TBBT 6x22: The Proton Resurgence

Sheldon has discovered that Professor Proton (a Mr. Wizard or Bill Nye the Science Guy type) is both still alive and available for parties, so he hires him to come by the apartment and do his show. He's so excited the night before that he can't sleep and Leonard has to smack him to get him to shut up, and when the Professor's a few minutes late, he stares worriedly through the peephole on his door.

If I were a better physicist, I could make a joke about proton observation.

The mystery of the professor's whereabouts is solved rather quickly when Sheldon gets a phone call from him. He's an old man and the building doesn't have a functioning elevator, so he's been climbing the stairs for half an hour and is stuck on the third floor. Sheldon, Penny, and Leonard race down the stairs to help him, and the audience discovers that Prof. Proton is none other than TV's Bob Newhart.

Bob Newhart, everyone!

The professor is a little frightened by Sheldon's enthusiasm, but Penny's a pretty girl and he's very happy to see her. The three of them help him upstairs, but he was expecting to do a performance for a bunch of kids and he's a little confused as to what's going on. Instead of getting straight into it, Leonard gets Proton to tell them a little bit about his life. Unfortunately, after his show was cancelled, no other scientists would take him seriously and he was forced to do crappy children's parties to make a living. It's all a bit depressing. Then Sheldon busts out a copy of Prof. Proton's puppet sidekick, Gino the Neutrino.

Then it's really depressing.

Prof. Proton does his show for an overly-enthusiastic Sheldon, an intrigued Leonard and a vaguely-confused Penny, but partway through he gets so depressed that he has to stop. He just doesn't want to be Prof. Proton anymore. But Sheldon explains how important the show was to him when he was a budding scientist with no friends. Millions of young science students were inspired by the show and important discoveries are made every day because of Prof. Proton and his potato-powered clocks.

The professor is gratified by all the admiration the guys heap on him, but then he has trouble with his pacemaker and has to go to the hospital. Sheldon rides along in the ambulance and sings Soft Kitty to him in his bed. Since he's not feeling up to it, Prof. Proton asks Sheldon to take over for him at a birthday party the next day. Sheldon readily agrees, and asks if he should call himself Prof. Proton Jr. The professor agrees, and Sheldon thinks that makes him his son, so he gives his new father a big hug.

D'awwwwwww.

Meanwhile, Raj needs to spend the weekend in the lab, so he gets Howard and Bernadette to look after his dog. Howard's a bit snippy about it at first, which is kind of a dick move since he and Bernadette gave Raj the dog in the first place, but ultimately he agrees to dogsit. Cinnamon is Raj's baby and the conditions for watching her are quite stringent, but the Rostenkowski-Wolowitz coupling takes her to the park and they all have a good time... until they get home and find that Cinnamon has gone missing!

Dun dun dunnnnnnnnnnn!

They drive down the street near the park, screaming Cinnamon's name out the car windows (in their own voices and in passable imitations of Raj), but they come up empty-handed. While they go home to print up a poster to plaster around the neighbourhood, Raj gets a call in the lab from someone who found his dog. He goes to pick her up, then Skypes Howard and Bernadette. At first, Howard lies and says Bernie and Cinnamon are out for a walk, but that quickly falls apart and Raj calls him a lying liar from Liarsville.

J'accuse!

Raj is kinda pissed, but when he tells them he's had Cinnamon for hours, Bernadette lays a major guilt trip on him for making them worry. She's gonna be a great mom.

What I Liked
-Leonard using the word "cool" is like when kids say pusketti. In a way, super-nerds are very much like children.
-Sheldon got Prof. Proton to come to his apartment by using his noggin... and by writing him a big cheque. There are few problems in the world that cannot be overcome through liberal use of big fat cheques.
-Legitimate scientists give Prof. Proton crap for doing a kids' show. That might not be quite true to life, but it's kinda funny. Bill Nye gets ribbed for not having a PhD, but I'm not sure if he gets crap for being The Science Guy, too.
-When Prof. Proton starts having a problem with his pacemaker, Penny wonders if they can plug it into the potato. The audience loves a stupid idiot.

What I Hated
-Howard thinks it's sexy when Bernadette imitates Raj. That's a level of creepy that this show didn't need to stoop to.

Final Thoughts
Bob Newhart's delivery isn't necessarily as swift as it used to be, but he still has really good comic timing. I'd be really surprised if Sheldon's speech to Prof. Proton about how important the show was in shaping his life wasn't at least partly based on how the writers felt about Bob Newhart as his influence on them. Although I'm not sure if he ever had a puppet sidekick.

The Prof. Proton plot was funny and sort of sweet, but the other plot wasn't nearly as good. As a metaphor for parenthood, the dogsitting plot has been done many times before, and the result is always the same. I think the writers probably pulled it out of their random plot sack after Newhart finally agreed to be on the show. But one pretty good plot is better than nothing.