Maybe Bridget will come back in future episodes but it seems unlikely. Even worse it casts aside the Bridget angle far too quickly. It just doesn’t go to the same interesting places that Greg and Yogi Tina’s plot lines do. It’s surprising the show took this long to examine the possibility that Larry is on the spectrum. The problem is that Curb Your Enthusiasm, itself, doesn’t quite seem to recognize how fun the two’s interactions are and instead uses it as a set up to have Larry interact with her shitty kid and put the seed in his head that if he says he has Asperger’s, a lot of his antisocial behavior will be forgiven. The two just have wonderful chemistry and we get to see a flirtatious side of Larry David we’ve never gotten to see. REALLY well! And not even in a comedic sense, though Bridget is pretty funny. So Larry and Bridget (Lauren Graham) go out for dinner and things go really well. Larry finally agrees after some predictably awful theorizing about her appearance. Susie has a friend who is dying to be set up on a date with Larry. Only it’s not a great wind that carries him across the sky, it’s just two or three excellent cascading jokes that build on one another for 30 minutes.įunnily enough, the one thing holding “Namaste” back from being a truly great episode of Curb is a performance that is just too good. When Curb Your Enthusiasm is really working, it reminds me of the “Ojibwe saying” poem from The Sopranos where Larry goes about in pity for himself. The work that just those two jokes put in is remarkable and the way they allow the plot to flower is awesome. How are you going to pay for this, asshole?”) immediately dissipates and he just resolves to pay for the damage to the car, himself.
Justin’s bravado from earlier (“Look, Larry. And when the guy whose car Larry hit, Justin (Marc Evan Jackson) arrives to bring Larry an invoice, he has similar “recognizing people’s races over the phone” issues and discovers that “Larry” is a black guy when Leon answers the door. Leon is immediately being able to tell Greg is black when he calls, which is amazing. Larry and Jeff have a conversation about how they couldn’t pick up on Greg’s race through the phone and it in turn sets up two of the episode’s best jokes. Greg is offended and won’t get Larry’s car fixed for another 3 weeks, setting up Larry’s Uber misadventures for the rest of the episode. This encounter is an excellent two or so minutes but it also again sets up another 20 minutes of plot and jokes along with Yogi Tina and her temperature addiction. Uber ratings don’t become 1-star after one 1-star rating and back-up cameras in cars don’t turn off when music is played like in the way that causes Larry to collide with another car. *”Namaste” has a poor track record for understanding how technology works. Not only does it hammer home Larry’s narcissism and lack of filter but he also quite fairly adds “it’s just that most white people when they have black friends like to show off about it.” The first words Larry says upon meeting Jeff’s mechanic friend Greg (Doc Farrow)* are “oh you’re black!” and it’s undeniably hilarious in bluntness. Larry’s encounter with car mechanic Greg sees similar levels of Curb Your Enthusiasm-style comedic success. It features a rough beginning, strong ending and a middle whose success relies upon how identifiable Larry’s everyday struggles are vs. “Namaste” is a perfectly fine episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm season 9 and bears pretty much all the same strengths and drawbacks of its compatriots. Two, season 10 of Curb Your Enthusiasm needs to be set in a dystopian Black Mirror future in which Larry leads a rebellion of social outcasts. Because one 1-star review is clearly not enough to bring a respectable Uber rating down to 1. One, Larry clearly has no idea how averages work. His interactions with his drivers, and the subsequent level of chaos and stress it causes him to reign down like hellfire suggests two things. Larry steps right into “Nosedive” in “Namaste” as he discovers that he has become what he was always destined to be: a 1-star Uber passenger.
Now one week later, “Namaste” blows right past Modern Seinfeld and becomes the first Curb Your Enthusiasm to feel like an episode of Black Mirror. Last week’s “The Accidental Text on Purpose” was the first Curb Your Enthusiasm that seemed like an episode of Modern Seinfeld. This Curb Your Enthusiasm review contains spoilers Curb Your Enthusiasm Season 9 Episode 7