We’re three episodes from the finale, and it’s no clearer how Curb will end than when the season started. But while the end of the last episode saw Larry going downtown in a cop car, in this one, he’s getting caught in a different kind of downtown. Could these all be hints pointing to a final fate in which Larry, like Jerry, George & Co., ends up behind bars once again? Or are they red herrings? It’s too early to tell; we still have Larry’s heroic water-bottle trial to look forward to. (Something Larry reminds us of.) Regardless, he’s still in trouble, though this time it’s not with the law as much as the Catholic morality police: his housekeeper, Dahlia. Yes, Larry has been caught going down on a woman; this time not Sienna Miller — one wonders how things were left there — but a young artist by the name of Renee Holcomb, who has painted a portrait of Larry as part of her “Wisenheimers” series of old Jewish comedians. They enjoy a good date until Larry tries to return an awful key lime pie that the waiter claims is “past the threshold of returnability” because, between them, they had already eaten half of it. This is one of those brilliant Curb bits that feels ripped from the script of daily life. This one time at Quiznos, I saw a guy try to return a “frozen” chicken salad after having eaten all but one piece of chicken. Was the pie past the threshold? In my opinion, no, but the comments section is here for a reason. After the date, Larry and Renee have sex, only for Dahlia, the housekeeper, to walk in on them as Larry is performing cunnilingus. “You knock!” Larry whines, sounding a whole lot like Jerry Seinfeld. Some world-class lines ensue in a conversation between Larry and Leon about the origins of the ancient art: “There was a cunnilingus pioneer out there. We don’t know who it was. They should get some credit for that.” Dahlia is so traumatized by the “incident” that she starts slacking on her cleaning, positioning the toilet paper so you have to pull it from the bottom . (Larry likes it from the top.) Any handling of towels just reminds her of “the trauma”; she was holding towels during the scene of the crime, or the Scene of Trauma, as Freud would call it. The unconscious, it turns out, is a wild and uncontrollable thing. Or is it? Jeff tells Larry he’s going on a trip to North Carolina for Caftan
Queen Susie’s textile convention and that they’re both stuck in the middle seat because she booked last-minute tickets. In what he coins as “the dream scheme,” Larry suggests that Jeff fake a nightmare about having middle-seat plane anxiety. It’s easy enough; it’s already been done in Fiddler on the Roof , in which Tevye fakes a bad dream to convince his wife that his daughter must marry a different man. The reference works so well because Susie, with her balance of earnest generosity and straight-talking chutzpah, is a classic archetype of Jewish lore. Of course she is superstitious about dreams, like her ancestors in Eastern Europe, but she is also a modern
American mother, concerned in equal measure about the impact of trauma. The plan works perfectly; Susie lets Jeff off the hook because she “believes in respecting the unconscious.” (I giggle at the thought of Susie reading The Body Keeps the Score .) Surely she would be more sensitive to Dahlia than Larry, who asks her, “Can we get over the trauma by tomorrow?” Sure enough, she ends up pulling a dream scheme of her own, tossing and turning as she says, “Very busy tongue.” Meanwhile, Freddy Funkhouser (Vince Vaughn, in case you forgot he’s still in this) has taken up a drinking-on-the-golf-course habit, taking swigs from his flask after every putt. Larry says it makes him look like a derelict — something that comes in handy later when he gets looped into the inner circle of a man named Stu, who has just suffered a stroke because he ate a whole tub of foie gras delivered by none other than Susie Greene, in an attempt to retaliate for Stu’s wife Gina’s apparent efforts to get her fat by delivering French pastries. Though he hardly knows Stu, Larry has landed in a group chat with his family members, where each message gets increasingly cringe. (“One good thing about being sick … it proves you weren’t being a hypochondriac this whole time …”; “Every day is a fresh start, wake up with a thankful heart.” Stay through the whole credits sequence to see the full scroll, which includes a picture of Stu as a kid, to which someone named Ruben replies, “Stu looks healthy there.” Of course, no message from Larry.) Gina tells Larry — over lunch that Larry has paid for, despite being the “invitee” — that Stu has asked specifically that, in the possibility that he doesn’t survive the stroke, Larry take care of his 11-year-old daughter Olivia, who now identifies as a cat. “I’ve never spoken to a child without contempt in my voice in my life!” he tells Gina — particularly ironic considering the real Larry has two daughters. (Side note: If you haven’t seen the very Curb -like cameo of Larry on Hannah Montana with his daughters Romy and Cazzie, please watch this clip right here and educate everyone you know.) The scene in which Larry meets Olivia was, for this recapper at least, the episode highlight by far. “Hello, pussycat” is how Larry greets her, proving his argument that he is the worst possible person to take care of kids. (If this joke was a pussy-eating reference, it didn’t quite work, but I’ll cut Larry some slack and assume it was just one of his maladaptive misfires, one that made me cackle.) “Do you like hockey?” he asks. “Do you think
Puerto Rico should become a state?” Olivia reacts to Larry’s misanthropy with an act of brilliant, conniving preteen cruelty: She pulls the string from his sweatshirt— something few, if any, have recovered from. It’s 2024; you’d think they’d have invented a better hoodie mechanism by now. When Larry visits Stu at the hospital, he begs to be exempt from the task of becoming “Catwoman”’s guardian, but Stu is steadfast — that is, until Larry pulls out a flask, like the derelict Freddy Funkhouser, whose only responsibility toward Stu is to watch over and sell his prized antique violin. Stu “flops” their tasks, and Larry is in the clear until Freddy finds out and uses Larry’s own tactic against him: the “dream scheme.” He pretends to fall asleep in the hospital room, dreaming about the hilariously nightmarish things he’d say to Olivia. (“It’s not hard to make friends; it’s just nobody likes you … It’s a pocketknife. You’re supposed to cut yourself sometimes.”) If this scene was at all improvised, it’s some of Vince Vaughn’s best work since Wedding Crashers . Stu flops them once again, and now it’s war. They show up at Stu’s wife’s house and fight so much that they end up
