And Babu was an ungrateful bastard, to be quite honest. The first Babu episode was on in syndication yesterday and Jerry really goes out of his way to help him out and it’s just through sheer bad luck that Babu’s restaurant fails.
– No one visits Babu’s restaurant aside from the Seinfeld 4.
– Jerry suggests he add some Pakistani dishes while emphasizing “I am NOT a restauranteur.”
– Babu counters by saying he will extensively remodel the entire restaurant and change the menu to all Pakistani food.
– No one comes in after Babu’s changes.
– He screams at Jerry and violently chases him from the restaurant.
The Visa renewal is even worse.
– Babu’s Visa renewal is put in Jerry’s mailbox.
– Jerry is out of town and Elaine picks up his mail. Respecting his privacy, she doesn’t look through th email while he’s gone.
– Jerry comes back and Elaine forgets to give him his mail for three weeks.
– Babu is deported for failing to renew his Visa that he knew was late.
How can the blame for either of those scenarios be laid at the feet of the Seinfeld 4? In the first, Babu is entirely to blame for starting up a poor restaurant and continuing to run it into the ground with bad decisions. In the second case, Babu knew his renewal application was late, but he never checked with INS about it. What if it wasn’t delivered to Jerry? What if it was just lost in the mail? Babu has no one to blame but himself.
I loved the finale and I think that if you did judge the characters they should be thrown in jail as a menace to society. And, I think, that what the writers were saying as well. It’s sort of an in joke.
It’s been pointed out that the premise of the show was that it was about four people who do nothing. And the punchline was they were imprisoned for literally doing nothing.
The reason I didn’t enjoy the finale was that it was really just a glorified clip show. The trial was just an excuse to revisit memorable moments from the series. That wouldn’t have been so bad had it not been for the fact that immediately preceding the show was an actual clip show. When we got to the episode, I felt I had literally just watched it.
I liked how in those episodes of CYE, people kept commenting to Larry about how disappointing the *Seinfeld *finale was, and this was his chance to make up for it.
This is a great list, but you forgot the whale that George saved, albeit from Kramer’s errant tee-shot (" The sea was angry that day my friends, like an old man trying to return soup at a deli!")
But he wasn’t trying to save the whale for the whale’s sake. He saved the whale because Jerry told the woman George wound up dating that George was a marine biologist, and he didn’t want to mess that up. “Why couldn’t you have made me an architect? You know I always wanted to pretend I was an architect!”
I’ve always thought the same way. Babu’s restaurant was deserted, he wasn’t going to make it. Jerry’s suggestion might have cost him more (probably in interest-free government loans), but he probably would have failed either way. And he didn’t have to listen to Jerry.
If anybody is at fault about the renewal application, it’s the mailman or Elaine, not Jerry. As soon as Jerry knew about the application, he did what he could. Maybe it was even addressed wrong.
There were also references to Jerry getting Babu an apartment in his building. Jerry is a good man, very good man.
I also felt there was another thing that was always overlooked. The mugger had a gun. In all Good Samaritan laws, there’s no mandate forcing you to put yourself in harm’s way in order to help someone else out. They caught the mugger’s face on tape, that was good enough. If they had charged in, the mugger might have shot all 5 of them.
