The Big Bang Theory - The Roommate Transmogrification

By Todd VanDerWerff 

 It’s always weird to look at a season finale from the Big Bang Theory. The show’s so generally plotless that an episode that builds to some big cliffhanger-here that Raj and Penny have sexual intercourse and everybody’s in the apartment to determine their walk of shame-often feels kind of bizarre. However, there’s a disagreement to be made (as my wife did to me immediately after this episode finished) the season finales of the show are a little more satisfying because season finales often end in a situation from the plot being unfinished, and that’s just the way the show is of course. And, indeed, after a first scene I didn’t like a good deal, this episode won me over rapidly by concentrating on the Sheldon and Raj pairing, which has quietly built into one of the show’s best. 

And also the cliffhanger, while kind of shamelessly attempting to setup a love triangle (since the show seems done with the Howard/Bernadette/Raj thing for now) isn’t a poor one, because these things go.oes the last moment make any sense? Depends on where they go by using it. Like the majority of from the folks on sitcoms, the Big Bang Theory gang spends almost all of its time spending time with each other, instead of anybody else. This means that, like most sitcoms, this show is going to eventually sort out as many different couple permutations as it can develop (particularly when you think about that Sheldon’s from the table for anyone but, theoretically, Amy and Howard and Bernadette won’t be cheating on each other when they got married, at least not with anyone within the group). Which means that Penny and Raj were going to hook up at SOME point, and also the show bit the bullet and also got it out of the way in the most logical possible way: They got really drunk. Sure, Penny says Raj is cute and all, but it’s tough to begin to see the two getting together with no influence of alcohol (and that’s discounting my long-standing antipathy toward the “Raj needs alcohol to talk to women” device).So, obviously, we won’t fully realize how this cliffhanger works until season five. And that’s possibly the manifestation of a good cliffhanger: It makes more story possibilities of computer destroys. Already, we’re going to possess the obligatory episode where Raj is way more into Penny than she is into him, the episode where Leonard gets a little jealous, the episode where Howard is shocked it happened, etc., etc., etc. 

Plus, since Leonard and Priya have, apparently, broken up, what with her moving to India and all sorts of, it creates a rather more balanced love triangle, particularly if Kunal Nayyar and Kaley Cuoco end up having non-drunk chemistry, something Cuoco and Johnny Galecki never had. I can’t say I’m exactly “looking forward” to seeing how this plays out, since it’s all fairly predictable, however i don’t HATE it, just like a large amount of fans appear to (if a cursory scan of Twitter is any suggestion). And that i admire the writers to get the “everybody finds out” scene taken care of immediately. It might happen to be ponderous building to that particular next year, however they ripped the Band-Aid right off.

The rest of the episode was more like guesswork but generally pretty funny. I didn’t really like the outlet scene where everyone made fun of Leonard to be lactose-intolerant, because of its huge number of boring fart jokes (the low-point perhaps being rhyming “rooty tooty” with “booty”), but I kind of saw what the writers were going for all the same: The whole group is really as cohesive as it’s ever been. And when they make fun of each other, it’s not meant to be malicious or mean-spirited, just good, fun joking among friends. So we’re establishing things as they are that'll be torn down through the episode, with Raj having to move out of their own apartment and Priya and Leonard fighting and Howard feeling upset about how he’s not really a doctor and all of his friends are (contributing to Bernadette making them a sort of “kept fiancée) and Raj and Penny sleeping together.The good stuff starts up immediately after with Bernadette’s announcement that she’s not just likely to be getting her PhD, but that the pharmaceutical company is paying her a lot of money in the future work for them. What follows-Howard feels emasculated by her success by her buying him nice things and just generally treating him like the Betty Draper from the relationship (not to mention the fact that all his friends have PhDs, too)-is entirely predictable, but there’s lots of fun to be had with Bernadette being the bread-winner and with this storyline, which I can only presume find yourself with Howard eventually choosing to get his PhD as well. In general, the development of Howard as a character is the most impressive within the show’s run, which feels as though another move to push him toward moving ahead together with his life. 

That's, it feels as though that unless the show decides to have the two split up due to their fight, by which case he’ll probably regress. (Though then your show might have the problem where Raj, Penny, Howard, Bernadette, and Leonard are all single along with a surprising number of those individuals have slept together, while just as many Fall asleep with one another, which would kind of make my head hurt.)But the real fun here comes from Raj relocating with Sheldon. This has quietly become one of the show’s best relationships to experience for laughs, and there’s the same here, what with Raj learning all about Sheldon’s weird rules and Sheldon discovering that Raj takes better proper care of him than Leonard ever did. To a real degree, it’s probably said to be the A-story (I think we spend probably the most time on it), but it never feels as though it dominates the episode. It’s only a nice, quiet way to spend time using the characters and find out the way they connect to one another. And when little else, The Big Bang Theory does that sort of scene well, even when it’s doing anything else wrong. Fortunately, most anything else in this episode went pretty well anyway. When the show could just create episodes like this in perpetuity, I’d certainly forgive them their early season growing pains.



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