Right from the starting stand-up routine (the first in years) you can tell there's a bad approach. This wasn't written as a Seinfeld episode but rather as a Seinfeld Television Event. The first half of the hour long episode plays out like a regular episode but even then, the jokes seem to be trying too hard to be Seinfeldian. Jerry and George give Elaine a hard time for a breach of phone call etiquette (this amounts to the Elaine subplot). Kramer just can't lose his swimmer's ear - how zany! The central Jerry-George plot (the only plot) is that they've finally got the go-ahead on the show they conceived with NBC, and George (as is wont of George) overcompensates by acting like a huge asshole. There's a couple of snickers here and there but everything feels way more contrived than usual and without the wit to justify it. And then it all just gets worse.
The second part is of course the infamous trial. The foursome are grounded in a small town in Massachusetts after a dramatic near crash on an airplane (that's right), where they are arrested for not helping a fat guy as he's getting carjacked. What follows is essentially a clip show - the lowest form of episode - featuring references to virtually all the most memorable and beloved jokes from the last nine years, as guest star after guest star is paraded in front of the audience, reminding you of all the good times you had with them. In a fairly atrocious montage we see all our favourite side characters pack their bags so they can sit in on the trial and be seen in all the long shots. I remember when it aired that City TV marathoned the top ten episodes of Seinfeld in honour of the finale (as voted by you!) and virtually every single episode they featured was touched on. In another montage of character witnesses, we are treated to maybe five or six old incidental guest stars and the occasional clip to go along with it, in the span of maybe two minutes.
I'd like to have known Larry David during this period. He would've been off the show for two years and then asked to come back and write a finale at the apex of Seinfeld-mania. At that point he would've been newly and bombastically rich, but removed from a show that was responsible for his fortune and continues to be lauded as a game-changer, one of the most celebrated sitcoms of all time, and I'm informed, the most successful show in American television history. Coming at this after watching seven years of Curb Your Enthusiasm, I can't help but wonder at David's personal relationship with the show as a force in his life. Did he like it? Did he resent the show's continued success in his absence? Had he gotten to a point where he thought he had pulled a fast one on everyone; that Seinfeld wasn't all it was cracked up to be and we were all idiots for liking it? Maybe he thought the show, and all of us who watched it, deserved to be mocked. Maybe the finale was his way of saying that it's just another crappy sitcom.
Because it does feel in many ways like a big fuck you - an indictment of the whole endeavour. The trial of the characters comes across as a trial of the series, and it ends with a guilty verdict. These are horrible people, and in their nine years of misadventures they've ruined and even ended lives. Why are these beloved characters? Why are you so invested in following the lives of four New York sociopaths? It was a poor choice to treat the finale like anything but another regular Seinfeld episode, but if it has to be a sweeping retrospective, shouldn't it at least be celebratory as opposed to damning?
Ultimately, the episode was moralizing, followed one straight-forward narrative, and largely didn't even take place in New York. In other words it was everything a Seinfeld episode has never been before. The only plus side is that they got to set up for jokes about it ten years later in Curb.
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