By Episode 9, And Just Like That… had finally shed its awkward pilot jitters. Carrie Bradshaw, still reeling from Big’s death (the podcast recording meltdown), is no longer a rom-com heroine; she’s a woman trying to decompress a lifetime of grief into a 42-minute runtime.

The episode’s central metaphor is digital decay. Just as an XviD rip loses fidelity with every re-encode—macroblocking in the shadows, a slight desync of audio—Carrie’s memories of Big have started to pixelate. She can’t recall his laugh without the “block noise” of trauma. When she attempts to date again (a disastrous setup with a tech bro who quotes Seinfeld ), the scene feels intentionally jittery, as if her life is buffering on a 2005 dial-up connection.

In a world of seamless streaming, give me the macroblocking. Give me the desync. Give me Episode 9 in all its artifact-riddled, raw, human glory.

3.5 out of 5 green pixelated squares.