Originally posted by Charlie Goose
Not sure what the point of the mad dash down the street was.

Originally posted by BassDude
January? I thought they were going to start them late Fall early Winter... (November ish....) Is January confirmed?

Originally posted by costanza187
Whoever said the miscarriage with Charlotte was rushed, yea I agree. It would have been more dramatic to draw that out a little bit.

Originally posted by zuffy
Am I the only one that is annoy by Carrie's character every week or may be I am just sick of Sarah Jessica Parker?

Originally posted by Tommy Ceez
BTW, You know theres 7 episodes left when they re-invent thier most one sided character.

Originally posted by nightwing82
Carrie needs to get rid of her lover. I cant watch that crap.

The Washington Post
Is There Such a Thing As Bad 'Sex'? Ponder That as HBO's Series Reaches Its Climax.

By Tom Shales
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, January 4, 2004; Page N01

As has happened with many great television series over the years, "Sex and the City" will make its exit well before its audience's interest -- indeed, passion -- has waned. The practice is consistent with the showbiz maxim about always leaving 'em hungry for more. Perhaps audience and show are like lovers in the sense that finishing together, while preferable, isn't always possible.

Sarah Jessica Parker, star and guiding spirit behind the series, has said, as people in such positions usually do, that she wants the show to exit while the quality is still high and the audience still pleased as punch. And so, tonight at 9, HBO's sizzling and seminal hit comedy returns for a protracted final bow -- eight new episodes that will be the last ones produced.

Unfortunately, the farewell party opens with a lull. Even the show's least-demanding fans are likely to be disappointed by tonight's return, "Let There Be Light," a slapdashy, mishmoshy affair in which some of the humor seems forced, as well as inconsistent with the witty-wacky tone of the show. If the entire series had been no better than tonight's episode, it's unlikely "Sex and the City" would have won the wide following or critical respect it has.

But there is good news right around the corner. Next week's episode, "The Ick Factor," finds the show back at its best, full of snap and fizz and one certifiable shock, a crisis befalling one of the characters that should not be divulged in advance. Of the four Manhattan women whose misadventures in pursuit of love and lust the show has been chronicling all along, the character who gets the bolt from the blue is the one viewers might think is the least prepared to deal with it. But "Sex and the City," like real sex and real cities, is rife with revelations.

It becomes obvious from next week's eventful installment that each of the four characters will have her own full-fledged story arc and that a certain amount of closure is in store for all of them. The brilliance of next week's episode also suggests that despite tonight's stumble, "Sex and the City" will go out in glory -- perhaps more than one blaze of it -- rather than tiptoeing gently to the great recycling bin that is television's past.

Not that we'd divulge them anyway, but those arcs are under lock and key. According to HBO spokesman Quentin Shaffer, executive producer Michael Patrick King went so far as to film three different endings for the series finale (airing Feb. 22), so hardly anyone but him will know exactly where everybody ends up. Viewers are most curious about Carrie Bradshaw, the saucy sex columnist played by Parker, Shaffer says. Will she marry, stay single, perhaps find herself in the aging arms of her beloved "Mr. Big"? The National Enquirer may spill such beans, but we're above that sort of thing. Besides, we don't know.

It follows that faithful viewers won't dare miss a single episode -- not even tonight's, because it lays track that is important to the various plot lines. It should be noted, too, that tonight's show is disappointing only when compared with the overall quality level of the show. It's not a very satisfying "Sex and the City," but the episode could pass as an okay episode of "Friends" or of many another broadcast network sitcom, even some of the more laudatory or highly cherished ones.

Intriguingly, tonight's season opener (actually opening the second half of the season, which started last summer) is the work of writer-director King, who deserves most of the credit for keeping the series fresh and, more impressively, getting fresher all the time. And yet his script for "Let There Be Light" is shabby. Next week's script is by two women who've worked on the show the past few seasons: Julie Rottenberg and Elisa Zuritsky. Their work is Emmy-worthy at the very least.

