Monday, November 19, 2012

TBBT 6x08: The 43 Peculiarity

Click the image to get the episode.

Two plots this week. In the first, Sheldon disappears for 20 minutes every day at 2:45, and Raj and Howard try to figure out why. They start by asking Alex (who I thought was just a one-time character) where he goes, but all she knows is that her pants are too loud and she has to go get some quieter ones.

Corduroy is the loudest fabric not found on Don Cherry's jackets.

They track him to an old storage room in the basement, but they can't tell hear him doing anything, so they come back in the middle of the night to break in. Inside, they find nothing but a blackboard with the number 43 on it. They spend the next day trying to figure out what that could mean, but they can't come up with anything. So, Howard steals the spare camera for the Mars Rover and hides it so they can see what Sheldon gets up to. But, he finds it and switches the feed to a video of him sticking his head into a wormhole and getting his face eaten by an alien.

Get this man a crowbar.

Then he shows up and yells at him for invading his privacy. They don't need to know, don't deserve to know, and will never know what he's doing down there. But we will.

He's actually not bad at it.

In the second plot, Leonard and Penny are having some relationship issues because she's doing a report for school with a British guy, and Leonard is jealous of his sexy accent. Because he's a creepy weirdo, Leonard follows the guy out of the building and warns him that Penny's boyfriend is a big dude in a gang called 'The Scientists'. Penny catches him, and she's not happy.

I'll bet Johnny Galecki's seen that face before.

At work the next day, he bumps into Alex and asks her for some girl advice. She sees an opening and starts hitting on him, but he's completely oblivious. When he gets home, he bumps into Penny on her way to work. She's ticked off that he embarrassed her in front of her friend, who knew who he was because his picture's on her fridge. While she's admonishing him for his behaviour, she tells him he shouldn't be jealous because he knows she loves him... which is the first time she's ever told him that.

She didn't mean to say that.

They both pretend it's not a big deal so they won't start crying. Then Leonard goes into his apartment where he gets a text from Alex telling him that she's always available if he wants to talk. Dude's knee-deep in ladies.

What I Liked
-Sheldon's "chicken pecking for corn" head motion. You can slip a lot of perverted jokes past the censors, apparently.
-Howard tests the storage room for booby traps by shoving Raj in first. That's the best way to do it.
-Raj thinks 43 is the number from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, but Howard tells him it's 42. I actually had to do that once, too.

What I Hated
-Raj and Howard listen at the storage room door, but they don't hear anything. Unless the university decided they needed soundproof storage rooms, they should've heard Sheldon hacking his sack.
-Howard's belt buckle. I get that they're supposed to be super-nerds, but even the biggest Pac-fan wouldn't wear that thing.

Eugh.

Final Thoughts
I really didn't think Alex was going to show up again. Because of the way he treats her, there really isn't much comedy gold to mine out of the Sheldon-Alex relationship. It looks like they might try to get something out of her interactions with Leonard and Raj, though.

No Amy, Bernadette, or Stuart this week. It allowed the show to be a lot more focused, but they still went with two plots that were totally unrelated. It's strange, they've done episodes where all eight characters fit into a single story, but then they cut three of them out of the show entirely and they can't seem to work them into related plots.

That sort of thing doesn't really seem to matter to me, though, because this episode hit 34 on the still unbuilt Laugh-o-meter. That's fairly impressive. Although, upon further viewings, I have no idea why I thought it was so funny the first time. But, I only judge how funny something is one time because a joke is rarely as funny the second time around. I got what I wanted out of it the first time, and that's all that matters.

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