Now that Sebastian is living on the other side of the country, the real work in his relationship with Carrie begins, as the two have to find ways to keep their connection alive and not allow the distance between them to wreak havoc on their passion for one another. However, that’s easier said than done and they end up playing phone tag with each other, getting the maid involved and failing to carry the right amount of change for a payphone call at school. While Carrie is off trying to save her relationship, Mouse is beside herself now that she’s without a relationship and without a goal to aspire toward. Her entire life has been geared toward getting into Harvard, she tells Donna, and now that she’s been early accepted, she doesn’t really know what to do with herself.
It turns out that Donna is having a similar but entirely different problem in that she’s realizing how shallow the dating pool at school is, but before she can come to accept that maybe she won’t be able to date any of her peers without repeating herself, she sees Dorrit obviously flirting with a guy who tells of M80s and being in the principal’s office. Donna offers to give the girl advice on snaring a bad boy and Dorrit reluctantly accepts – either she is to play the hallway flirtation game for another six months hoping that something will happen or she should interact with him at a party outside school to see whether they have a connection or not. Elsewhere, Carrie gets a shock when she finds out that Larissa has gotten engaged to Harlan and been given a huge ring for her troubles. Now that she’s effectively off the market, Larissa is going to have to live vicariously through Carrie’s exploits, which she says should resume once she and Sebastian break up over the distance between them.
Larissa argues that there are only two ways that the relationship could go; if one of them move to be with the other, it could put a lot of pressure on the other and if they don’t do anything, the relationship could slowly wither on the vine and fade away. Luckily for Carrie, she gets her chance to take the pulse of her relationship with Sebastian when Tom announces that he has a confidential weekend case to deal with and that he’ll be gone for at least one night. He mentions that neighbor Ms. Meade will be around if they need anything and that there will be hell to pay if they try and pull something while he’s gone. Once the family meeting dismisses, Carrie gets on the phone and calls Sebastian to try and get him to come out for the weekend, while Dorrit calls one of her friends to let them know that there’ll be a huge party at her house that weekend. Carrie soon finds out that Sebastian won’t be able to come out due to attending a boating trip with his father and begins worrying that Larissa got into her head, that she needed the grand romantic gesture of him coming to see her to know that they had a chance at becoming something.
While on the phone with Mouse, Carrie gets a knock on the door. It’s Sebastian, there to surprise her. As she jumps into his arms, Dorrit finds the guy she was talking to in the hallway at the diner with a friend of his and invites them both to the party and Tom finds out that there is no mysterious case that Harlan needs his assistance on. Harlan and Larissa are working on their prenuptial agreement and require Tom to mediate, even though he doesn’t practice that kind of law and there could be a conflict of interest considering his personal connection to the two of them. Tom ultimately agrees to do it as long as his rate is doubled; meanwhile, Carrie and Sebastian’s time spent reconnecting on her bed, which includes the revelation that he’s moving back to Connecticut for good, gets interrupted by Dorrit’s party downstairs. Carrie gets dressed and goes to see where her sister is, instead finding keg stands, pot, and potential destruction for her father’s house. Weirdly, she also finds Mouse, who heard about the party over at the diner and was coming to warn Carrie about Dorrit’s plans to throw a rager.
But Carrie can’t leave, not when the fate of the house is likely in her hands, and she soon begins puttering about the house trying to minimize the damage. Amazingly, Harlan and Larissa are flying through their prenup with Tom and ease through the infidelity section pretty smoothly. Right as they were about to finish on the section pertaining to the division of marital assets should a divorce occur, their major problem arises – Larissa doesn’t want to move in with Harlan after they’re wed. Back at the party, Dorrit runs into Scott, the friend of the guy she likes (Nick), and the two talk about how he runs cross country and how lame she finds any and all things athletic, even after he explains that it clears his head and allows him to focus better. Nick soon arrives with pot brownies in hand, while Carrie is busy picking up bottles and fending off Sebastian, who she reminds that they don’t have to rush their reunion.
She’s dealt another difficult in Ms. Meade, over at the house after hearing the loud music. Just as the older woman threatens to call Tom, Mouse finds herself channeling her competitiveness into beer pong and doing quite well for herself; Donna, too, is having a good time at the party outside her comfort zone, spending her evening without a guy and not any worse for wear without one. Donna and Mouse go off to play some beer pong and 
relax, while Ms. Meade can’t get through to Tom due to the poor cell phone service at the hotel he’s at with Harlan and Larissa. Tom is busy, anyway, trying to sort through his friend’s relationship difficulties and manages to get Larissa to open up about the reason she’s so against moving in with Harlan. She’s adamant about not wanting to lose herself in a relationship and explains that the series of compromises that one has to make when a relationship reaches the point hers with Harlan is at are threatening her individuality and sense of self. Tom comes up with an idea, though, that could save her relationship – have her sublet her loft and Harlan buy her an apartment in his building that could be 100% her own. When he promises to give her a decorator and creative control, she accepts and the two begin passionately kissing on a nearby couch, with Tom edging out the door.
