"The Parking Garage"
Like last season's "The Chinese Restaurant," "The Parking Garage" is a titanic achievement, mostly for just how effortless it makes everything look. The intricacy of the plot and the way it dovetails, combined with how palpably involved you become in everyone's little personal drama (Jerry needs to pee, Elaine is worried about her fish, George needs to pick up his parents) as the gang wanders a mall parking garage for hours looking for their car … it's all so simple, you forget just how complicated it must have been to put it all together.
"The Parking Garage" is a step up on "The Chinese Restaurant" in several ways: it expands the setting, while keeping it claustrophobic, so it can play around more with how it stalls the characters; it also includes Kramer and thus really manages to include a nice balance of everyone's mode of humor and really invest the audience in how these four function (and dysfunction) as a unit. I would argue that "The Chinese Restaurant" is probably still the greater achievement in that it does as much with even less, plus the sheer shock value of it being the first time Seinfeld had gone for such an ambitiously "meaningless" episode, but that doesn't diminish from "The Parking Garage" being one of the show's all-time classics.
Written by Larry David (obviously), "The Parking Garage" contains some nice snapshots of his curmudgeonly worldview from the angles of different characters. One of the first lines in the episode is Jerry grumbling, "Why do I always have the feeling that everybody's doing something better than me on Saturday afternoons? [People are] out on some big picnic. They're cooking burgers. They're making out on blankets. They're not at some mall in Jersey watching their friends trying to find the world's cheapest air-conditioner." David's someone who's both frustrated by and obsessed with the mundane, and "The Parking Garage" is like a nightmare, where these characters are trapped in the mall garage in Jersey, the most mundane thing you can imagine. I might be getting a little too intense here, but something about those mirrored shots of the endless garage speaks to me.
So Jerry is angry just to be at the garage at all. He doesn't do much for a while before peeing in a corner, at the urging of Kramer, and getting hauled off to parking jail for his trouble. Jerry's scenes, where he tries to argue his way out of the security guard's office, are probably the weakest in the episode, but they're pretty funny, especially his assertion that he has a public urination pass, but his brother stole it. "He and his friends are probably peeing all over the place!" His only other major contribution to the episode is to remark, "boy, those Scientologists. They can be pretty sensitive" after George pisses off the pretty girl with a joke about L. Ron Hubbard, amusing mostly because of the knowledge that Seinfeld himself took some Scientology classes in the 80s. It's so very odd that that's true, but he acknowledges it, as if he's admitting that he dabbled in coke the same time that everyone else was.
George is frustrated because he has to pick up his parents in an hour to take them to a show (his parents are looming ever-larger as off-screen characters, with more hints that they're largely responsible for George's neuroses). What he's really frustrated at, of course, is how everything is going against him. He chides a woman for hitting her kid, and the kid tells him he's ugly. The sight of a Mercedes parked illegally fills him with such rage that he wants to spit on it, but once the driver of the car emerges, he's of course powerless. No wonder he doesn't carry a pen because "I'm afraid I'll puncture my scrotum." It'd probably happen. My favorite moment in the episode is his existential conversation with Kramer, considering that these two characters probably have the most diametrically opposite outlooks on the show.
"What's the difference, we'll all be dead eventually" he moans after Elaine vanishes. Kramer says such thoughts don't bother him, and to George, this is more infuriating than the looming specter of oblivion itself. It's one thing for bad things to be happening to George, of course. But for others to be happy, unburdened, that's really where the anger kicks in for him, I think. "I once saw this thing on T.V. with people who are terminally ill. And they all believed the secret of life is just to live every moment," Kramer says. "Yeah, yeah. I've heard that. Meanwhile I'm here with you in a parking garage, what am I supposed to do?"
Elaine, carrying her slowly dying goldfish, is affronted by the rejections of everyone in the garage she asks to drive her around. David, of course, has no faith in humanity to do anything but reject Elaine's pleas for help, but what's really an affront is that they reject the cute goldfish. "I can see not caring what happens to us, we're human. But what about the fish? The fish?" she cries. Most sitcoms would have spared the goldfish, for the same reason of sentimentality, I feel. Not Seinfeld. Their death (and George missing his deadline) happens off-screen, after they find the car but Kramer has walked off, having deposited his air conditioner and forgotten where it is. Kramer's cheerily oblivious arrival, after all the fight has drained out of the rest of the gang, is strangely cathartic. "What time does that play start?" "About eight o clock." "That might be a problem."
And the coda, of course, is one of those serendipitous filming accidents that pays off so amazingly: the car fails to start, and the gang, we can imagine, is trapped forever. You can see Jason Alexander break into laughter in the final seconds, and who can blame him. It's so, so funny. This gets an A only because me giving "The Chinese Restaurant" an A+ caused such a stir that I'm afraid to do it again. But "The Parking Garage" is really one of the best episodes of Seinfeld, ever.