Chaos Theory

Chaos theory: the edition of a dining room table could cause a cataclysmic end to life as we know it. Learning science every day on the Big Bang Theory. In other news, IKEA is a thing.

I wonder how slow the writer’s room was that they thought, say, let’s finally get Leonard and Sheldon a dining room table! Somehow the notion strikes Leonard’s fancy (or was Penny manipulating him?) and he refuses to budge on the matter, despite Sheldon’s protests. Nothing short of taking up the extra space makes Leonard cease and desist and—when he does purchase the table and coordinating table settings, Sheldon’s forced to face the music and realize change doesn’t always spell chaos. It didn’t with his Spot, and it didn’t with Amy…no matter what Amy tells him. Get it, girl.

While Raj and Howard share a magic wand TV remote, Howard gets a call from NASA inviting him back into space to fix the equipment he installed on his previous venture. He accepted the offer immediately…unfortunately. He failed to remember how he lamented the previous months of work, unlike Raj and Bernadette who remembered only too clearly. (And he really SHOULD know better than that—he did tie the knot before he left!) Their own persuasion unsuccessful, they host a brief intervention to knock him off the idea. As it turns out, the most convincing element to keep his roots planted right here happened to be Survival Training. Still, the thought doesn’t make his blood-pressure skyrocket quite like a phone call home to Mom.

Next week, Sheldon and Howard strive for faster friendships. Now that I finally remembered to wait for the previews, I really wish I knew where they were going.

“This is so much better than watching TV like a muggle!”

--Every Big Bang Theory TV commercial

--Not really, it’s Raj

The Highest Of Fibs

As we learned while Ted and the Mother celebrate an evening of her future successes, Ted made a vow on the morning of Robin’s wedding, where Barney is suffering the mother of all hangovers. Pun intended.

He pledged—as the rest pledged—not to get as drunk as Barney for the remainder of his life.

Barney preceded the morning of the wedding with the drunken stupor that spanned the previous two episodes before the Winter Olympics hiatus. Now, leaving his friends with only the most cryptic memories of his family Hangover Elixir (circa 1941), the gang resorts to multiple tactics to wake him up without resorting to a Weekend at Barney’s photo shoot—however much it may be his dream.

I mean, the elixir was clearly a placebo, but I felt up to waiting out the rest of the episode and seeing why.

And it certainly paid off watching how each HIMYM member (but Ted, that we know of, to his credit) broke their vow at some point in the late future. Eighteen-year-old Marvin earned an actor! Robin and Barney almost earned a kid, thank you VERY much writers for rubbing salt into that wound.

But in the present day, they couldn’t even recreate the famed elixir to fix Barney’s stupor. Yes, the placebo was exactly that, but Barney invented it for the best of reasons: to help his place-bro’s when they were at their worst. When Ted drank away memories of being left at the altar. When Marshall thought he failed the Bar. When Robin and Lily did…something.

As cute as Ted’s young brood looked at the episode’s end, it didn’t make up for the second episode teaser: the Weekend at Barney’s. There was no such weekend. Barney bought the fib (an elixir in and of itself), but the photos were inevitably cancelled.

Where Wine Comes From

I thought the closest they could get to another Sheldon was Amy.
I was wrong.

To recap, in order to get her Bed and Breakfast Valentines Day retreat (it does fall on a Friday this year), Amy organized the trip there by 1915yadayadavintagel-Locomotive! I know what I’m talking about.
Valentine’s dinner would be served there, with all the fixings. And Bernadette and Howard along for the ride.

Amy, however, never suspects that Sheldon would meet a second train enthusiast. Hyper-enthusiast. Can recreate specific trains of specific kinds with their mouth-iast.

And no, before you hypothetically ask, I don’t think Sheldon was completely right in his respect defense. Enjoying oneself just because they used the terminology (Mr. Literal) doesn’t give one free reign to completely ignore their own joys and feelings. But I have to hand it to the man—he knows how to make an argument sound convincing. No matter how the network spun the scene.
Did they ever spin that scene.

