"The Scofflaw" (Season 6, Episode 13, originally aired January 26, 1995)
I like to think of these two episodes as the saga of George's toupee. Weirdly, they did not air next to each other — a clip show marking 100 episodes was in between, and I'll sort-of cover that next week — but they are related, in that George gets his new hair at the end of this one, and has it taken from him in the next one. "The Scofflaw" is pretty good: it has an amazing title for one, and Kramer gets some fine physical gags in wearing his eyepatch. It also features a somewhat odd guest star turn from Jon Lovitz as a jerk friend of Jerry's who pretended to have cancer to get free stuff. I'm a huge Lovitz fan but for some reason it felt odd seeing him in the show.
Don't get me wrong, Lovitz is funny, but I feel the show doesn't use his comic gifts well enough, with Gary an essentially flat character until we realize later on that he's a jerk. At that point, his preening is at least somewhat funny. But considering how rare it is to have a guest star on Seinfeld who was actually famous at the time and is not an athlete, Lovitz just isn't handed enough to do. The sight of him in a pompadour is tremendous, however.
A lot of funny stuff happens around Gary, though. Jerry's fury at actually wasting his energy being nice to someone who didn't have a life-threatening disease is amusing to behold. But George keeps him in check because he thinks Gary's going to give him a primo parking space, until the end of the episode, where this plot clumsily bangs into Kramer and Newman's part about the parking scofflaw. That dovetailing is not flawless, but Jerry's glee at finally being able to unload on Gary (with George's say-so) is a decent capper to the episode.
The scofflaw plot, while far more ridiculous, works because it involves Kramer shouting at Newman to be a man, and Newman crying. Plus, anything that ends up with them in front of a skeptical judge (usually the same one) is good stuff. But the idea of the parking cop chasing the scofflaw as his white whale seems recycled from Philip Baker Hall's classic Mr. Bookman character, chasing Tropic of Cancer. How do you create this wacky character of a eyepatch-wearing traffic cop constantly trying to find one specific driver, and then drop him without giving him anything interesting to do?
Instead Kramer, who's looking for new eye-wear to set him apart, adopts the eyepatch, telling Jerry, "I wanna be a pirate." Ho ho ho. Every sitcom would then do the joke that Kramer has poor depth perception. But Michael Richards is the kind of actor who can really carry that joke off, without even really giving you anything past his movements. But it also feels like half a story idea, since the eyepatch thing quickly turns into Kramer confronting Newman the scofflaw.
Elaine, meanwhile, deals with the return of Jake Jarmel (the guy she dumped for the Jujyfruits), whose fashionable glasses set Kramer's plot in motion. I like him guarding the secret of where he got his vintage frames — nice to see such douchey behavior is essentially timeless. But the transition to Elaine's old boss wanting the glasses doesn't really come off, and Jake's fury at seeing the glasses on his face at the end (mostly because Elaine wants to piss him off) doesn't quite work, even in the heightened Seinfeld universe.
The most important thing about this episode is its conclusion — George getting the toupee. Weirdly, it looks better on him in this episode than it does in the next. Maybe because there, it has to fit on someone else's head at the end of the episode.
"The Beard" (Season 6, Episode 16, originally aired February 9, 1995)