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A few years ago, I was idling around the TV section of a music and DVD shop I frequent when I happened to see a stand displaying all six seasons of Sex and the City. As I starred at them, I realized that there was an odd pattern to the box art; on each cover, Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker) is highlighted, whilst the remaining three characters are faded out, and are often pushed into the background. At first I just assumed this was due to the natural egotism of the star - an idea supported by the fact that on Seasons 5 and 6, Carrie is the only character featured - but then it hit me, the big secret at the heart of Sex and the City:

Carrie is the only character who is real, the other three are figments of her imagination.

Think about it; the entire story is told through her writing, meaning that she is the only one whose word we have that anything depicted in the series or the films actually happened. So, if she is an unreliable narrator, we can only assume that she is making up the stories as means of coping with how crushing her real life is. Kind of like how Roseanne ended.

How does this tie into Sex and the City 2, then? Well, at the end of the first film Carrie married Big (Chris Noth), the man of her dreams who she has been pursuing for so long, which in a figurative sense could represent the point at which she made peace with her personal demons and resolved to leave the world she had created behind. But in the second film, she is still married to Big and we learn that their marriage has hit a rough patch. She has clearly relapsed, and she escapes even further into the fiction that she has created, resurrecting her "friends" and flying off to Abu Dhabi, a place that is so wholly different to New York. Because of her deteriorating mental state, she creates a fantastical story that makes no sense, whisking her away to a land far away from the drudgery of her life, and which sees her strutting across the desert in outfits so garish she looks like she is the star of a Baz Luhrman adaptation of Dune.

Following this logic, Part Three will be one part Sex and the City and two parts Shutter Island, with maybe a bit of Inception thrown in for good measure; fabulous costumes and terrible banter mixed with an attempt to help Carrie reconnect with the real world lest she get a lobotomy.

Note: This theory relates specifically to the UK box art. If the American box art is different, then we can only assume that the whole thing is real, in which case I have no possible explanation for why Sex and the City 2 is so profoundly awful.

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