Samantha’s Return to And Just Like That Was the Perfect Callback to Sex and the City

Kim Cattrall’s long-awaited cameo on And Just Like That finally took place in the opening moments of the show’s season 2 finale—and it may have given us the show’s best callback to Sex and the City yet.

Cattrall, as the glamorous PR maven Samantha Jones, appears on a surprise phone call opposite Sarah Jessica Parker’s Carrie Bradshaw, expressing regret that she won’t be able to make Carrie’s final dinner party in her iconic Upper East Side apartment. In the scene, Samantha, who has since moved to London, had planned to surprise Carrie at the event after Charlotte and Miranda told her that Carrie was moving out of her longtime home, but due to a three hour flight delay, she was unable to make the flight at all. As a consolation, she asks Carrie to put her on speaker phone so that she can “pay her respects” to the apartment.

“Thank you for everything you f-cking fabulous, fabulous flat,” she says with slight British accent.

Read More: Sex and the City Is Nothing Without Samantha Jones

When Carrie teases her about her accent, Samantha cheekily jokes that she’s actually Annabelle Bronstein, an identity she memorably assumed in season 6, episode 10 of SATC. In that episode, Samantha impersonates Bronstein, a British woman whose membership card she finds in the bathroom of the Soho House, the members-only club with a pool that Samantha, despite her PR connections, can’t secure access to. The ruse, along with Samantha’s British accent, goes swimmingly until the real Annabel Bronstein informs the club that she’s been in London for the week and not in New York City.

Cattrall’s reprisal of her role from SATC has been one of the most anticipated moments of AJLT’s second season and came as a surprise to many fans of the two shows because of the longtime feud Cattrall is rumored to have with Parker and the rest of the SATC cast. This alleged real-life tension was written into the first season of AJLT, in which an estrangement between Carrie and Samantha was one of the show’s largest storylines, a seeming way to address the absence of Samantha, whose outrageous and sex positive escapades were often the comedic heart of SATC.

While Cattrall’s appearance on AJLT was brief, it was a charming moment for nostalgia for the original series, a sentiment that the show has returned to again and again by reviving other past characters like John Corbett’s Aidan Shaw. It was also a reminder of Cattrall’s undeniable charisma and how, despite how things may change, there will never be another Samantha Jones.