At a house party in Manhattan, Carrie and Weaver are intimately conversing about her wish to become a journalist, where he drew the inspiration for The Fishy Detective (one of the party guests wearing waders), and their mutual love for the Muppets. As Samantha finds a bass player in a wife beater to go home with, Carrie is in her own little world with Weaver, though their talk of writing processes and her “cute little diary” subsides when she finds out that the play he’s writing is about his ex-girlfriend Katja. The following day, Carrie goes to lunch with Mouse and Samantha where she lets them know how freaked out she is about the presence of the other woman in her relationship, but they’re more focused on the fact that Carrie wants to fake her virginity with Weaver. Since the v-word put unnecessary pressure on her relationship with Sebastian, Carrie wants to act if she’s already lost her virginity around Weaver. If he were to take her virginity? She thinks that pain and pleasure sound the same anyway, so she can just fake it in the moment.
While Samantha goes off to the art class that she’s modeling nude for, thereby causing enrollment to triple, Sebastian has lunch with his mother and learns that she’s marrying the 24-year-old tennis instructor. However, she had to buy the giant ring that’s on her finger and he expresses worry about her, that she’s getting involved with someone too young and someone who could take advantage of her; she responds by telling him that if he loves her, he’ll be happy for her. Miller shows up at school and gets strangely possessive when he finds Dorrit talking to one of her friends from math class. He then says that since his parents have left their house while it’s under construction, she could come stay for an entire week, should she lie to Tom about having a project to work on with Audrey. Dorrit says no, though, and Donna, having overheard everything, tells her that her boyfriend is smothering her.
Sebastian approaches Carrie in the hallway and asks if he can talk to Tom about his mother, that she’s planning a wedding with the tennis instructor and that there’s already talk of having a little brother or sister. He wants to make sure that the money she got in the divorce settlement isn’t in any danger and that she’s as protected legally as she can be; Carrie agrees to ask Tom to talk to him about the situation. However, Mouse thinks that Carrie is wrong for opening the door to an ex, even if the act of opening itself is out of friendship and without ulterior motive on her side. Carrie thinks she just talked to him in the hallway and that nothing can come from it and Mouse spots West in the hallway, going up to him for feedback about the homecoming float she designed. He thinks it could use some glitter and just as she rails against the archaic, empty figureheads that are homecoming court, an announcement comes over the intercom that West won King and Donna won Queen.
Feeling invigorated from her time in the art class, especially now that she’s got a steady place to live at in the studio, Samantha gets surprised once she views a painting of her that has a broken heart on it, signifying the inner sadness in her that one of the artists noticed. As she tries her hardest to keep other people from viewing her pain, she’s frustrated beyond belief. Over at the Bradshaw house, Tom informs Sebastian that his first impression of the boy was off the mark and that while he can’t tackle the case due to not practicing family law, he can get a list together of lawyers who could help his mother. Just then, Carrie walks in the door, fresh from helping Mouse finish the homecoming float. Sebastian wipes some paint chips from her hair and the phone rings; it’s Miller, asking if she wants t have an adventure in the city that Saturday, which she agrees to, despite her guilt at not telling him about Sebastian.
Mouse, of course, thinks that Carrie should slam the door shut on her friendship with Sebastian to avoid jeopardizing the relationship with Miller, but she’s also worried about West and Donna spending time together as homecoming king and queen. She doesn’t necessarily think that West would try anything with her; him winning king was a reminder of how much more popular he is than her and it aggravated her insecurity about her lack of a social life. Dorrit arrives him to find Tom and Miller in the kitchen listening to a John Denver album. She then watches as Tom invites Miller to stay over for the week of construction on his house, with certain rules enforced along the way. Miller thinks that this will be great for them, that they can spend the type of time together that they aren’t able to find their busy schedules. To Dorrit, though, it just reassures her that she doesn’t want to be with him anymore and that Donna was right in thinking he was a smotherer.
When Donna insults Mouse’s papier-mâché pumpkin, claiming that orange does nothing for her skin and that she should put some glitter on it, Mouse storms off and denies that she’s jealous of Donna when West asks her about it. She informs him that she’s more concerned of the fact that she doesn’t have a lot of people in her life, just as Carrie walks in the diner and finds Sebastian sitting by himself, fresh from a fight with his mother. She 
gave him an ultimatum – either show up to her wedding or be cut out of her life for good. He wants to show up and she asks if he would want anyone to go with him; she doesn’t think it’ll be fun or anything, she just wants to be there for him and give him the company that he needs. He says he’d love to have her come with him and that the wedding is Saturday night, the same day that she’s to hang out with Weaver. She mentions that she has something in the city during the day but that she’ll be around for the wedding, as well.
That Saturday, Carrie and Weaver hang out at the Brooklyn Bridge and she inadvertently blurts out a question about whether he’s still in love with Katja. He’s not, citing the fact that she’s a psycho bitch and that he was in a bad place during their relationship, and tells Carrie that the reason he’s writing the play is to let go of that period of his life. Though she might have nothing to be upset about there, Carrie gets a start when he says that if he were still in contact with Katja, it would be a problem, since exes staying friends is complicated and messy. The two get caught in a thunderstorm and make it to Weaver’s parents’ house near the bridge; they’re gone, but Weaver still gets himself and Carrie changes of clothes and towels, while she sends him to get the banana she keeps in her purse. While Samantha finds the artist of the broken heart painting after class and flirts with him, Donna runs into Dorrit at the diner and learns that Miller has exhibited classic progression of a smotherer. Dorrit feels like she’s fallen out of love with Miller and Donna claims that that sourness she feels whenever she’s around him is due to him curdling, since all men have expiration dates.
