Last week, Sarah Jessica Parker posted a photo on Instagram of her flanked by Cynthia Nixon and Kristin Davis, confirming two things: The long-discussed Sex and the City revival, And Just Like That, is really and truly happening—the three had just read through the first episodes—and, tragically, it is really and truly happening without Kim Cattrall. Due to a longstanding rift between Cattrall and Parker (and others associated with the show), the franchise’s beloved fourth lead character will be absent from the new series.
I’ve always been of the opinion that to do a new series, especially after that second movie, was ill-advised, but to do one without Cattrall was sacrilegious. That’s why I was delighted when a photo of Kim Cattrall in a very provocative ensemble crossed my Twitter feed this week:
In this photo, Cattrall appeared to be wearing not a revenge dress, but something even better: a revenge NASA suit. Could it be? For one brief shining moment, I was elated by the thought that Cattrall had arranged so that while Carrie and co. were at brunch, she would be in space. Now here was a power move befitting Samantha Jones. Finally, a cosmopolitan-drinking cosmonaut! I pictured Samantha flirting with Jeff Bezos on the moon, and a thousand jokes about phallic rocket ships danced through my mind.
But my glee was short-lived, because, I am very saddened to tell you, Kim Cattrall is not going to space. I don’t like it any more than you—I don’t want to live in a world where Bezos gets to go to space whenever he wants but Kim Cattrall can’t—but it would be irresponsible to spread misinformation.
What happened was this: Earlier this week, NASA tweeted that when its Artemis I mission “flies around the Moon later this year, there won’t be any astronauts aboard. But there will be a very important passenger: a manikin.” Then, a Star Trek fan account quote-tweeted NASA, writing, “Breaking news! @KimCattrall has been chosen to fly aboard @NASA’s #Artemis I mission which flies around the moon later this year. Congrats Kim, wishing you good vibrations!”
If you’re wondering why a Star Trek fan account would be interested in Kim Cattrall, it’s because prior to her Sex and the City career, Cattrall played a Vulcan named Valeris in a 1991 Star Trek movie. And if you’re still wondering how the tweet makes any sense at all, it’s because before that, Cattrall starred in an extremely ’80s comedy called Mannequin, where she played a department-store mannequin who came to life and fell in love with Andrew McCarthy.
I knew both of these things—Cattrall hive!—though not that there was a word, manikin, that meant something similar but slightly different than mannequin. So why was I so easily fooled, and by a Star Trek fan account? In my defense, Cattrall herself replied to that tweet with the aforementioned photo of herself in the spacesuit, and that got retweeted a bunch of times. And how are you going to argue with a photo of Kim Cattrall in a spacesuit?
It was only upon further investigation that I realized that it was just a joke: Cattrall did a bunch of other winking tweets about it on her Twitter feed, and the hall monitors at NASA replied to one puncturing the fantasy. Sigh. Whatever, do I really have to apologize that I was so entranced, nay, inspired by the thought of Kim Cattrall in space? This is Cynthia Nixon losing the New York governor’s race all over again.
One final mystery remains: How did Kim Cattrall have a photo of her in a NASA suit just lying around? Here, a glimmer of hope: I’m guessing it’s from 2013, when Cattrall visited the U.S. Space and Rocket Center to attend Space Camp! Yes, really. It turns out Cattrall is qualified to go into space. It just hasn’t happened yet. But it still could. And I think that would be just fabulous.
