Like his best friend Jerry Seinfeld, George Costanza went through a pretty impressive list of women in his day. One of the most interesting, though, would have to be Celia Morgan, a convict from “The Little Jerry” episode. In it, George visits a women’s prison on behalf of the Susan Ross Foundation, and it’s there he meets Celia, the prison librarian who is serving time for embezzlement.
They hit it off and George asks her out, sort of. While talking to Jerry about it, George makes many compelling points for having a girlfriend who is behind bars and dreams of wonderful conjugal visit sex.
In the same time frame, Elaine begins dating a man named Kurt who prefers to shave his head, but when Elaine wants him to grow out his hair, Kurt discovers that he is going bald. However, he seeks the wisdom of George to get through the upcoming painful months.
George’s plans with Celia are derailed when she is up for parole, but George luckily squashes that by insinuating to the prison that Celia will be up to her old ways once she’s released. That’s no matter, because even though her parole is denied, Celia simply breaks out of prison and goes to George’s apartment, which she somehow knows the address to.
So by the end of the episode, George is out at the cockfight to watch Little Jerry Seinfeld and eat tamales while Celia lays low at the apartment. Kurt comes by to thank George for helping him, when two detectives show up to arrest Celia and George. They end up mistaking Kurt for George because he’s bald and take him in for aiding and abetting a known fugitive. This is all despite Kurt’s very reasoned explanation.
All right, you think, this should get sorted out pretty easily.
It makes sense for Celia to keep her mouth shut about the whole thing, but once they get to the jail, there are probably about a million ways to properly identify Kurt. However, none of that happens, because here is where we find Kurt at the very end of the episode:
Elaine is visiting Kurt in this scene, before breaking off their engagement (since he’ll be fully bald by the time he gets out). We find out that Kurt is actually in jail for punching a cop, but that doesn’t mean the police would just suddenly stop looking for George Costanza. So we have to assume that they must still think Kurt is George, right? And Elaine obviously knows that Kurt has wrongfully gone to prison, but it makes sense that she would protect her friend George in this as well.
So what about Kurt’s lawyer? How bad could he/she possibly be? Why wouldn’t he/she believe Kurt or say anything to the court about why Kurt would resist arrest so vehemently? Even weirder is the fact that, in this final scene of the episode, Kurt mentions that his lawyer tells him he could get out of prison in ten months with good behavior. Kurt’s lawyer seems pretty cognizant of what’s going on, so I’m inclined to believe that he/she knows who Kurt is and knows he is innocent (even though he fought a cop), but simply chooses not to do anything about it. That’s pure evil, and somehow more believable than pure ignorance.
How does any of this happen?! How does Kurt go all the way through the legal system and get a conviction of 10-14 months without anybody figuring out or caring that he isn’t George Costanza? I would have to assume that, at his trial, Kurt made it abundantly clear that the whole thing was a gigantic misunderstanding, and the real criminal was still out there. Maybe no one believed him? Maybe he was so adamant, so crazed about his identity, that police officers and guards just tased him until he stopped.
George, of course, does eventually go to prison for nearly the same amount of time as Kurt does, but still, Kurt’s life is completely ruined (and George still gets to hang out with his friends while in prison). Not only is Kurt freshly bald, but he’s now a wrongly accused, though still convicted, felon as well. Unless they…think…he’s George? If that’s the case, what happened to “Kurt” in the real world? Did he ever even exist? Did no one in Kurt’s family go looking for him or even try to sort the situation out, if they knew what was going on?
This is the most confusing Seinfeld episode ever made.