And that episode is directed by a woman, Wendy Stanzler, and is helped by some deft editing that juxtaposes the sweet and the bitter. No generalizations should be drawn, however, from the fact that a man wrote a lackluster episode and two women wrote a terrific one; we don't want to get into that kettle of quicksand. Besides, King oversaw the episode, as he does all of them. Darren Star, who got the show going and developed the concept, has had little to do with its week-by-week workings.

That tonight's show is less than hoped for is mildly newsworthy because people expect higher standards from HBO than from the broadcast networks. They pay for HBO, after all, and CBS is free. (NBC and ABC should pay you to watch.) Most of the time, HBO delivers. But this hasn't been a hunky-dory year for the pay-cable pioneer. No new episodes of its mega-monster meta-hit "The Sopranos" aired (and the network is very sloppy about identifying the vintage of the reruns that pop up), leaving "Sex and the City" and Larry David's inspired lunacy "Curb Your Enthusiasm" -- also returning tonight -- to carry the banner. New arrivals "Carnivale" and "K Street" leaned toward putridity, to be gentle about it, but then the HBO year ended with a triumphal and ferocious masterwork, "Angels in America."

Though viewers are not really affected by this, it seems worth mentioning, just for the record: Sometime during the year, HBO began imprinting each preview cassette sent out for review with the critic's initials in one corner of the screen, allegedly as an anti-piracy measure. My, how friendly -- virtually accusing critics of making and selling illegal copies of HBO shows by taking a step to prevent it. Do they really even think there's a market for bootleg "Carnivales" or lousy NFL chitchats? It's the kind of ugly arrogance one would expect from the Time Warner empire, or just about any gargantuan conglomerate, come to think of it.

Why, it's enough to make a critic mad, mad, mad! But fortunately, the happy matter of "Sex and the City" is what's on the table now -- the show and its truly super cast. Even when they're deployed on some sadly errant errands, the lead actresses remain wonderfully, wickedly watchable: Parker, of course, whose character has grown more complex and whose own attractiveness has increased as the show has gone on; Kim Cattrall as the delightfully dirty-minded and blunt Samantha Jones; Cynthia Nixon, considerably cuter than a button and slyly sassy as Miranda Hobbs; and Kristin Davis as Charlotte York, who can be awfully prim and wimpy but means so well that no one could dislike her.

Okay -- dislike, maybe, but not hate.

Cattrall, who has sometimes been reduced to serving as a mere dispenser of racy one-liners, gets a chance to demonstrate her range and depth in these final episodes as Samantha faces weightier issues than how she'll find sexual satisfaction tonight, and every night. She learns, among other things, that her gym-dandy hunk-in-residence (Jason Lewis irresistibly playing Smith Jerrod) is more than a boy toy when one bothers to scratch his surface -- not literally, of course. Nixon steps out and dashes off some fancy footwork when Miranda decides impetuously on a course of action that many viewers will find long overdue. It involves her stupendously well-meaning boyfriend Steve Brady (David Eigenberg, thoroughly snug in the role).

Davis's Charlotte, ever the do-gooder, gets involved in some obvious but funny slapstick when, training to help the blind, she stumbles around Barneys, the chic Madison Avenue clothing store, with her eyes covered, stopped in her tracks by the beckoning scent of a shoe sale.

Carrie is still seeing Aleksandr Petrovsky, that smugly over-confident Russian sculptor played with -- what else? -- smug over-confidence by Mikhail Baryshnikov. She not only ogles Petrovsky, she Googles him, discovering via the Internet that he earned the nickname "Aleksandr the Great" for his after-hours endeavors, not his goofy statues. His fancy-pants wooing techniques include reading her poetry by the fireplace on a rainy New York afternoon and composing a tune in her honor as he sits at the piano (reprising Rock Hudson's trick from "Pillow Talk," perhaps?) and titling it "La Femme Avec Les Yeux Lumineux."

It all gets to be a bit too charming for her ("Meanwhile, back in the 18th century," she begins one scene with him) but leads to an amusing resolution at the end of next week's episode. Oh, but you don't need to know any more about the impending and protracted conclusion of "Sex and the City" if you've followed it for all, or even most of, these seasons. It has been a sparkling, clever and insightful journey. We hate to see it end -- and yet we can't wait to see how it does.