TBBT 6x11: The Santa Simulation

It's Christmas, and as such, Leonard has decided it's time for a Christmas-themed Dungeons & Dragons game. Men only. For some reason, this annoys the ladies, so they put on sexy outfits and head out drinking with Raj, who was killed when a cannon blew his face off.

If the ladies were single, the words 'blew', 'face', and 'off' would also come up in the course of their evening.

With Raj and the ladies gone, the game continues. Santa's been kidnapped by ogres and the guys are on a quest to save Christmas. Sheldon's not terribly enthused because he hates Christmas. However, he comes from a family of devout Christians, so he knows all the Christmas songs and traditions and is thus able to defeat Leonard's array of Christmas-themed traps.

Including using jingle bells to open a drawbridge.

Unfortunately, when they finally reach the ogres' dungeon, Sheldon paralyzes Stuart and Howard before they can save Santa. It seems that when he was five, Sheldon visited Santa at the mall and asked him to bring his grandfather -the only person who encouraged him to study science- back to life. Instead, he got Lincoln logs. Now, he has a deep hatred for jolly old St. Nick. He gives him a good, swift kick in the gut and then leaves him behind to be devoured by ogres.

Later, Santa kills him with a cannon.

Out at the bar, Raj buys the girls champagne, and in return they try to get him laid. When you buy a girl a drink at a bar, usually she's the one who sleeps with you, but I've been away from the bar scene for a while, so perhaps the game has changed.

At any rate, the woman the girls pick for him gives him a fake email address, so a defeated Raj laments his predilection for chasing women who are unavailable to him; as with his crushes on Penny and Bernadette. Amy didn't know about that, and when Raj says he never had the same feelings about her, she gets a little bummed.

Awwwwwwwwwwwwww.

However, Raj is empathetic. When he was a young man, none of the ladies wanted him, either. They exchange stories of their loneliness, which includes a lady version of 'The Stranger'. He tells Amy that she's lovely and wonderful, and that's enough for her, so they go home.

What I Liked
-Raj wants to shoot his magic all over a monster's ass. It may be low-brow, but I'm a big fan of double entendre jokes like that.

I wonder if he wants Stuart to watch.

-Amy wants someone to get some action at the bar. She doesn't care if its her, the other girls, or Raj. That's my kind of lady.
-Howard motorboats the large chest. If you play D&D with a bunch of pervs, I assume something like that happens fairly regularly.
-The key to disabling one of Leonard's traps is to sing Good King Wenceslas, so Sheldon sings all five verses. If you're going to make the solution to a puzzle annoying, you need to be prepared for it to backfire.

What I Hated
-Leonard kills Raj two minutes into the adventure. I'm not a D&D guy, but what little I know about the game leads me to believe that if you're killing off the players before they've even had the chance to roll some dice, then you probably shouldn't be the Dungeon Master.
-Sheldon screws up the words to Good King Wenceslas. They only had Jim Parsons sing one and a half verses. They could've at least given him the correct lyrics.
-The girls give up on getting Raj a lady really easily. He got turned down once and they just bailed. They didn't even stick around until last call to try to pick up a straggler.

Final Thoughts
This episode gave us a bit of insight into why Sheldon is the way he is. He lost his only source of encouragement when he was five years old, and he was betrayed by Santa at the same time. Most people might be able to get over that, but since he has an eidetic memory, Sheldon can never forget that betrayal. Leaving Santa to be eaten by ogres was still a bit harsh, though.

We got a little insight into Amy as well. She just wants to be loved and to have hot, sweaty sex in a bathroom stall. That doesn't seem terribly unreasonable.

I have a bit of a problem with the way the girls were written this week. Women don't have to be crazy, and they don't have to define themselves by their relationships with their husbands/boyfriends. They got dressed all sexily and went out to a bar in order to spite their men for not spending every possible minute with them. At least part of the episode was written by a woman, so maybe she could've spoken up and said something like 'Hey guys, maybe we can make the girls a little less crazy. Maybe.'

Nevertheless, this episode had some fun bits, and Stuart was delightfully melancholy.