Maybe you were looking for closure, or a happy ending. Or maybe you were just hoping to find that gerbil safe and sound. In any case, that’s just not Larry David’s way.

The season finale of Curb Your Enthusiasm recalled the days when a TV show was a TV show, whether it was the first, the 14th or the last ever installment. Networks once upon a time just gave us the show without any pomp. And that’s what Larry gave us last night. Twenty minutes into the half-hour, you couldn’t tell you were watching the last Curb of the season. (Ed. note: The New York Post has reported we could see two or three more seasons.)

Did I mention I miss Cheryl? Larry was missing her too. Leon had some choice advice for him involving facial hair and becoming “another ******”. He got as good as Susie with a certain expletive. The Blacks announced they’re ready to move home, and Larry looked genuinely sad to see them go. Then he looked genuinely perturbed to learn there was a gerbil loose in his house.

Michael McKean had a guest spot as Matt Tessler, an old Seinfeld director who was terrible. Why wasn’t this guy on more? He hits up Larry for a recommendation to direct Richard Lewis’s pilot. Larry can’t stand him because he’s always going on about his special needs son, the one with MS or MD, as Antoinette puts it. She then asks if he still needs an appointment to have his ticklish nether regions examined.

If that was my secretary, discretion would definitely be a topic of discussion during her next performance review.

So Larry takes Matt’s recommendation of the doctor his cousin works for—after promising to talk to Richard Lewis, which he does only half-heartedly—and naturally finds himself arguing with the doctor’s receptionist over the sign-in sheet. I’m with him regarding that bit of privacy invasion.

Sure enough, Larry makes a love connection, even at the gastroenterologist. Now, I’m no expert in what makes a man attractive; if I was, I would be myself. But Larry doesn’t strike me as having what it takes to be a lady’s man, yet he landed dates with Lucy Lawless and now with Paula. I guess being obscenely rich gives a guy an air of confidence women find alluring.

In his second tussle with the doctor’s staff, Larry won’t tell the nurse why he’s there. I get that. Why does she need to know? Can’t the doctor just ask? Is there an efficiency to relaying information via the nurse? Does the delay give the doctor time to hit up WebMD for clues? At any rate, Larry, at his passive-aggressive best lies and says he’s there because of a gerbil. I won’t explain further.

On his date with Paula, Larry spots a handicapped man who bucks the entire ticket line. Of course no one is so crass as to object. But once inside, the guy turns out to be a fraud. Larry’s impressed. Too bad Paula—looking like she had ants in her pants, calling into question her claim of only seeing the gastroenterologist for a check-up—was unimpressed with the movie and takes off.

Back at his office, Larry decides to use the ploy he just witnessed to scare off a potential tenant in his building. I haven’t seen that good an imitation of a person with special needs since fifth grade. Come to think of it, I haven’t seen such an imitation at all since fifth grade. Naturally, Tessler walks in and takes great offense. Seriously, why wasn’t McKean a regular? He vows to spread the gerbil rumor his cousin told him about all over town.

Stuck without a date for Sammy’s Bat Mitzvah, Larry asks Loretta if she’ll join him. That night, she is looking like a fox. (Get it? Vivica Fox? No? Anyway, she looked great.) Given the chance to say a few words at the microphone, Larry decides it’s a good chance to set the record straight about him and the gerbil, particularly with Cheryl and her date there.

Cheryl is unimpressed, Susie and Jeff are furious, Larry is mortified and Tessler has his whole table laughing at Larry. So he asks Loretta to dance.

Cue the dramatic montage of Larry and Loretta’s whirlwind romance, which leads to her hilariously telling off Susie during one of Susie’s classic anti-Larry tirades, and Larry and the Blacks living happily ever after. Apparently his art-imitates-life split with Cheryl reveals little hope on Larry’s part for reconciliation with his real-life wife Laurie.

This ending was barely an acknowledgment that the season has wound down. And yet it was a perfect coda to a life lived cynically and self-centeredly and still uncomfortably like all our own lives in a lot of little ways.

Larry got personal this season in ways he had never done before and showed he is still in top form. It was ironic to hear Tessler say he’d been pigeon-holed in dramedy territory since that’s exactly where Larry took the show this season, to great result.

I don’t have the perspective to say this was his best season yet, since I watched the first five over the course of three months earlier this year. But it sure seems like it was the best to me right now.

I just wish they’d found that gerbil.