Seinfeld Explained. Season 2, Episode 11.
The Chinese Restaurant.
No Kramer. One location.
Zero resolution. Jerry, George,
and Elaine are waiting for a table at a Chinese restaurant,
no reservation, before a one-night screening of Plan 9 From Outer Space.
The maître d' has exactly one answer to every question:
five, ten minutes. George needs to reach his girlfriend by payphone to explain a sudden departure from her apartment.
Elaine is starving. Jerry lied to his uncle about being sick tonight,
and someone from his uncle's office is already in the room.
George's whole night depends on reaching Tatiana by payphone.
She agreed to talk again,
after three days of silence,
following an incident where he walked out of her apartment mid-encounter because the bathroom had no privacy buffer from the bedroom.
He's been building toward this call all week.
Mid-encounter. No buffer zone.
Three days of calls.
The exit logic he's worked out involves a formal architectural audit of bathroom proximity with one conclusion:
the only departure that could have landed with actual dignity required him to be Batman and have just spotted the Bat-Signal.
He believes this COMPLETELY.
It genuinely holds up.
Batman at least gives the exit moral weight,
the situation had no good answer available,
and Bruce Wayne had the only option that felt legitimate.
The tragedy is that he can't retroactively be Bruce Wayne,
so he's stuck with what actually happened.
Before the phone, Elaine has an emergency.
Her hunger speech goes from nostalgia,
eating out was an adventure once,
to her current state:
a large animal waiting for the trough.
Jerry offers fifty dollars to silently steal one egg roll from the elderly couple at the nearest table.
She negotiates every loophole out of the dare first,
pick it up, eat it, say thank you, walk back.
Then instead of just taking it,
she goes over and offers the table a cut.
What did she expect hard-of-hearing diners to do with that proposition delivered through barely-parted lips?
Complete confusion. Nobody knew what she said.
She walked back empty-handed.
She negotiated the terms of a dare she didn't attempt,
and her replacement plan was harder than the original.
The whole thing is failure compounding failure,
she ends up with nothing and hungrier than when she started.
Then the phone. A man's been on it for ten minutes ignoring George completely.
When he finally finishes, a woman steps ahead,
and there's a full address on the social contract,
sensitivity toward fellow individuals,
and the obligations of civilized society.
Then the man from before apologizes on his way out and George melts immediately.
His actual antagonist, the woman who cut in,
won the argument and kept the phone.
He needed someone to blame and then someone to forgive,
and it happened to be two completely different people.
He eventually gets through, answering machine.
Leaves a message: call back,
ask for the balding stocky man with glasses.
Then tells the maître d' he's expecting a call.
Does he think that description is going to locate him in a crowded restaurant?
Balding stocky man with glasses,
that narrows it down HOW, exactly?
Meanwhile Jerry's been carrying a quieter problem.
The woman who looked familiar all episode turns out to be Lorraine from his uncle's office,
the uncle he told he had a stomachache tonight,
the one he blew off to protect his seat at a one-night Plan 9 screening.
He maps the relay, uncle, aunt, mother,
back to uncle, cousin, sister.
New York, Long Island, Florida:
his family is the opposite of the Bermuda Triangle,
nothing disappears there. He traces the whole path before finishing the thought and decides the lie is already burned.
His defense of Plan 9 is that this isn't Plans 1 through 8,
those were probably fine.
This is Plan 9,
a one-night screening of the worst movie ever made,
and that distinction is the whole argument.
He lied to family to protect access to a film he'd describe as the worst ever made.
And then he doesn't see it.
The thing he covered for is the thing he never gets.
The bribe. They pool twenty dollars, George is out,
he almost got arrested bribing a roller derby usher once.
Elaine calls it a guy thing,
Jerry invokes the women's movement,
Elaine grabs the money and hands it to the maître d',
who pockets it and seats someone else.
Clean pocket. No hesitation.
Dennison gets the table.
Jerry goes back to retrieve the twenty.
The maître d' reads it as the story of a man who can't let go,
relationships are difficult, staying together is very hard,
he's genuinely trying to help,
and he's not wrong about their history.
Tatiana called back while they were occupied.
The maître d' paged Cartwright, not Costanza,
nobody answered because nobody there is named Cartwright,
and she swore and hung up.
The name is genuinely unexplained:
George spent all night on a call that already came and went.
She called. He paged Cartwright, she hung up.
They give up and leave: Jerry's calling his uncle,
Elaine's heading to Sky Burger,
George has nothing left to wait for.
And Bruce calls the table the SECOND they're out the door.
George never got through.
Bruce paged Cartwright into an empty room..
The table was called the moment they walked out the door.