Curb Your Enthusiasm Finale Recap: A Free Man

On the evening of May 14, 1998, an audience of 76 million viewers tuned in to watch the two-part series finale of Seinfeld — America’s fifth-most-watched series finale behind a few shows that included Cheers, because when has Ted Danson ever given Larry David a break? It’s hard to overstate just how big of a deal it was when Larry, who had returned to Seinfeld to write the last episode, ended the series with the “New York Four” being found guilty in a New Hampshire court for having violated the “Good Samaritan Law,” standing by and mocking a man as he was robbed at gunpoint.

A quick refresher on the Seinfeld finale: After a parade of character witnesses testifying to the rotten behavior of the group through the years, with many, many episode flashbacks, they end up in jail, with Jerry delivering one final stand-up bit in an orange jumpsuit. It was as if all of America was rooting for the same team in the Super Bowl and that team lost: The finale was panned by critics, bemoaned by shock jocks, and even Seinfeld himself expressed remorse for the near-universal disappointment. The only person, it seemed, who didn’t regret the ending was Larry because, as he reminds us in the Curb finale, “I’m 76 years old and I have never learned a lesson in my entire life!”

Even so, many have never let Larry live it down. Throughout this season, people (Ted Danson among them) have reminded Larry (and us) that he’s guilty of sending America’s favorite narcissists to prison — a decision many saw as humorless and uncharacteristically moralistic for a show that espoused “no hugging, no learning” as its chief ethos. So, with the title of this episode, “No Lessons Learned,” Larry has us wondering if he’ll finally learn the biggest lesson of his career and leave us with none.

We begin where the main action of the Seinfeld finale began: on a plane, though this time Larry, Jeff, Susie, and Leon (the Brentwood Four?) are headed to Atlanta for Larry’s voting-rights trial. Leon is bingeing Seinfeld on the plane, giving us a strong heads-up about how the trial will pan out. Leave it to Leon to point out what we were all thinking: How does Jerry land — and fumble — one beautiful woman after the next? Over the years, Larry has too (whatever happened to Renee Holcomb, the Weisenheimer artist, or Sienna Miller?). But it’s perhaps more believable that the celebrity who has made a brand of his misanthropy has a long line of suitors than the broke comedian. Later, after Jerry shows up, Leon asks him where the “fuck tapes” are, assuming he had sex with each of those women offscreen.

On the highway, Larry is cut off as he’s trying to take an exit; the woman in the car beside him (Allison Janney) keeps speeding up, refusing to let him in, then flips him off through the window. They meet the rest of the crew at the hotel, including Richard, who tells them he’s been in a highly passionate relationship with a woman named Cynthia; they were so in love that when Richard broke up with her, she attempted suicide, a fact that Larry refuses to believe was more than a pity grab. That’s when Cynthia approaches, and it turns out she’s the same woman in the blue Mercedes who cut Larry off.

The gang is going to dinner at Auntie Rae’s restaurant, though not without inviting Cheryl, also in town with Ted, who is protesting the election law. At Auntie Rae’s, the gang orders salad with her famous salad dressing. Susie asks for the recipe, but Auntie Rae insists on keeping it secret. Since Jeff and Susie’s anniversary is coming up, Jeff decides to try to gift her the dressing recipe by calling up Auntie Rae and pretending to be “Journey Gunderson,” a man whose wife has landed in the hospital after consuming the salad dressing and therefore needs to know the exact ingredients. It’s a success: Auntie Rae is panicked, Susie is elated, and Jeff gets husband points.

Meanwhile, Larry prepares for his trial, dismissing jurors for the pettiest of reasons. Because this is such a public case — the protestors outside have signs that read things like “Yada Yada Yada,” “#FreeLarry,” and “It’s Getting Hot Out Here, So Take Out All Your Water Bottles” — the jurors are required to sequester, not unlike in Jury Duty. Back at the hotel, Larry confronts Cynthia about her alleged suicide attempt. Cynthia tells him she nearly overdosed on pink pills, and a skeptical Larry sizes her up with a squint, the way he’s done with countless rivals before. Cynthia told Richard she tried to hang herself, despite telling Larry the attempt was made with pills. Richard accuses Larry of ruining one of his relationships once again, along with his chance to start a family and adopt children. “What are you gonna adopt, a 40-year-old?” Larry says. “Yeah, a doctor,” says Richard. “A doctor or a lawyer.” Even at his “advanced age,” Richard is holding out for the Jewish-parent dream. He’s been one of the season’s highlights if not the highlight; if there’s any proof there is a God, it’s that we got to have Richard for one last season.

And so the court scene begins. Immediately, Larry complains about the lack of coasters on the counsel’s table, in a callback to the last episode of season seven, “Seinfeld,” which revolves around a fictional Seinfeld cast reunion. Some have seen this episode as Larry’s first attempt to “redo” the Seinfeld finale, so it makes sense that the court scene opens with a reference to Julia Louis-Dreyfus’s accusation that Larry has left a ring stain on her coffee table and Larry’s ongoing quest to find the person who doesn’t “respect wood.”