Carrie walks into the room and finds Weaver reading her journal after lecturing her about how private an act writing is. However, he didn’t read anything truly incriminating, only getting to information about her virginity and how she was going to hide it from him. She explains the reasoning behind that and he stresses that he wants her first time to mean something, which causes her to realize she’s ready and begin kissing him. Dorrit arrives home to find Miller jamming out with Tom and pulls him aside to break up with him, telling him that he merely loves the idea of her and not letting him sing a song he wrote about her. Later, she tosses out the Rolling Stones shirt that he left behind and warns Tom against becoming friends with one of her boyfriends again. Samantha tries to kick the artist out of her bed, claiming that she wanted to prove that she didn’t actually have a heart (something far better, in her mind, than having a broken heart), only to learn that the heart in the painting was his. He just broke up with his girlfriend and his therapist told him to channel his pain into his art, meaning that Samantha’s reputation as an emotionless sex bomb is still in tact.
Carrie basks in the afterglow of her time with Weaver, which was on a couch in a rec room, for too long and misses her train back into the city. She does, however, send Mouse to Sebastian’s mother’s wedding in her place, giving herself more time to hang out with Weaver. She then confesses to him, following grilled cheese sandwiches with bacon, that she had been in contact with an ex and that she was going to go with him to his mother’s wedding that evening. However, she’s glad that she missed the train and she would be shutting the door on their friendship beginning with the next time they talked. The next day, Mouse finds West at the diner and tells him that she missed his coronation to be there for Sebastian, which West totally understands and respects Mouse for. He thinks that the quality of one’s relationships is more important than the quantity and she pulls out a crown she made him due to missing the coronation, crowning him in the middle of the diner.
While Carrie resists the temptation to read Weaver’s play while he slept, opting to put it in the desk drawer and write in her journal instead, Samantha feels as if the teacher wasn’t so off when interpreting the painting as being about the model’s broken heart. Carrie arrives for lunch with Mouse and Samantha, opting to only tell them that she had sex and keep the rest of the details to herself, and officially closes the door to her friendship with Sebastian, nodding at him in the hallway at school.
Additional thoughts and observations:
-Um, Gonzo’s feathers are definitely blue, Weaver, so what kind of Muppets have you been watching?
-Samantha tried to fake her virginity with an Arab, but they apparently have ways to suss it out of you. Also, she slept with at least three faculty members at her high school. Samantha has a lot of stories, you guys, and I kind of want one episode this season to focus on allowing more of her past to come out. Because I’m sure it’d alternate between being horrifying and being entertainingly insane.
-Although I think I like Weaver thus far, it feels as if Carrie is romanticizing the idea of being in a relationship with a writer. It makes sense, considering that she and Sebastian were fairly opposite, that she would want to be with someone similar to her, but thus far, her feelings for him seem to be based on just that – the fact that he’s not Sebastian. It’s a little unfair to Weaver that her interest is more in self-protection and an idealization of his profession than in actual feelings and something that I think will come up later in the season.
-Carrie not wanting to spill the details of her first time was a cute wink at the audience, but if I were Mouse or Samantha, I think I would have flipped a table, because ugh. How are you going to make such a deal of being a virgin and not give up the details of your first time with the people you complained to? They deserved to know what happened and it’s not as if this was some grand romantic event with too many personal touches to recount. It was a random moment on a rec room couch with someone she’s not been with for that long; let’s not make it something it’s not.
-Although she was a bit of a crazy pants during this episode, overall, I liked what they did with Mouse and West. Her issues of wanting to be accepted go back to last season and they would definitely be exacerbated by being reminded that she’s dating the most popular boy in school, so exploring very real relationship issues through a teenage lens is part of the show’s bread and butter. It gave both characters time in the spotlight, especially important for Mouse since it wasn’t connected to Carrie, and allowed for a bit of growth in their relationship, punctuated by the sweet crowning in the diner. The Donna hate in the episode was a little confusing, though, because don’t they all like (or at least tolerate) Donna now?
-Speaking of Donna, my biggest laugh in the episode came from her questioning where the other Jen went. Amazing. Also, didn’t “Jenny”/New Jen look a lot like Carrie?
-I actually sympathized with Dorrit for about 2/3 of this episode, because Miller was kind of gross when he popped up at school being jealous of her talking to another guy and I can imagine how irritating it is to have someone who won’t give you your space. Plus, pairing her with Donna was a fun character combination, something that Dorrit needs more of in order to not be the brooding sad sack in every episode. But the way she handled the break up and the direct aftermath reminded me of why I don’t like her as a person and how despite her own assertions, she still has a lot more growing up to do. How are you not going to give the boy his shirt back? Or let him stay in an actual house vs. living at a construction site?
-I’m not necessarily a Carrie/Sebastian shipper (him calling her Bradshaw, though, is kind of everything), but the head nod at the end was especially sad, for some reason. Maybe it’s because I’m of the mindset that being strictly friends with an ex isn’t an impossible task and that separating herself from someone who obviously needs a shoulder to lean on only makes her look bad? I don’t know.
-Small Samantha story, but I liked how it was still very telling about who she is and how she operates. While she’s so concerned with appearing strong and not needing anyone to survive, she knows who she is at the end of the day and can only mask the vulnerability for so long; as much as she tries to hide her past, it still has a very noticeable impact on her behavior and the way she sees the world.
-Grilled cheese and bacon sandwiches: good or awful? Because they sound both good and awful and I’ve never had one.
-Interesting that Carrie gets told that she’s a bridge and that it’s a compliment. I mean, I get why, but it’s strange that she’s all aflutter on being called a bridge.
–The Carrie Diaries is off next week, but on December 6th, Carrie develops writer’s block, Maggie and Sebastian bond over surprising news, and Bennet moves into a shady neighborhood, worrying Walt.
