Curb Your Enthusiasm recap: Yup, text chains do in fact suck

Larry David is the kind of guy who always has a scheme—we know this as fans of Curb Your Enthusiasm. Be it the grander variety, like launching a whole coffee shop out of spite, or the more everyday sort, like that trick with Larry’s balls hanging out of his shorts a few episodes back, he’s always got something up his sleeve. (Oh, I guess that’s kind of a pun. Neat.) Some of his strategies play out just as he hopes and they get him out of trouble. Others flounder, as is the case with the one in this episode: “The Dream Scheme.”

Larry is awakened at 3 am to the sound of his cell phone ringing. It’s Gina Grossbard (who?) sharing that her husband Stu (huh?) has had a stroke. Larry barely knows these people, and wonders aloud, “Why the fuck’d she call me?!” What’s more, he’s been added to a text chain with Stu’s family and everything, getting little kid doodles and all. And of course he can’t just leave the group, because, “They’ll see [he] left.” (This group text thing culminates in a confrontation with Stu’s cousin Waylan that’s pretty funny. Waylan suggests Larry hasn’t been active enough, Larry admits to feeling “too good for the chain,” Waylan threatens that once Larry is removed from it there’s no turning back, and they gesture emojis at each other until they part—you know, the very normal exchange we all have when we get into a group text situation.)

But there are issues beyond the group text. Turns out Stu has some requests for Larry and Freddy. He wants Larry to keep an eye on his 11-year-old daughter, and he was Freddy to sell a violin in his possession that Jascha Heifetz once played at Carnegie Hall. Larry hates his prospective role, even says, “I don’t like children. I’ve never spoken to a child without contempt in my voice in my life,” and visits Stu in the hospital to try to get him to “flop” his and Freddy’s roles, even whipping out a flask he swiped from Freddy to ensure that he comes across as an especially irresponsible adult—it works.

Next, Freddy heads over to get Stu to “flop” things back, and resorts to the main trick of the episode: faking a sleep-talking nightmare, Larry’s own idea. Freddy uses this tactic to voice aloud some phrases he might just use with Stu’s daughter one day, like “You’ll come out of the basement when you’re good and ready,” which successfully flops things back in his favor. Jeff uses it successfully, too—earlier in the episode—to communicate to Susie that he’s far too anxious to accompany her to a textile convention in Raleigh, North Carolina. Both men seem successful in their use of Larry’s strategy, but they fail in the end. Jeff ends up on that plane with Susie after all, thanks to Larry’s confession that he put Freddy up to “The Dream Scheme” with Stu, which comes just as she’s dropping off a salad for Stu’s wife. Following this, Freddy and Larry fight over the violin a bit only for it to shatter on the floor behind them after Larry attempted to plop it back in the case. Oops!

Larry has another problem to deal with in this episode, too. He enjoys a nice dinner and some disappointing key lime pie on a date with Renee Holcomb, an artist painting him for her gallery exhibit featuring Jewish comedians called “Wisenheimers.” The date goes well enough for her to stay the night, but as he’s going down on her the next morning, his housekeeper Dahlia walks in carrying a stack of towels. She then associates most aspects of her job, towels especially, with the trauma of witnessing that sex act, and she becomes less and less willing to perform any actual work while she’s there. Dahlia’s vindictiveness reaches a fever pitch when Renee brings Larry’s finished portrait by for a sneak peek before it’s boxed up and sent to the gallery; we see her smirk and know that she’s up to something.

Finally, our focus pans across Renee’s gallery exhibit, and we see Albert Brooks, Gilbert Gottfried, Albert Brooks, and Richard Lewis each represented in painting form. Larry and Renee walk in and see that Dahlia has defaced Larry’s painting to include a sloppy rendering of Renee’s lower abdomen, pelvis and thighs, making it look like a reenactment of the cunnilingus incident. They immediately bail, just as they did in the restaurant where they got that crappy key lime pie, and that’s where the episode ends. There were clever callbacks to be sure, some hilarious Leon lines, and some great Susie Essman zingers in this one, but the Freddy stuff never grabs me all that much. All in all, the episode is pretty funny. Good enough. No need to fake a nightmare to get out of watching it or anything.

Stray observations

• My favorite Leon moment of the episode? When he says he had to dry off with paper towels after his shower due to Dahlia’s newfound aversion to the cloth ones. It just creates a funny mental image to me, and his delivery is as perfect as ever when he says it.
• I love Susie’s dog’s little punk rock, spikey, coyote-proof vest. I want one for myself.
• I would actually enjoy seeing an exhibit like Wisenheimers. That little glimpse of those gentlemen was lovely. Also, doesn’t it harken back to “The Kramer” in a fun way?
• It’s probably going to linger for the remainder of this season, this sense of getting a little emotional whenever Richard Lewis pops up in scenes (or in this case, on canvas). Still a little weird that they just had Marty Funkhouser go to China as their solution to dealing with Bob Einstein’s death. Thoughts?
• Renee seems like a good character, a consistent one as far as her values, preferences, etc. She feels like a real person more so than some of Larry’s other love interests on this show who feel like projections. But I still miss Irma.
• In a fun touch, we get to see the group text scrolling alongside the credits, with dumb little messages including, “As they say in obedience school… heal,” and “I’ll send a teddy bear. He always loved those.”
• Children identifying as cats and using litter boxes at public schools is a persistent myth. It’s a whole thing. Stu’s kid snatching Larry’s sweater string because “cats like strings” is a funny little gag, and the mom doing the same thing to him later in the episode is a nice callback, but it feels… icky. Maybe this will somehow factor into Larry’s ultimate comeuppance we’re all predicting?