Curb Your Enthusiasm recap: Larry gives Bruce Springsteen COVID

Well, the title of this episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm, “Ken/Kendra” certainly gave me pause and had me wondering if some transphobic stuff was in store. Fortunately, Larry’s fragility and need to present as unquestionably, 100% straight is more the butt of this joke, and the character Ken (Kendra when he and Larry last interacted) seems completely unfazed by Larry’s apparent discomfort with the fact that they used to hook up. If anything, Ken seems to delight in bringing it up again and again, leaning into it as Larry squirms. As far as representation goes, it is a bummer to still see sex with trans folks, even pre-transition, regarded as icky here in 2024. However, this reaction absolutely tracks with what we’ve learned about L.D. and his insecurities over 12 seasons; he’s flawed. And as Larry’s new lawyer Sibby Sanders reminds him, “It’s going to come down to the jury saying ‘do we like Larry, or do we not like Larry?’” This, I think, is the audience’s call to make, too, as he does things on both sides of that fence on a regular basis; whether the man is good or bad is sort of the crux of this whole final season.

Ms. Sanders really has her work cut out for her, too, defending this dude. Cheryl’s masseuse Chunhua announces that she’s done with Larry’s massage (one in which she called Larry “brittle like wood” and said his skin was dry). He looks at the clock and protests, patting his legs (she had only worked on his shoulders and feet to this point). Chunhua is immediately disgusted, thinking he wants a “happy ending.” He insists she had done 35 minutes, not the full hour he paid for, and shouts back, “I don’t want a happy ending. I just want an ending.” Then she leaves… with a threat: “You messed with the wrong person!” He has to fix this situation. And his solution is to introduce her to Bruce Springsteen (The Boss wanted to meet Larry because of the water bottle thing, so why not?)

But that’s not the only way in which Larry’s caught dealing in deviant behavior this episode. Springsteen’s manager Ken mentions that when he and Larry hooked up back in his pre-transition days, they would only ever have sex on the floor. The reason? To avoid cuddling after sex, since no one wants to spend time down there. This gets back to Cheryl, who finds it appalling that Larry had used the trick on her when they were married, and later in the episode, the owner of a cafe Larry and his friends frequent called Ollie and Al’s also admits to being disgusted by that very concept of it. You see, when Larry confronts the owner Lorenzo on the restaurant’s downgrade from an A to a C, he explains that it stemmed from an employee having floor sex right in the middle of the restaurant, and when Larry explains the function of floor sex, Lorenzo is incensed. Meanwhile, Larry wants to meet this floor sex-having employee, because of course he does (will he, though? He’s got one more episode for us to find out!)

Larry’s greatest sin this episode, though, is not the massage situation or the “floor fucker” thing, but another, grimmer event: giving Bruce Springsteen COVID during their brief encounter at Jeff’s house. Springsteen had a sold out “Farewell” tour going on, but got so sick from potentially having grabbed Larry’s water cup instead of his own, that he had to cancel dates. So yes, this does mean that Larry gets COVID this episode, and has to tell everyone he has encountered within the past few days about his situation, including Les McCrabb (a hilarious Matt Berry), a director who worked on two episodes on Young Larry and has since demanded that L.D. read the draft of his manuscript. So because Larry hasn’t read his book yet, he’s waiting on calling McCrabb. Meanwhile, Bruce says publicly that he got COVID from Larry David, and apologizes to his fans—our guy’s lawyer really doesn’t like that.

There’s a thing with a zipper this episode, too, that ties into the whole McCrabb storyline. Had Larry not taken so long fiddling with the one on his sweater (because he’s “feeble,” as Leon points out), he would have been long gone before running into the guy in the first place. Later, when Larry has finally finished reading the manuscript, he struggles with than dang zipper again, and in that short span of time, it turns out, McCrabb has already handed his phone over to the man running his yoga retreat and can’t take Larry’s call. McCrabb then proceeds to hug, kiss, and breathe on everyone on the retreat bus: this could go very poorly.

Now, determined to make good on his promise to help Chunhua meet Sprinsteen, Larry drives her over to the sickly superstar’s home, which is surrounded by fans paying tribute to their idol, chanting and holding signs with slogans—even a sketch of “Born to Run”-era Bruce with a tear falling down his cheek. Larry lies down on the floor of his own car and has Chunhua drive them through the gate (as she explains, a masseuse can always get in). Springsteen is laid up in a recliner, watching Young Mr. Lincoln, when Larry and Chunhua approach the glass window so that the masseuse can collect on that photo op she wasn’t able to get during the earlier unsatisfactory introduction. The poor, sick fellow is pissed, of course—he’s still sore at L.D. for giving him COVID in the first place—and yells at the duo to “get the fuck out.” Larry does the driving to get the pair out of there and the fans are infuriated to see him; they chase his car and throw things. This can’t reflect well upon the man mere weeks ahead of his Georgia court date.

In all honesty, this doesn’t feel much like the second-to-last episode of a season, much less an entire series, but perhaps that’s the point. Maybe we’re keeping it light as the show sails off into the sunset, and I’m glad we’re still laughing together. At least it helps to take the edge off, doesn’t it?

Stray observations

• “I don’t want a happy ending. I just want an ending,” is what Larry says to Chunhua the masseuse at the end of his massage, but is this also sort of a meta moment, perhaps some foreshadowing as to the kind of ending we may expect to receive from this show?
• Larry doing a goofy high-knees walk is one of the silliest things we’ve seen him do to date, and I love that Leon suggests that it could catch on widely and he’d be added to the Evolution of Man chart.
• This season includes a lot of Asian actors doing played up accents, and it has me thinking about that episode of Master of None where Aziz Ansari and another actor are asked at an audition to “do a voice.” Remember that? It leaves me feeling a little icky seeing it done so much in S12.
• When describing the importance of hunches, Larry does a ridiculous little bit, doing voices and everything, in which Eleanor Roosevelt tells FDR she has a hunch about Pearl Harbor. His voice for Eleanor Roosevelt is high-pitched and quavery, while his FDR is basically just Mick Jagger impersonating Keith Richards. He’s been having a lot of fun this season.
• There were a great many marvelous Leon moments this episode, but my favorite was probably when he was explaining “the darker the berry, the sweeter the juice” to mean, essentially, that Black people would taste better to cannibals than white people. He says to Larry and Jeff that they would “have to add condiments on you motherfuckers.”
• Matt Berry reading lines from his character’s autobiography is so great (especially the one about Patricia Heaton getting “handsy”) and we have to wonder whether he improvised these—same with some of the particulars of his little sidewalk chat moment with Larry, including the names “Jeff Donat” and “Ken Puffin” and the saying “every hole is a goal.” The man is a treasure.

Curb Your Enthusiasm is available to stream now on Max.