''George and I are moving to California,'' Jerry says (seeming to lend credence to one early popular rumor about the episode's secret ending). But first he gets to take the NBC private jet anywhere he wants, and the four heroes head to Paris, only to have Kramer do a jig while trying to get water out of his ear, stumble into the cockpit and cause the plane to start descending. ''Is this how it ends? It can't end like this!'' Jerry yells as the plane goes down, only to right itself and land in Latham.

Their perfectly chosen lawyer is a Johnnie Cochran imitator called Jackie Chiles. ''You don't have to help anybody,'' he says. ''That's what this country is all about.''

''They just stood there, did nothing?'' asks the prosecutor. Of course they did nothing. That's what ''Seinfeld'' was famously about. It was also about the kind of clever linguistic tricks on display here. Chiles calls the New York Four ''innocent bystanders'' and argues: ''Have you ever heard of a guilty bystander? Bystanders are by definition innocent.'' The parade of witnesses might not have made much sense to people who had never seen the show, but for fans it was an uproarious parade in which all the pettiness that Jerry, George, Elaine and Kramer had enacted over the years catches up with them: the Soup Nazi, the bubble boy, the woman whose marble rye Jerry stole.

These flashbacks, explaining who the characters are, should have replaced the inflated, half-baked clip show that preceded the finale, a bloated 45-minutes that seemed to have more commercials than clips.

But that show was revealing in its own way. It was a compilation of punch lines without the jokes. Elaine dancing and Kramer dropping a Junior Mint into the open body of a surgery patient were scenes viewers recognized without explanation.