The girls are bailed out at the party when Scott arrives and vouches for them, lying that they only invited a couple of people and word spread, without their knowledge, about the party. Due to peer pressure, they claim that they can’t bust up the party and while Ms. Meade reminisces about her own bouts with peer pressure, she eats one of the pot brownies. Donna finds Dorrit and chastises her for talking to Scott rather than Nick, telling her that this party is close to being busted up and now’s her chance to make a move if she’s going to. Elsewhere, Carrie finds Sebastian talking to his mother about what happened with his father; it turns out that the two had a bad fight that caused Sebastian to come back to Connecticut and that she’s trying to get him to return to Laguna in order to avoid dealing with him. However, he doesn’t want to go back and just as his mother leaves for good, a keg erupts in the kitchen, spewing out foam.
Sebastian and Carrie go outside where he reveals the reason for the fight - his father’s girlfriend hit on him and when he rejected her, she went to his father and said that he made a move on her. He tells Carrie that after the fight, he knew that the only place he wanted to be, that he ever wanted to be, was right with her and that he wants to know what’s going on in her head, even if it’s something that he might not be prepared to hear. She then confesses to feeling pressure when he mentioned earlier that she was the reason he came back and that while she will always be there for him, the fact that he leans so heavily on her is a lot for her to deal with. He goes inside to think of a way to take some of the pressure off of her, which turns out to be busting up the party with a fake “cops are coming!” claim. Everybody leaves, except Dorrit takes Nick up to her room and finds out the next morning that he has a girlfriend. Mouse and Donna wake up snuggling on the couch with no memory of how they got there and Sebastian got up early to get a jump start on cleaning the trashed Bradshaw house. He also talked to his dad and while the two won’t be living together anymore, Garrett offered to give his son a monthly allowance meant to help him get a place in Manhattan.
Donna leaves and Sebastian, Mouse, Carrie, and Dorrit quickly get the house back in order, as Tom is set to return any minute. They beat his arrival and get away with the party, Ms. Meade falling out of the closet high and, embarrassed, explaining that she slept walk her way over there. Sebastian ends up subletting Larissa’s Manhattan loft and for one brief, shining moment, Carrie doesn’t feel pressure on her shoulders.
Additional thoughts and observations:
-“I’m the princess and I’m very Nubian.”
-“Did you know they have, like, thoughts and feelings?”
-Minor anachronism: Dorrit used “what’s your damage?” during the party when Carrie first came down to confront her. That phrase wasn’t popularized until the 1988 release of Heathers; the show is currently in early 1986.
-For some reason, I found the ending really touching. I don’t know if it was the music, the voiceover, or where the episode ended up story-wise, but watching Sebastian get the roots he’s always wanted and Carrie feel the weight lifted off her shoulders was quite sweet.
-I’m guessing Walt is in Manhattan with Bennet, Maggie is spending quality time with her dad, and Samantha is off doing her own thing? I assume that the absence of cast members this season was due to budgetary reasons, so I tend to not harp on that because it’s not in the control of the creatives, but having a big event like the party and most of the main cast being absent felt strange. I can buy Walt and Samantha not being there; Maggie would have heard about that party and since she’s on good terms with Carrie and company now, she would have went.
-I would listen to Loveline with Dr. Drew & Donna LaDonna where Donna gives nervous teens and 20-somethings advice on dating and sex via a radio show.
-Was it strange to anyone else that Dorrit’s new guy A) looked exactly like Miller and B) wasn’t named until halfway-ish through the episode? Also, he might be a douche for fooling around with her when he had a girlfriend, but Dorrit wasn’t exactly concerned about his status while she was pursuing him. She wanted him and she didn’t want to know anything about him aside from the fact that she thought he was hot, so part of the blame for what happened rests squarely on her shoulders.
-I figured that the confidential case that Tom was hired for was a bachelor party for Harlan, so what do I know? Nothing, apparently. I would go on about how well-worn the main plot of this episode was, but it provided the structure for some interesting character work (both at the party and at the mediation) and I’m a fan of central things like this that bring in characters who might not have interacted much otherwise. Still, I know that there are no original stories and that any plotline will nearly always be derivative of another, but the wild-party-when-the-parents-are-away is a tad musty.
-Speaking of, as cute of an image as it was and as great a chemistry as the two share, Mouse and Donna snuggling, and realizing that they like snuggling together, was very Friends.
-Did you find Carrie to be rude when she told Sebastian to, in a nutshell, get off her jock? Honest Carrie is one of my favorite Carries, much moreso than Passive Aggressive Carrie or Emotionally Stunted Carrie, but there was something about the way that she told him that felt a little blunt. Like, this man came across the country to see you and is coming off two big dust ups with his parents; he has nowhere to live, no place to go, no safety net to catch him and now is the time you want to tackle an issue like that? I don’t think she was wrong in what she said; the timing and the way she said it were a little rough, though.
-If the show makes it to a third season, I’m guessing that, should Kyddshaw still be functioning, Carrie moves into Larissa’s loft with Sebastian? What will be more interesting is who of her friends will join her in the city and how much of a role everyone else, including her family, would play, if any at all. I like the show quite a bit and yet I think its most interesting days could be ahead of it, which is both exciting and terrifying, since the show’s life span could be cut short and that potential not fully realized.
-Next week on The Carrie Diaries: Maggie mistakenly enlists in the army, while Walt and Bennet receive shocking news, Sebastian backs out of plans with Carrie, and Tom finds a way to get Dorrit back in the dating game.
