And Just Like That EP Explains This Week's Samantha 'Cameo'

Warning: This post contains spoilers for Thursday's And Just Like That.

This week on And Just Like That..., Carrie Bradshaw got some advice from a fabulous old friend.

Carrie met her grumpy British neighbor, Duncan Reeves, in Thursday's episode — more on him here — and to get the inside intel on him, she grabbed her phone and texted... none other than her Sex and the City BFF Samantha Jones! "They say he's a lot of fun," Samantha texted back, and when Carrie told her Duncan is living in the apartment under her, Samantha responded with a classic Samantha-ism: "I wish he was under me."

No, we didn't actually see Kim Cattrall typing on her phone, but the And Just Like That writers wanted to keep Samantha's spirit alive just the same, executive producer Julie Rottenberg tells TVLine: "We realized [Carrie's] neighbor is from London, and Samantha's in London, and it just felt like the real thing you would do... We wanted to make sure we kept alive the idea that they had been in touch."

It was a small scene, but "we just wanted to touch it lightly, to remind viewers that they're still in each other's lives," Rottenberg adds, "and just to give the viewers a little reminder of that friendship."

Samantha was the only one of the four main Sex and the City characters not to return for And Just Like That... — amid persistent rumors of a feud between Cattrall and Sarah Jessica Parker — and in Season 1, we learned that Carrie and Samantha's friendship had frayed in recent years. But the two reconciled over text later that season, and in the Season 2 finale, Cattrall returned for a brief on-screen cameo, with Samantha calling Carrie to tell her she wanted to surprise her at her farewell dinner at her old apartment but she couldn't make it after all. (Cattrall later shut down rumors that she'd appear again in Season 3.)

Were you happy to hear from Samantha this week, even if only by text? Hit the comments to give us your thoughts on the "cameo."