George tries editing a photo to hide his history with his new boss. Jerry dates a doctor who brags about saving lives, and he becomes offended when he discovers she’s a dermatologist. Elaine’s neighbour goes on holiday but forgets to turn her 3:30am alarm off. Kramer becomes obsessed with slicing meat thin.

Story by: Gregg Kavet and Andy Robin and Darin Henry
Teleplay by: Gregg Kavet and Andy Robin
Directed by: Andy Ackerman

Jerry’s plot here is particularly funny to me because it brings out one tiny aspect of the show: nothing the characters do is actually important. It’s common for comedians (and sometimes writers in general) to complain when people come to them saying “I always wanted to do that”, with the common retort being “nobody goes up to a doctor saying ‘I thought about doing that’,”, with the obvious retort to this being “when a comedian bombs on stage, nobody will get killed”. Jerry’s plot here takes that one step further, revealing the subtext of insecurity that drives that thought. Jerry knows, on some level, he could have been a doctor or a lawyer or whatever and done something important, but instead he’s making people laugh on-stage. Now, I believe making people laugh is morally good, but I get being insecure over it enough to be driven to question people who do claim to be saving lives, and of course he gets comedically punished for it.

George’s plot, meanwhile, is one of those rare Seinfeld plots where technology has radically changed how that plot would play out, but not made it impossible. Only a few years ago, it wouldn’t be unreasonable to expect even George to be able to Photoshop himself out; now we’d expect him to use genAI to try and modify it only to make it worse. Regardless, this is something that makes a weird amount of sense; I’ll go into Kruger more later in the season, but right now, his apparent George-like laziness makes perfect sense as a job George would try and do. What strikes me as a basis of American thought (particularly American conservative thought) is that people are naturally lazy and selfish; George is definitely an expression of that philosophy, and so it’s funny and makes sense that he’d try and get a job with an equally lazy and selfish boss he’d take advantage of.

Elaine’s plot has one central idea that doesn’t quite bring it down: why didn’t she just call the landlord? It’s entirely possible that an American woman’s relationship with her landlord in 1997 isn’t quite the same as an Australian man’s relationship with his landlord in 2026, because this is really is something where I’d just call him up and say “hey, can you come fix this” and he’d come unlock the door and turn it off. On the other hand, it does strike me as very Elaine to try and solve the problem in the most short-sighted way possible.

TOPICS O’ THE WEEK

• The cold opens is Elaine dreaming that all three of her friends are trapped in bed with her and she’s begging to get out. I wonder how much this kind of thinking was a sincere expression of the writers and why Seinfeld (comedian) ended the show with this season; certainly, at least, it factors into the interpretation that the characters were all going insane in the last two seasons. This is yet another idea Always Sunny would run away with – the subtext that all the main characters had was each other, and that they were equally dependent on and trapped with each other because nobody else can stand them.
• “It says here you worked at Play Now for four days?” / “That should be fourteen…”
• “This Kruger guy is clueless! I can’t wait to work for him!”
• Great blocking: Kramer shoving his meat in Jerry’s face. No, wait, there’s a better way to word that.
• “You’ve really lost a lot of hair.” / “I AM AWARE!”
• “How was the doctor date?” / “Eh, it died on the table.”
• “I’ve cut slices so thin, I couldn’t even see them.” / “Well then how did you know you cut them?” / “Well, I guess… I just… assumed.”
• Believe it or not, the story of a photo editor drawing in a guy’s face instead of really fixing it is based on something that actually happened to Seinfeld (comedian).
• “You call yourself lifesaver? I call you Pimple Popper MD!” Jerry accidentally predicting a whole TV show.
• “Because it is the mature and adult thing to do!” / “How does that affect me?”
• Little moment of Elaine doing her terrible dance. There’s also a scene recalling Jerry and George talking about possible jobs in “The Revenge”.
• “Fiber from shirt on left shoulder… I’ll have to keep an eye on that.”
• “George, why would I, a Julliard-trained dermatologist, send him to somebody else?”
• “I’m not too worried about it.”

Biggest Laugh:

Next Week: “The Betrayal”. Ooh, controversial.