“I want more Sex !” Final episode disappoints

By Emily Bielagus

I watched the last episode of Sex and the City in a room filled wall to wall with 20-something women, and as the closing credits rolled on the screen, I looked around in order to gauge the general initial reaction. The room had a post-coital vibe; as the women surrounding me each took a moment to acknowledge that Sex was finally over, there was a silence bubbling with satisfaction and contentment.

All eyes began to peruse the crowd and seemed to be asking, “Was it good for you?” Most answers I’ve gathered have been an emphatic “Yes! I want more!” and thus I feel I may be in the minority when I admit that no, it wasn’t; I need something else.

The series finale was so perfectly packaged it could have been wrapped up neatly in a Manolo Blahnik shoebox. Charlotte gets her baby, Samantha finally gives her heart away (and revels in the last of the euphoric Samantha orgasms to be aired on HBO) while Miranda finds peace not only in the role of a successful lawyer but also as a mother, wife and caretaker. And of course, Carrie gets her Big.

One of the last scenes of the series, taking place in a Parisian hotel lobby, finds Carrie dressed in a Cinderella-esque ball gown, whimpering over a broken necklace and a recently wrecked relationship with a certain Russian artist. Enter Big, the handsome prince who saves the day by first picking Carrie up off of the ground, then threatening to beat up the Russian ex. He confesses that it’s taken him “a long time to get here” (he’s not just talking about Paris, folks), and finally completes the scene by sweeping Carrie off her feet again with an invitation back to New York and a Hollywood kiss, the quintessential culmination of a lovers’ reunion.

Although I am an advocate of happy endings, I have to disagree with this one; the inference here is that a happy ending can only be obtained by a man’s heroic recognition of his wrongful denial of true love. An alternative but equally happy ending could have shown Carrie finally embracing herself as a woman who, even without a male counterpart, is content, confident and complete. As we all know, Carrie is not the type of woman who needs to be saved. If given only a few more minutes on that hotel lobby floor, she would have picked herself up, brushed herself off and gotten herself back to New York City to her old friends, her job and her home. It would have of course taken a lot of guts on the part of the writers to end the show without Big, but that’s what Sex and the City has always been about. It is a show that took a lot of risks. It went out on a limb by offering a strong woman character who didn’t apologize for her promiscuity. In contrast, it included a woman who lived her life by The Rules. It also celebrated a woman who showed a fierce dedication to her career, and illuminated the difficulties of being a single woman striving through what she often felt was “a man’s world.” That is what I have always admired about Sex and the City; its ability to take many different types of women, place them in tough situations and allow them to react with conviction, audacity and variance. It also allowed viewers, male and female alike, to relate to and learn from the various exploits of the four characters we came to love over the past six years. There is nothing to be learned from Carrie’s ending, however, because it’s nothing that we haven’t seen before. Most women do have a Big in their lives and I wouldn’t put it past Disney or the creators of Seventh Heaven to end a series with the reunion of a woman and her Big, but I expected more courage out of a show that claims to empower the woman in all of us.