2 3 muscle relaxers. At the same time, Mouse stops by the diner and brings Maggie several college applications, purposely culled due to being in the area, accepting Maggie’s test scores, and offering financial aid. Unfortunately, the applications run $25 each, amount to $200 that she doesn’t have right now, although she does have some babysitting money and promises to start saving up for the rest.
While Tom pays a visit to Harlan and gets an offer to return to the firm, seeing as how it’s in need of more M&A lawyers and he knows how good Tom was in his prime, Larissa recounts tales of being a geisha, which proved too subservient of a role for her, and having an affair with a Japanese businessman. She especially took shine to the concept of Zen that she learned from him – the idea of living in the moment, calm and detached from expectation. Carrie also likes the idea of changing how she approaches her time as school, specifically her imminent interactions with Sebastian, but talk soon turns to how she wasn’t able to date any while on Manhattan. Once Walt declines to hear Larissa explain how gay sex works, she invites both he and Carrie to Yoshiki to view clothing from all the latest Japanese designers and partake in some Saki, which they both agree to. Elsewhere, Sebastian stops by Carrie’s house and asks Dorrit for her help regarding something with her sister.
The group arrives at Yoshiki and Carrie immediately takes to a still gardenia in a glass box, finding her Zen in the stillness. Bennet and Walt walk off by themselves where the latter expresses further worry about going back to high school and people sensing that he’s gay. Castlebury isn’t exactly the most accepting place right now, so Bennet tells him to slip in and out of his last year like a ninja; however, if Walt gets scared or needs someone to talk to, he has free reign to call. Just then, Samantha arrives and makes quite a scene, yelling across the mostly silent grounds and immediately drawing Larissa’s annoyance. Back in Castlebury, Maggie’s old hookup Simon drives up beside her and tries to get her to “hang out” with him, even though she’s on her way to the library to fill out her college applications. Already feeling anxiety about her future, she decides to take him up on his offer, further delaying having to face the task of writing a personal essay. Meanwhile, Deb manages to convince Tom to reconsider his initial reluctance to head back to the firm; she argues that he’s bored by his case load, the girls are both doing very well, and the guy who once worked at the firm is still inside Tom, so he’s not lost forever.
Over at the diner, Sebastian runs into Vicki Donovan, a married woman from the club looking for “golf lessons”; he rejects both the offer to go golfing and her insistence on having him call her Vicki, even as she compliments his hands and mentions how she wants something light, fun, and without strings. Larissa and company peruse the avant garde designs, one of which catches her eye as something that would be cute on Carrie. Walt and Bennet seem to like it, but Samantha hates it, claiming that it looks like pajamas and no one would want to have sex with Carrie while she wore that. She and Larissa continue trading insults with no end in sight and Carrie tries to block out all the noise and achieve the state of Zen that she so desperately longs for. Everything calms down once a ninja begins doing a demonstration for all those around, with Samantha going up to flirt with him while Larissa continued looking at the displayed clothes.
Walt, Mouse, and Carrie walk into school on the rainy beginning to their senior year, Walt in a Jets jersey and Carrie immediately confronted with a problem by Dorrit. She wants to be in a certain English class taught by a teacher Carrie’s close with and Carrie agrees to help her out; however, once they arrive in the classroom, only Sebastian is there and Dorrit locks the two of them in together. It’s not long before the two are kissing and ripping at each other’s clothes, only the teacher catches them and sends them to the principal’s office before anything further can happen. Walt is also having trouble adjusting to his final year and embarrasses himself in front of two jocks who comment on his jersey before being saved by Mouse. Once she gets him straightened out, Mouse attends to matters with Maggie, who claims that filling out the applications is too hard for her. Mouse tells her friend that the reason people lose it with her is because she doesn’t take responsibility for her own actions, such as by coming down harshly on Walt without thinking that maybe he’s going through quite a bit himself, trying to discover who he is without letting the people around him in.
Over at Interview, Samantha pops in to look for Carrie but finds Larissa instead and the two trade more barbs, with the latter telling Samantha that she’s the type of girl who claims to be above commitment but is really just afraid to connect. Feeling one of her buttons pushed, Samantha asks for the address of the festival they went to because she wants to get to know the ninja better, just as Walt runs into the same two jocks from earlier in the morning. Again, he has no idea what he’s talking about and has to be saved, this time by Donna, who kisses on him for good measure – and forgets that she’s dating one of the guys he was talking to. Outside the principal’s office, Carrie rants about how she had never been sent to here before and how nothing between her and Sebastian can ever be simple. In a nutshell, she can never be the gardenia to which she aspires. She ends up getting detention all the following week and Dorrit tells her that she should get out of her head and go after what she wants. Problem is, though, that she’s such an overthinker that she doesn’t know what she wants.
