Summary
Larry’s spite store opens for business in “Beep Panic”, while texting and driving, sweating in food, and Bavarian licorice all cause their own problems.
This recap of Curb Your Enthusiasm Season 10, Episode 9, “Beep Panic”, contains spoilers. You can check out our thoughts on the previous episode by clicking these words.
Finally, Latte Larry’s is open for business. Come on down for a new coffee experience, with highlights including unique beans, self-heating cups, no wobbly tables, and absolutely zero defecation. For that, you can go next door to Mocha Joe’s, where Joe (Saverio Guerra) and Ted Danson are panicking about all the interesting things Larry is doing to steal their customers.
This is just one of a few subplots and recurring gags in Curb Your Enthusiasm Season 10, Episode 9. The other is the perils of texting while driving; Larry gets startled in the act and tosses his phone, and the potential ramifications of such a thing are discussed at lunch with Jeff (Jeff Garlin) and Freddy (Vince Vaughn). Since Susie (Susie Essman) is going out of town, Jeff proposes a golf trip. When the waitress, Diane (Abbi Jacobson), delivers their food to the table, she reveals that she was slightly delayed because of diarrhea and everyone leaves without eating it — hasn’t she realized we’re in the middle of a pandemic?
Another subplot in “Beep Panic”: Larry keeps faking various car troubles so he can steal Bavarian licorice from the dealership. This will come back to bite him — and several others — in a big way later.
In the meantime, though, business is booming for Larry, much to the consternation of Mocha Joe and Ted, the latter of whom has resorted to standing outside and asking people if they remember him from Cheers. They argue about the prices now being so low that they won’t make any money, and to decompress Ted suggests that Joe watches his watermarked awards screeners with his mother — he does, and the piracy warning gives him an idea. He calls Larry.
Elsewhere, Jeff was so happy taking Susie to the airport that she decided to stay home. At lunch with Larry, Freddy, and now Richard Lewis, who has an important play coming up, Diane returns with an air-conditioning issue and sweats in Larry’s soup. When they try and leave without eating again, the store’s proprietor, Mr. Takahashi (Dana Lee), confronts them. Despite trying to cover for her, Diane is fired.
When Larry sees Diane at the bus stop in Curb Your Enthusiasm Season 10, Episode 9, he offers her a ride home and, after an argument about whether he should have eaten the sweat soup out of politeness, a job at Latte Larry’s. He also takes her to the dealership to sample the licorice, feigning interest in buying a new car, and when the salesman (Richard Topol) confronts him he gets so aggrieved that he ends up buying a BMW i8. Now with two cars, he gives Diane the old one.
As tends to be the case, this moment of ill-advised altruism backfires on Larry. On the way home, Diane is texting at a traffic light and runs into his new car. Larry thinks this is a simple matter of taking his old car back, which Diane reminds him isn’t how gifts work. Now with no car at all, he and Leon (JB Smoove) eat the complementary licorice that came with the sale, while Leon explains how he eats black things — licorice, jelly beans, burnt toast — in support of the culture. This is the funniest exchange in “Beep Panic” by a decent margin — Leon continues to be the unsung MVP of the regular cast.
Mocha Joe arrives for a discussion with Larry, but the licorice kicks in, giving both Larry and Leon crippling diarrhea. When they slope off to the bathroom, Joe steals a handful of Larry’s DVD screeners. The offending licorice is passed on to Susie by Larry — after another lunch in which he, Freddy and Richard call off the golf trip, since it wouldn’t be the same without Jeff — and by Susie to Richard, who eats the entire tin right before his career-defining play. His getting the bubble-guts on-stage makes for a funny ending to “Beep Panic”.
Right before, the payoff to both the texting-while-driving running gag and the spite store rivalry subplot comes at Latte Larry’s. Diane doesn’t show up to work since she plans on going away with the money she made selling Larry’s car on eBay. A disabled man is texting in the queue, not paying attention, and ends up running into Larry, who is subsequently arrested by the FBI for illegally handing out awards screeners. This battle was won by Mocha Joe. But is the war over?
