The Big Bang Theory: The Pancake Batter Anomaly
By fred | April 1, 2008
(S01E11) Not every shows might have come back yet, but a few of them have. Many of those are on CBS, and that include the entire Monday comedy night ! And that’s really a great thing, not just because it’s good to have any show back, but also because lately the new sitcoms we’ve had to deal with, well, they weren’t really funny.
Whether it was The Return Of Jezebel James, a complete failure I’m sorry to say, Welcome To The Captain, an insult to any other sitcom out there, or even lately Unhitched, which had its moments but wasn’t really that good, the new sitcoms have pretty much all failed to make us really laugh. And while we’re still waiting for the NBC comedies to return, at least on CBS they’re here already, and they’re still funny.
And yes, The Big Bang Theory is definitely one of them funny comedies that I do watch, and every Monday I have a good time watching this show. It’s not the kind of shows you might think you’ll like, but if you give it a real chance it will surprise you, it will make you laugh, especially Sheldon, and in the end that’s all that matters when it comes to sitcoms, isn’t it ? (Well, or that’s a very important thing, at least.)
Now that this has been said, I have to admit that I found this episode not to be as good as others have been in the past, because part of it wasn’t really that good.
Things started well, with an hilarious 3D chess game opposing Sheldon and Leonard and, of course, having Leonard loosing on many levels. Sheldon was his true self, hilarious as usual, as illustrated when he corrected Penny after she said her joke was only funny on Nebraska : “From the data at hand, you really can’t draw that conclusion. All you can say with absolute certainty is that that joke is not funny here !”
Then came what this episode was really going to be about : Sheldon being afraid of germs, and eventually getting sick of course. And at first and while it only dealt with Sheldon being the arrogant that he is, it was fine. When Leonard ran out after he heard that Sheldon was getting sick, that was still good. The scene at Howard’s place and the boys eventually lying to everyone and hiding being monkey masks to go to the movies, all of that was really funny.
I especially loved how Penny got to outsmart Sheldon for once : “Penny, I have a IQ of 187, don’t you imagine that if there were a way for me to have had soup at home, I would have thought of it ?
- You can have soup delivered.
- *silence* I did not think of that !”
But this is when things started to get not so funny anymore, when Sheldon wasn’t just his usual self but turned into a crying baby, basically. When he acted like a child, his behavior turned to become pretty annoying, and, well, not so funny. Adding to that the whole a-bit-too-much-geeky plan of having Leonard trying to sneak in his own apartment to get his glasses, and how that whole plot was highly predictable all the way till the end of the episode, and sadly about the last third of this episode was not so good, and not really funny.
I’ve said it many many times, Sheldon is the force of this show and what makes everything funny, that’s a given. But he’s got to be his true self, he can’t be put down by a little flew to act as an annoying child, the kind he would scorn and mock if he was better, because then we do miss him, and we are not laughing anymore.
Still, most of the episode was actually pretty funny, we just have to ignore how it ended or that last impression will not leave a good impression on us, and that would be unfair, since for the most part it worked just as good as always.
Posted in Reviews
Shows: The Big Bang Theory