While Samantha goes back to Yoshiki and agrees to get to know her ninja a little better, only to find out that she spilled her heart to the wrong warrior, Tom is back in the office with Barbara and walks in on Harlan and Larissa getting, er, reacquainted following her trip to Kyoto. After school, Maggie arrives at the diner and apologizes to Walt and his newly acquired black eye; she confesses that when she learned that he didn’t love her like she wanted him to, she just fell apart and lashed out at him unjustly. He responds by telling her that he does in fact love her, just in a different way, and that she deserves to have somebody love her and treat her with respect. Touched, she wishes the same for him and the two vow to make it through the next 271 days together, clasping hands in the process. Back at Carrie’s house, she gets a visit from Sebastian and he claims that since all he does is make things crazy for her, the last thing he wants to do, he’s going to have to let her go. He knows it’s over and though Carrie wants to go after him, she knows it’s over, too.
Maggie runs into Simon again and this time, soundly rejects him, telling him that she deserves to be with somebody who wants her to have a good future. As she goes back to the diner and fills out college applications, Sebastian hooks up with Vicki, attempting to have a no strings attached hookup. At Interview, Carrie receives a gift – the gardenia. The sender? Larissa. The message? Be Zen.
Additional thoughts and observations:
-“Is it a lesbian lover? Exciting.”
-“She’s finding her Zen. I’m going to find some Saki.”
-“Shoo, ninja! Shoo!”
-“He is wearing a sports jersey, for God’s sake.”
-“I’ll have it dry cleaned. Or incinerated.”
-I’m a little disappointed we never got to see Walt as a bike messenger. The Carrie Diaries could always use more day-glo bike shorts.
-I must say, even though the show might be a touched crowded right now, I missed Larissa’s energy and was happy to see her return from Kyoto. It fills out Carrie’s professional life a little more, as the first three episodes have leaned on her personal difficulties, and gave Samantha another character to go up against, which could be the catalyst for her growing as a person as Larissa held the mirror up to her regarding her dating life. Their catty insults may have been extremely fun, but once we get past the first impressions, I think Samantha/Larissa could be one of the most interesting pairings the show could pursue.
-My absolute favorite thing about the episode, though, was Harlan mentioning that he’s setting his girls up to have totally screwed up expectations about men. Carrie hasn’t fully embraced Sex as of yet, considering that Carrie’s backstory was changed and people were added to her life that were never mentioned in the HBO comedy, but little nods like that to who she’ll become and will do just fine for me. If the show can continue filling out who this character is and why she is the way she is, I don’t mind any inaccuracies.
-For those curious, an M&A lawyer specializes in mergers and acquisitions, so it’s heavily entrenched in the banking industry and deals with a lot of transactions, risk analysis, and regulatory bodies.
-Love the ninja metaphor from Bennet about how Walt should tread through high school. As a gay male who made it through high school in the south without being beaten up, it was incredibly apt.
-The return of Hot Douche Simon! And Barbara! Interestingly, the show has been so focused on Carrie’s journey that it’s built up a good set of peripheral characters to jut in and out of the story as need be. Also, I was happy to see an episode so focused on Castlebury, just because the summer added a lot of depth to how everyone was approaching the first day of school. Which I always hated, because I was just anxious to get it over with.
-Molly Sims! Lovely to see you. I don’t mind the “Sebastian beds an older woman” story, because of the final look he gave when he was in bed with her (very distant, even more sad) and the fact that this could explore some of his own issues (troubled mother, absent father) without being too heavy-handed.
-Do you think that we’ll see Samantha’s ninja again? I hope so. It would be intriguing to see how she handled dating at such a young age vs. how we know she handled it during Sex and the City.
-Of all the characters on television that I want to be happy, Maggie and Walt are near the top of the list. If nothing else comes from The Carrie Diaries, I want the show to end with both of them finding what they want out of life. Preferably as good friends who stay close after the group splits up. Did I forget to mention that I get too attached to television?
-Next week on The Carrie Diaries: Carrie interviews a high maintenance playwright, while Sebastian finds someone new to console him.
