Seinfeld/Headscratchers

• Why are the characters seen as being bad for what they did to Babu Bhatt? While everyone else who appeared in the finale were people they legitimately wronged out of selfishness, Babu was just someone they tried to help, and his getting deported was an honest mistake.
  • You're right, and its probably meant to be ironic that even the one instance where they meant to do good was stacked against them in trial. But also, if you remember the episode, they were patting themselves on the back for all the good they did him, which basically amounted to giving him advice. Its like telling a fat person he should eat less and exercise more and then congratulating yourself for helping him lose weight (or given the quality of the advice given, its more like telling a fat person he should take an ancient Chinese weight loss herb you saw an ad for on the internet.)
  • Frankly, the finale itself is a Just Bugs Me... not because it's just stupid to send your main characters to prison as a finale, though it is, but because so much of what was being used as evidence for their horribleness was misunderstandings. Generally speaking, the assholish things the characters do are as a result of crazy confluences of events and not outright malevolence. They didn't mean to get Babu deported, they actively tried to save him from that. George didn't mean to get toxic envelopes that killed Susan. Kramer didn't mean to get a wheelchair for that woman that would be unable to brake. Were the characters, generally speaking, selfish? Yes. But they were not the sociopaths they were made out to be in the finale until the finale, and the mocking they did of the fat guy being robbed at gunpoint would have been wildly out of character for them for most of the run.
    • I had thought George had bought the wedding invitations because they were slightly toxic as a sort of last-ditch-will-never happen-but-worth-a-shot way to get out of marrying Susan... Haven't seen that episode in a while though.
      • No, he just buys them because they're very inexpensive. George is guilty of being cheap, he's certainly not a murderer.
    • That's not even getting into the fact that the use of character witnesses in the trial was incredibly illegal. When people are put on trial, the court's supposed to go out of its way to prevent the jury from learning those sorts of irrelevant, character-defaming acts.
      • The judge says this... then allows it anyway, on the basis that the lawyers went through a lot of work to get these people.
        • You're assuming that this is a normal court with normal rules. But what if the characters died in the plane crash, and this is the afterlife where their souls are being judged? Consider the final scene--what earthly jail would place a woman in a cell with three men? I like the idea (which isn't my own) that they're in a kind of hell forced to listen to one another's neurotic rambles through eternity.
        • But isn't that how they'd choose to spend eternity anyway?
• In "The Doll," Kramer and Frank (and later, The Maestro) play billiards on a table that's too large for the room they're in (the cues keep hitting the walls). How did they get the table in there in the first place?
  • In-universe, the pool table disassembles. Out-universe, the set disassembles.
• Why do they call him "the Bubble Boy" when he talks like a 42-year-old man?
  • Alliterative Appellation?
  • That was the joke. I think the implication (maybe they said it, maybe this was WMG that I assumed was canon) was that he had been famously a bubble boy as a boy, but he had gone on and lived his life and now was a bubble man. But everyone still remembered him as the "Boy in the Plastic Bubble" (a real movie) even though he was all grown up. So Elaine talked Jerry into what she thought was a favor for a sick little kid, but of course, the dad is asking him to visit his adult son.
• Why do we just accept that Seinfeld is a show about nothing? It has two episodes about nothing. I realize that was innovative at the time, but besides "The Chinese Restaurant" and "The Parking Garage," there's a lot going on in your average episode. I mean, a show where they have an episode where George meets Castro or Jerry reveals fattening yogurt that destroys the David Dinkens reelection campaign is not about nothing.
  • The thing is it was one of the first sitcoms without a wacky hook like a sarcastic butler or a talking cat or a genie or a large wacky family or incompatible neighbors. It was a totally original concept at the time but by now has become passé. That's why by our standards it doesn't feel like a show about "nothing". They lampshade this with "Jerry", which is just Seinfeld with the wacky hook about a sarcastic butler being thrown in.
  • That's a good explanation, and it's probably what people mean, but I'm not sure I agree with it completely. Sure, Cheers has the hook of, "It's a sitcom, but in a bar!" but lots of other pre-Seinfeld sitcoms don't really have anymore of a hook than Seinfeld. The Cosby Show is about the ordinary day to day life of a Brooklyn family. Is that any more of a hook, or any more "about something" than the life of a comedian and his three friends? Or All in the Family is about the politically incorrect observations of Archie Bunker. Is that any more "about something" than the Jerry's observations?
  • I think the other major aspect of the "nothing" is the fact that there's basically no Character Development. Like they say, No Hugging, No Learning. Pretty much every other sitcom before that point was more family oriented and made some sort of attempt at having morals so that the characters would mature and develop to some degree. Seinfeld was different in that it forgoes that completely, basically showing four people just living their lives without really growing at all.
  • ^That. Even Dom Coms like The Cosby Show would have a theme, usually illustrated through Plot Parallel so you couldn't miss it, and a moral at the end accompanied by Full House Music. And of course All in The Family was "about something" -- it was social commentary largely about race relations, which is about as "about something" as you can get. There's a reason this show is the Trope Namer for both Seinfeldian Conversation and Sein Language -- its distinctive style of comedy is mainly about discussions of completely inane questions like the placement of buttons on a shirt or the vagaries of social interaction like "the stop-and-chat" and "the kiss hello," which everybody can identify with but nobody had yet commented on, and not only commenting on them but talking them to death because these are characters who don't care about their jobs, don't have families and know perfectly well their current relationships will probably be over within the week. "About nothing" doesn't mean nothing happens in the episode, it means there's no point to anything that happens in any episode.
• Whatever happened to the woman who was impregnated by George due to a defective condom?
  • She turned out not to be pregnant at the end of the episode. Then she disappeared like every other girlfriend of the week, presumably because they broke up in between episodes.
    • I do believe she broke up with George upon seeing his rather odd eating habits (gobbling up some pasta like a pig) at the end of the episode. Her face says "Wow, even if he did care for me...would I want this hog as the father of my children?"
• What did Susan see in George anyway? She was a successful NBC executive, he's a perpetually unemployed loser. She's even much better-looking than him. Did he have a great sense of humour or something? And why did she want to marry him when it was obvious he didn't want to go through with it? Was she just settling for the first decent guy to come along? Maybe she really was a lesbian, and George was The Beard.
  • By the time Susan and George were to be married, she was no longer employed at NBC after she was fired because George kissed her in the meeting. It's not hard to imagine that her self-confidence was crushed by her losing that very prestigious and very well-paying job.
• Another one about George: so, is he like the adult version of Charlie Brown? I ask because the happiness and confidence he gained from doing the opposite only seemed to last for that episode.
  • My guess is that George was too insecure, self-destructive and generally petty to keep it up. Doing the opposite for George would eventually involve having to forgive minor (probably non-existent) slights and acting emotionally mature, and he just couldn't pull it off for long.