TBBT 7x05: The Workplace Proximity

Sheldon and Amy go out on date night, where she tells him that she's joined a research project at Caltech.

At first he's fine with it, but after talking to Howard, he realizes that he doesn't want to spend so much time with her. Reluctantly, she agrees not to hang out with him at work, and he agrees to let her take the job. Not that she needed his permission, but he gave it anyway.

Unfortunately, he also threw Howard under the bus, and now Bernadette's mad at him for saying he wouldn't want to work with her. She tells him to find somewhere else to sleep.

Sheldon introduces himself to Amy's colleagues, which embarrasses her for some reason.

The remaining happy couple he knows tells him he's wrong and that he should apologize.

Bernadette goes to Raj's place to try to patch things up with Howard and get him to come home. But, he wants to stay and finish the new Batman game

Sheldon goes to Amy to apologize, but doesn't do a very good job.

So, Penny tells Leonard to get the guys in line and make them make things right with their ladies. Instead, the guys shoot lasers at balloons. Which I say is a better use of their time.

What I Liked
-Sheldon finally learns that it's all right to poop at a restaurant. It's astonishing how useful that ability is.
-One of the cards in the guys' phony card game is the 'Two-eyed Cyclops' Hee-hee.
-Howard tries to fake a heart attack to get out of a fight with Bernadette. It's an excellent plan. Too bad the wrong arm went numb.

Left, man! Always go left!

-Raj makes an "As you wish" joke after Howard tells him to stop talking about how they ate cookie dough together and watched The Princess Bride. That's a good movie, and I don't care who knows I like it. I don't feel like enough people in the audience got the joke, though.
-One of the baseline images Amy uses to test the monkey's fear response is a crocodile with a mouth full of monkeys. That doesn't seem like good science, but it's funny.

What I Hated
-They have the monkey and Sheldon react the same way to Amy's visual stimuli tests. That's just dumb.

It's also not funny.

Final Thoughts
Amy working at Caltech doesn't really open up as may story opportunities as one might think. When they show the guys at work, mainly they're just eating lunch together, and Amy already eats with the gang on a regular basis. It could create opportunities for at-work nookie, but since Amy and Sheldon don't do that, I really don't know what her new project will add to the show. Of course, it's possible that even though she said she'd be working on there for a while, they may just ignore that and never mention it again. It wouldn't be the first time a sitcom has made a big deal about something, only to completely forget about it in the next episode.

After Leonard didn't set the guys straight at the end of the episode, I assumed that it would be a "very special" two-parter. But, I've seen the next episode, and they don't even mention Sheldon and Howard's relationship troubles again. Which is surprising, considering that Bernadette was so ticked off that she threw Howard out of the apartment for a few days. Things are pretty bad when your lady doesn't want you around.

Which brings up another point: Bernadette really overreacted. I think the writers went a bit too far, and should've just had Howard sleep on the couch for a few days, rather than spending the night at Raj's. As it stands now, Howard's married to a lunatic who might toss him out at a moment's notice. That's not really in keeping with her character, since she's tended to be relatively patient with him over the years. They're just not so good at writing about relationships on this show. Unfortunately, doing episodes about the couples makes it easy to get everyone in the cast some screen time, so I expect a lot more relationship-based episodes in the future.

As for this particular episode, it wasn't bad. It didn't exactly have one plot, but at the same time it wasn't as disjointed as sitcom episodes can get when they have more than one plot. At the same time, it wasn't terribly interesting and didn't do anything new. It was reasonably funny, though; a fine example of the three-camera sitcom, but the genre's been around a long time, and I fear there might not be much new ground to tread.