"You're not your father. You're me."

And because I’m not a big bad Fox subscriber, it looks like I’m crashing Winston’s birthday instead of Elaine’s wedding. Though we do get a decent preview of her lovely…ah…adornments.

Morning-after-Nick (see, getting better with the name thing) tries his hardest to impress Jess right off the bat—until her father shows up on their doorstep. Today of all days, no less. For Elaine’s wedding, no less.
On Winston’s birthday, no less.

While Jess spends the morning scrambling for her friends and co-workers, Nick and her father find themselves bonding into the afternoon; and panicking when he finally reveals he slept with Jess. While the father’s reaction wasn’t what I’d assumed it’d be (I thought he’d be the cricket and/or baseball bat wielder), his actual opinion bruised worse than a club to the head: that Nick was just like him, and that he wasn’t good enough for his own daughter.
Sobs.

But a family crisis calms down a middle school class of rowdy, law-abusing adolescents wonderfully. I wonder what Miguel’s car looks like.

Elaine, driven up the wall by her family’s enthusiasm, barely makes it through the first get-together before finding the end of her fuse. Taking Jess’ advice and napping post-Henna tattoo, she wakes to find the tattoo beautifully adorning her fingers, palms, and wrists…and face.
Winston notices first, running errands on his hitherto-forgotten birthday, and we leave the episode with little more reassurance than a doting fiancé can offer. At least we know in the finale preview she gets the ink off somehow. It isn’t with olive oil.

And Schmidt and Elizabeth repair their college relationship in the nick of time (zing) to share with roof with his roommate, Jess, and, ultimately, Winston. I’m glad they pretended to remember Winston’s birthday in the end, poor guy.
Then again, he got to buy a whole sheet cake to eat himself. I’ve never had the guts.

"The Little Cups"

I love a good, deep episode every once in awhile. They bring up character points you didn’t even know you needed, letting actors exercise with that much more legroom.
Yes, even in the context of Howard Wolowitz. I really did just say he needed the legroom.

During Howard and Bernadette’s dinner party, they send Sheldon into the back closet to organize, where he finds an unopened (well…previously unopened) letter from Howard’s father. The patriarch left Howard and his mother when Howard was a boy, as we’d gathered from many a front-porch screaming match. Howard, angry for the incident and unforgiving to this day, refused to open the note when he received it on his eighteenth birthday. Even after wheedling, Howard declines to learn of its contents and, later that evening, burns it.

But Bernadette couldn’t rest not knowing—how better to help her husband? She, Penny, and Amy corner Sheldon for the info, followed suit by Raj and Leonard, the latter duo planning a second (better) dinner party. Were the others on their reasoning game, or was Sheldon remarkably off it?
And was Sheldon really content with keeping a secret like that? I sense character development from the twitchy days of aliases on bar napkins.

During Leonard’s gathering, Howard discovers Sheldon’s betrayal and leaves, enraged. The friends—and they really do look like friends, in this scene--follow him back to his apartment then, with what Leonard deems is a “cool solution”: they each give an account of what was in the letter, one of which is true. Howard needn’t ask which—from hearing them all, he hears the truth sometime.

Spoiler alert: With the exception of Sheldon’s story, a tale similar to the Goonies plot, they’re all really sad.

I didn’t waste time being frustrated that we, as the audience, never learned the letter’s true stipulations ourselves; I think that’s a fitting point. It puts us in Howard’s shoes, the receiver’s shoes, makes us more empathetic and emotional. Way to go CBS.

Though I personally wouldn’t have picked heeled-boot shoes for the occasion.