BREAKING the violin. Gina angrily tugs the sweatshirt string from his sweatshirt. Now the men have no responsibility, which is exactly how they like it. Of course, just as Larry is explaining the dream scheme to Gina, Susie walks in with a salad — a low-calorie “peace offering” — and learns Jeff’s anxiety dream was a sham. She forces him to get on the plane, and he ends up between a knitter and a guy eating chips while on his laptop. The scene is so very Elaine in “The Airport,” stuck in a middle seat after a flight is canceled. (“He’s sleeping and I have to go to the bathroom. I hope this disgusting slob appreciates what I’m doing for him.”) The plane (a Delta aircraft, by the way) is diverted, and they have to be bussed to their final destination. Hopefully Susie got to her textile convention in time. If there’s any justice in this world, we will get to see her debut caftan collection before Curb closes the curtain. Ideally, she’s modeling with her puppy, Frankie, in matching outfits. Shout-out to the coyote vest — a real-life absurd-looking invention designed to keep coyotes from snatching small dogs. It turns out the coyotes from episode three are still rampant, and Susie, God bless her, is doing all she can to protect her pup in the gaudiest, most Susie of ways. Cousin Waylan, the man behind the infamous “Martha’s beef stew really heals all wounds” text, later calls Larry out for his group-chat absence. Larry tells him he’s overwhelmed by the constant dinging, to which Waylan says he could just give it a ha-ha or a thumbs-up — “or a heart, that’s an option.” Larry responds with some incredible IRL emojis, forcing a cheesy smile and putting his palms together for “prayer hands.” Once again, Larry is fully innocent. His only crimes in this episode have been taking a big bite of a bad dessert, pleasuring a woman, having the self-awareness to admit he can’t take care of a child, and getting overwhelmed by a group chat. (Who hasn’t wondered what their
Friends do at work if not just sit there emphasizing, heart-reacting, and sending links to one another? “It’s really honestly like the lowest form of human communication,” says Freddy.) Oh, and encouraging Jeff to lie to Susie, which he always does anyway. No crimes detected. But Larry’s skepticism around the concept of trauma comes back to haunt him. Renee Holcomb returns to drop off the painting of Larry so he can see it ahead of the exhibition it’s part of. Dahlia answers the door and accepts the painting on Larry’s behalf. The exhibition includes Richard Lewis, may he rest in Hell , the late Gilbert Gottfried with his Aflac Duck, and Albert Brooks, who appeared on Curb in season ten to mourn his real-life brother Bob Einstein, who played Larry’s friend Marty Funkhouser before he passed in 2019. After panning through the paintings, we see a giant portrait of Larry David, only now there’s a pair of legs splayed open at his mouth. Naturally, Dahlia has painted “the trauma.” Honestly, it looks more like a rotisserie chicken than a human woman, but the effect is the same. The whole crowd looks at Larry and Renee, and after a beat, humiliated, they both turn around to leave at the same time. Once again, Larry ends the episode having gone “downtown.” The psychic damage has been done; Larry is learning you can’t have your trauma cake — er, key lime pie — and eat it, too. The dream scheme goes both ways. Larry must now prepare for a public trial that will surely be nothing if not annihilating. But will Larry emerge a hero or just a Wisenheimer? It’s dangerously close to the finale, and still, we have no idea. Let’s hope Larry keeps building upon what he’s already given us instead of sourcing scraps from the cutting-room floor. This episode also felt a bit oddly paced, from the slightly rushed, not-really-believable dinner date to Dahlia’s cartoonish reactions and the ill-conceived ending, which felt designed strictly for shock value. Where did Dahlia find paint in Larry’s house? And while I’m ranting here, Larry-style, where were Cheryl and Ted? On vacation at The White Lotus with Lori Loughlin and Mossimo from Target ? (I know they’re not in every episode, but I miss them, as well as Richard, of course. Thankfully, it seems he’ll be back in the next episode. And Vince Vaughn has made quite the case for himself.) There was so much good here; the misses were forgivable. The “Mount Rushmore of Pussy-Eaters”; offering a litter box to the 11-year-old Olivia; a group chat full of empty
Facebook bait; Jeff’s over-the-top fake dream; Susie’s dog’s coyote vest; the Freddy and Larry face-off in which they insult each other by saying how nice the other is. All pretty, pretty, pretty great. • On going “downtown”: “I can fuck around and do a TED Talk to that shit. I’ll have a pussy TED Talk. Get all the guys in one room, get a little microphone, get a little laser pointer and shit. Like, ‘This is a pussy, see?’ I’m good at that shit.” • On erogenous zones: “I go through all the fucking zones. All the eromenous zones. Eronenous zones. Erotenous … Gotta know where to lick at and where to tickle.” • On toilet-paper positions: “There’s people who do it from the top, you know, you roll like this. And people who do it from the bottom, you do it like this. It’s almost as if you’re un-wiping your ass.” • On why Larry can’t
fire his housekeeper: “You can’t get rid of her ass ’cause you got no basis. Getting caught eating pussy is not a basis.” • On the origins of cunnilingus: “That shit didn’t start ’til the early 1900s, at least. Somebody had to be first … Put that motherfucker on the Mount Rushmore of pussy eaters. They all got their tongue out and shit. Honor those motherfuckers.” By submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Notice and to receive email correspondence from us.