'The Big Bang Theory' Recap: Sometimes You're Jabba the Hutt's Head, Sometimes You're His Butt
Warning: This recap contains storyline and character spoilers for “The Communication Deterioration” episode of The Big Bang Theory.
Here’s the good, the meh, and the even-Sheldon-couldn’t-make-that-work of Season 8’s 21st episode:
The Good
For this episode, at least, Penny is the most mature member of the group… we know! Who saw that coming?!
But with Kevin Smith’s suggestion that she audition for his Clerks III fresh in her mind, Penny thinks she has a dilemma: Should she take another shot at her acting career, or should she put it aside once and for all and focus on her very successful pharmaceutical sales gig?
Sheldon, after much goading and a bit of trickery by Penny, points out to her that she doesn’t have to choose, at least yet. She should go on the audition, he says, and only if she is offered a part will she have to decide between the two jobs.
Penny goes to the audition, and just as she’s about to walk into the office, tells herself she doesn’t remember why she was so nervous about the tryout… and then she opens the door to see a room full of women who look a lot like her and who, obviously, all desperately want a part in the movie.
After catching up with Chelsea, an actress frienemy she hasn’t seen in awhile — frienemy because Penny reveals to another wannabe that she’s the one who started an unflattering rumor about Chelsea — Penny begins to wonder why, exactly, she was even considering going back to a career that made her feel “the anxiety, the depression, the negativity.”
“I don’t want to feel those things,” she later tells Bernadette and Amy after deciding she’s happy with her new career (and making the decision without any input from Leonard). “I want to sell drugs to people who feel those things.”
The Meh
Raj has been selected as one of the scientists to submit a design for the delivery system of a message, and the message itself, should we ever come into contact with aliens. Raj excitedly asks his friends if they want to collaborate with him on the project, but when Sheldon and Howard immediately take over and try to impose their ideas on him, Raj decides Leonard is the only one gentlemanly enough to truly act as a teammate.
Flash forward: Raj and Leonard in Raj’s apartment, trying to start the project, but unable to even get started without the leadership (or know-it-all-ness, potato/potatoe) of Sheldon and Howard to get them going. And when Raj and Leonard finally push themselves to get started, they take a very circuitous path to a solution… the very solution Sheldon and Howard had recommended earlier.
In the episode postscript, we learn Sheldon ends up taking over the project from there and making himself the liaison for communicating with the aliens, whose reaction to seeing him in a video is to decide to make a snack out of him.
The Even-Sheldon-Couldn’t-Make-That-Work
Sheldon has good intentions when he decides to Weird Al a bunch of songs to make their lyrics promote scientific learning to children. Good intentions, check, but songwriting ability, no.
“There was a scientist who had a theory, and James Clerk Maxwell was his name-o” is his version of “Bingo Was His Name-O,” and the other tunes, including his takes on “Itsy Bitsy Spider” and “Eye of the Tiger,” only get worse from there.
We will give Sheldon minor points for his suggestion that Beyonce might get behind his musical efforts to promote science, as well as his attempt at “Eye of the Tiger,” because, even though the Rocky III soundtrack song is 33 years old, it’s still a more current non-sci-fi pop culture reference than we might expect from Mr. Cooper.
Big Bang Bits:
* Sometimes you’re Jabba the Hutt’s head, sometimes you’re Jabba the Hutt’s “giant slug butt”; at least, that – we learn – is what happened when Sheldon and Leonard teamed up to dress like the Tatooine baddie for Comic-Con (and you need only one guess to determine which one went dressed as Jabba’s tuchus).
* Leonard: “When I encountered alien life, I discovered that the key thing was not to sit in its spot.”
Sheldon: “You can’t breath our air without an inhaler, he [Howard] is allergic to earth nuts, but I’m the alien.”
* A “theoretical nut conflict”: What will result, according to Sheldon, if Leonard puts almond milk on his Grape-Nuts.
* Penny uses Sheldon’s trademark triple door knock when she visits the guys’ apartment to ask Sheldon for advice, and Sheldon warns her, it can become addictive. “I kinda wanna do it again,” she agrees.
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* There was far too little screen time for Amy Farrah Fowler in “The Communication Deterioration”… she was in just one brief scene.
* Howard’s latest project: making molecular cocktails, i.e. a cosmopolitan in the form a little red ball, which, to drink, he advises Bernadette, “You just put it in your mouth and pop it like a zit.”
“I think I’ll have a beer,” she decides.
* There are just three episodes remaining in Season 8, with the season finale set to air on May 7.
The Big Bang Theory airs Thursdays at 8 p.m. on CBS.