Greg Kinnear plays the prosecutor, who unsurprisingly doubles down on Larry’s history of law-breaking. Now, here comes the part everyone could have anticipated: The first witness called to the stand is Joe Boccabella. Who? Just like the Soup Nazi, who was called by his unrecognizable real name, Mocha Joe enters the courtroom in a dramatic no-nonsense fashion to testify against Larry for starting a “Spite Store” that ultimately caused a fire to burn down Mocha Joe’s. Following the same Seinfeld-finale formula — if you didn’t get the parallels by now, Jerry himself shows up to remind you — a bunch of witnesses over several days in court are also ghosts from Larry’s past, each coinciding with a memorable flashback. Here are just a few of the more memorable accusations (leave your own favorites in the comments):

The jury is horrified. Meanwhile, before the final day of trial, Richard informs Larry that he broke up with Cynthia and he’s a bit worried because she bought a gun. “She’s gonna kill herself?” Larry asks. “No, you,” says Richard — a red herring indicating Larry might just die at the end of this in a dramatic Sopranos-esque send-off. Or will he go back to California and start meditating à la Don Draper?

Neither, obviously. After one last commentary on why they can’t make two copies of the verdict, Larry is proclaimed guilty. Just like Jerry, George, Kramer, and Elaine, he’s sentenced to one year in prison, though not without a moralizing speech by the judge beforehand. Meanwhile, Ted is arrested for protesting, making him look like the real hero in all this. (He shows off his sparkling handcuffs to MSNBC as he’s being taken away.) As Larry is carted off, he asks about toilet paper (one can only imagine which way they roll it in prison) and getting his charger back from Leon. None of the gang, especially Susie, is too pressed about Larry going to jail, which makes perfect sense. Larry is the friend they most love to hate.

Larry sits in the cell and sees his corduroy pants fold in a “pants tent,” and in a direct callback to the first episode, starts pontificating to his cellmates about it. Similarly, when the Seinfeld crew were locked up, they started immediately waxing on about the button, one of the first jokes in the series. It’s no coincidence that Curb mimics this scene with a clothing-related bit, even panning out of the cell in the same manner. In addition to being a cheeky parallel, it’s also Larry’s winking reminder that the Seinfeld finale was clever, thank you very much. But still, we have several minutes left to go.

In a surprising twist, Jerry shows up to bail Larry out of jail, telling him, “You’re a free man.” It turns out Jerry recognized the Joe Pesci guy from the Mexican restaurant earlier in the episode on the jury and reported him for violating the sequester order. After seeing the footage, the judge declared a mistrial, and Larry is free to go. “How about that, sport fans?” Jerry exclaims. (This might be a subtle reference to the fact that footage from Curb helped get an innocent man out of jail.) “You don’t wanna end up like this,” says Jerry. “Nobody wants to see it. Trust me.” Cue Larry’s eureka moment: “Oh my God, this is how we should’ve ended the finale,” he says. “How did we not think of that?” asks Jerry. They both shrug that signature disgruntled shrug and walk off in tandem.

So, did Larry learn his lesson? For this recapper, the jury is still out. In its defense, the episode is a loving nod to the Seinfeld finale, with a clever twist ending that reminds us that Larry has finally learned something. But jurors are not to be swayed by sympathy, and the sentimental goo of this episode left me feeling not unlike Jeff when Richard talks about his sex life: a little bit nauseated. There are so many references made with such a heavy hand, edited together with a ping-pong pace, that I couldn’t help but feel like Larry is better than this. Anyone who has seen the Seinfeld finale or even heard about it at the watercooler would recognize the structure of this episode was lifted beat by beat. Clever subversions be damned, it all felt a little predictable. I can’t help but feel that the insistence on rewriting the finale, and his series-ending reputation, landed him even further in the finale pits.

Still, when the episode finishes with the gang back on the plane, it’s a reminder of just how great this show has remained through the seasons. When Susie opens the plane window, they all bicker about the glare, and Susie says, “Go back to fuckin’ jail, Larry.” The real prison is Larry’s mind-set, and he’s more than happy to keep it that way. This show never lets itself get too sentimental, maintaining the gloriously bitter tang of black coffee. As predictable as this ending may have been, Larry David is as predictably satisfying as a cold glass of water on a hot day. We’ve lived with him as our misanthropic prophet for so long that it’s hard to imagine a post-Curb world. Let’s just hope it respects wood.

• On Seinfeld: “I watched a few, uh, Seinfeld episodes on the plane, and shit. You never told me it was a show about weekly ass. Jerry just constantly got ass every week. You know what I thought it was from the beginning? I said, ‘This ain’t a fucking, uh, TV show. This is more of a fuck documentary.’”

• On the Seinfeld “fuck tapes”: “Where the fuck are the tapes at? Larry won’t give that shit up. Every week, you getting new ass, right? Every fucking show, you meet some new chick. And I know you fucking. What a fucking waste, man.”

• On having sex with a woman on crutches: “Have you ever tapped some ass on crutches? You ever crutch fuck? That’s like fucking an animal ’cause the crutches are an extra set of legs. Break that ass off, huh?”

• On Auntie Rae: “That’s my auntie right there. She carries candy in her bra. If we’re all lucky, we’re gonna get some of that titty-taffy.”

• On Kramer: “Man, this goddamned Kramer, man, he’s too much, man. Walk into your fucking house unannounced and shit. You might as well take off the fucking door and put a fucking saloon door on that bitch. You know what I’m saying? This motherfucker just walking in when he wants to.”