Summary
“The Dream Scheme” is an average episode of Curb that’s good for a few laughs, but it doesn’t quite match up to some of the season’s better outings.
Episode 7, “The Dream Scheme”, is one of those episodes of Curb Your Enthusiasm where everything revolves around a central idea rather than the fun cascading effect of several storylines interlocking by chance. There’s a bit of that here, but less so than in some other Season 12 episodes. Instead, another of Larry’s harebrained schemes for shirking responsibility comes back to bite him, tying in jokes about text chains, cunnilingus, and children identifying as cats for good measure.
The text chain is the first clue that things are going to go wrong for Larry. At 3 am, he’s suddenly awoken by a woman he doesn’t know, who informs him that her husband Stu, who he barely knows, has had a stroke. Worse still, Larry has been added to a group chat with Stu’s friends and family, which is full of meaningless platitudes and emojis. Needless to say, Larry hates this.
The text thing has a payoff of its own – a stupid emoji-off with Stu’s cousin Waylan, played for maximum improvisational ridiculousness – but it’s more the catalyst for the main thrust of the episode, which is the dream thing.
What is the Dream Scheme?
Faking a sleep-talking nightmare is a plan of Larry’s design that gets people out of doing things they don’t want to do. He pioneers it in response to Jeff trying to get out of a trip with Susie where he’s going to be forced into an awkward middle seat between strangers. That night, Jeff pretends to have a terrible nightmare about the plane going down. Susie doesn’t think it’s worth him coming if the flight is causing him this much anxiety, so he gets away with it. The Dream Scheme works.
But then the joke becomes how everyone else employs the dream scheme to get out of their problems, most of which involve Larry. For instance: Stu has some requests of Larry and Freddy Funkhouser just in case he doesn’t make it. He wants Freddy to sell a violin for him, which seems easy enough. But he wants Larry to become responsible for his 11-year-old daughter, who identifies as a cat and, upon meeting Larry for the first time, snatches the string out of his sweater because “cats like string.”
Naturally, Larry would much rather be selling the violin, so he visits Stu in the hospital and pretends to be a delinquent by swigging a flask he stole from Freddy and making uncouth comments about the nurses. Stu decides that Freddy would be better suited to childcare, so a furious Freddy later visits Stu and uses the Dream Scheme to terrify Stu into swapping the roles back around.
Going Downtown
Larry’s housekeeper Dahlia also tries to utilize the Dream Scheme against Larry. Her problem is that she accidentally walked in on Larry going down on his new fling, an artist named Renee Holcomb, and is adamant that her housekeeping duties now come with the associated trauma of seeing Larry’s bald head bobbing up and down. She uses this as an excuse to turn up at Larry’s house and do nothing while still being paid.
With his upcoming trial, Larry can’t be seen to fire her, just like how he can’t be seen to leave the text chain. He has a reputation to maintain.
The Wisenheimers
Renee is an artist who is featuring Larry in an exhibit based around Jewish comedians she’s calling “Wisenheimers”. It’s another instance of an implausibly good-looking woman being inexplicably sexually interested in Larry David, but to be fair, Renee is a lot like him, which we see when she’s similarly snooty about a slice of key lime pie.
We’ll visit the Wisenheimers gallery at the end, but it’s worth noting that other subjects include Albert Brooks, Gilbert Gottfried, and the late Richard Lewis (RIP).
How does Curb Your Enthusiasm Season 12 Episode 7 end?
The dream thing doesn’t go well for anyone. When Larry and Freddy get into a confrontation at Stu’s house, in front of his wife, Susie overhears that the dream scheme was a ruse, so Jeff is forced to attend the textile convention with her and sit in the middle seat. Larry and Freddy, meanwhile, after accidentally breaking Stu’s violin, get ejected from both the house and the text chain, though that’s probably a plus for both of them.
But the final stinger comes at Renee’s exhibit. Earlier, she had dropped off the painting she had done of Larry so he could see it before it was sent to the gallery, but Dahlia got there first. At the exhibition, Larry and Renee see that she has… amended the painting to now feature Renee’s legs wrapped around Larry’s face. His reputation continues to suffer.
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