however, agree with Sebastian that at least a part of her took the interview knowing that it would make herself look better and that this would be her “revenge” for not getting credit for the parachute pants article; I don’t think she meant to get Bennet fired, but I do like that she showed some chutzpah rather than letting people walk all over her.
-While I completely get being down in the dumps about the breakup, the AIDS close call, and the ex being in such poor shape, Bennet needs to get it together before he begins a downward spiral that he might not be able to pull himself out of. The show seems to be pointing in that direction, that Bennet is going to continue to self-sabotage and that Walt might be the only one who can get him to snap out of whatever’s going through his head and go back to living his life.
-Samantha’s uncle from Florida raised flamingos. And crank. I believe it.
-Doesn’t it feel as if the show is edging Maggie out the door? If The Carrie Diaries makes it to a third season, the show will have some interesting decisions to make about who from Castlebury to follow and how much of Carrie’s high school life to feature, since the focus will be even more on Manhattan and her professional career. And Maggie meeting a guy in one episode, a month going by in between episodes, and the same guy telling her that he loves her in the next episode makes me think they’ll give her a happy ending in the second season finale and won’t feature her during a third season. It could just be the show’s pacing becoming more problematic near the end of the season, but the way her relationship with Pete has been written, I wouldn’t be surprised if she graduates from high school, opts out of going to college, and moves to the base to be with him, possibly becoming pregnant shortly after. Which, I want Maggie to have a happy ending since she’s been through so much, but this feels a little abrupt.
-Good for Tom for moving on from Deb. He needed to have a little fling to loosen him up a little and someone like Penny seems like just his type.
-Chili cheese fries are not that gross, Pete. Stop it.
-We all know Sebastian’s dad is going to lose that money, right? Which made it all the more sad that Sebastian actually gave it to him, since his father has done absolutely nothing to deserve that type of loyalty and trust. Weirdly, it also demonstrated why I think he has such a connection with Carrie, as they both have good hearts that can sometimes lead them astray.
-Any episode that continues the process of humanizing Samantha is a good one in my book, which is something that I always liked during Sex and the City. Samantha may be a delight for her one-liners and her brazen attitude toward sex, but it’s when she’s shown to have a kernel of vulnerability or a desire for a connection with someone that I love her the most, as it grounds a character that could easily become a caricature and allows for interesting emotional/psychological territory to be explored.
-Open relationships are always messy. Always, always, always messy. Avoid them if you can, you guys, whether it be your own partner wanting to turn your relationship into something open or someone you become interested in happening to be in an open relationship.
-Next week on The Carrie Diaries: Carrie, Mouse, Maggie, and Walt decide to go to prom together, while Carrie gets offered an opportunity from Larissa that causes her to rethink NYU, Mouse learns a secret about Donna, and Sebastian hides a big decision.