Although, perhaps, Sheldon might have learned his lesson after all. We can rest assured Amy joined him the remainder of the train dinner…sans strange third rail.

On the other side of the county, we discover Penny never read the childhood classic, If you give a dog a chocolate. Oh, sorry. That’s not how that goes? Explains Penny’s confusion a little more, then, when she and Leonard have to take Raj’s dog Cinnamon to the vet’s late Valentine’s night. Ironically enough, the one renting out the telescope got the sweeter end of the deal. I definitely think something’s up with that (passably normal?) veterinarian. And who self-described should have been a dentist.

All right, I’ll let you all off your hooks. Go watch the Olympics, you crazy cats. Happy (early) Valentine’s Day!

Don't You Forget About Me

80’s montages kill me.

After the drunken night following the last episode, Barney finds his way down the highway, accosts two losers—I mean, young men—and finds a strip club sooner than it takes Ted and Robin to find him again. He takes them on one last go-round the night before his wedding, ensuring protégé might exist in his place.

But I wanted to be that bro in training.

Also, it says so much when you realize he passed on the Playbook in sticky-note form. He had it memorized—although, perhaps, that in and of itself isn’t such a surprise. The most important takeaway? "It's not legendary unless your friends are there to see it."

While Ted and Robin trail the beach to find him (far, far off their mark), we finally witness Ted’s failed journey to find Robin’s locket. In essence, he must relive his three most influential girlfriends on the locket’s trail, only to watch it chucked off a bridge by the crazy Jeanette in the same manner he lost his childhood balloon.

I’m still not clear on WHEN he had the time to fly to Los Angeles and back from the east coast. Perhaps I’m missing something. All the same, he learns to let go of Robin, finally, on the morning of the big day. And in grand John Hughes style, no less.

We never learn who was in the car with Lily. But, we see Lily and Marshall break up, though not before choice warnings on Ghost Lily’s part: marriage isn’t a competition. And if you make it one, the only one that will lose, is you. Don’t make your spouse the opposite team; make them a team player.

Analogies aside, even Marshall and Lily bury their seven-year hatchet on the ceremony’s dawn. Now it’s a countdown to see just how long they can stave off the season—and series—finale.

Aye Aye Aye

I wondered how long it’d take for The Big Bang Theory to address con culture directly. They’ve yet to attend an all-in-out con, but that might be more a finale piece.

For now, we just get…oh, I don’t know…how about James Earl Jones?

When the boys try and fail to score the notoriously popular Comic Con tickets, Sheldon immediately decides upon the next simple and feasible course of action: building his own con from the ground up. Therein lies the irony: Leonard, Howard, and Raj mock Sheldon’s own efforts while they play into a con of their own, finding and purchasing tickets from a scalper. A risk indeed, but the best heroes always take risks.

Perplexed by their excitement and subsequent disappointment—although, at least, she understood why they were upset when the tickets ran dry—Penny, Bernadette, and Amy decided to counter the Comic Con enthusiasm of their respective partners by doing something “adult” and “sophisticated.” When the afternoon tea they expected actually catered to a younger target audience, Penny asks the hard-hitting questions every twentysomething asks: am I an adult yet? What makes a person an adult? Myself a twentysomething, I vouch in Penny’s stead that we all have our moments of feeling particularly adult…or not. I got my own groceries, yeah! I spent five hours playing Flappy Bird, no!

The women of the show question their own ascent from childhood and the remaining Con-less gentlemen hide from a sketchy Scalper. This is just about where the plot of the whole episode stops.

Why? Because Sheldon found James Earl Jones for his would-be convention.

While it was cool of the network to list Mr. Jones for the episode—and cooler still he played, well, a cool guy (at first)—it certainly detracted the spotlight from the rest of any kind of plot. But Blogger! It’s James Earl Jones. He can be a plot in and of himself, right?

Some may enthusiastically agree. Some may be chanting “filler” in the back of their heads as I type. What do you think? Trot it out while we wait for next week’s Valentine’s Day-themed installment. All aboard!