Be careful what you wish for, Amy Farrah Fowler. You longed for Sheldon Cooper to be an enthusiastic, attentive boyfriend, a partner who would want to marry you and make a family of little Shamy offspring.
It seems Sheldon and Amy’s recent cohabitation project has reached a nice boiling temperature. Yes, Dr. Sheldon Cooper is finally ready to get his baby daddy on. But while Dr. Amy Farrah Fowler is all about the cohabitation and the coitus, Shamy Jr. isn’t on her to-do list just yet. Of course, that was before Sheldon busted out his sexiest moves …
In an episode that’s more about setting up story lines that could pay off delightfully than moving current plots along — yep, Bernie’s still preggers and Penny and Leonard are still living together in Sheldon and Leonard’s apartment, which is pretty much the extent of those characters’ scenes in the installment — Amy’s lab experiment has left Sheldon with a raging case of baby fever, while Raj may have finally met the woman he’ll make a family with someday.
First up, Shamy’s latest project, which begins with Amy mixing her skin sample with Sheldon’s to synthesize a neural network. Once he gets past the perceived pain of Amy taking a skin sample — on a scale of one to ten, she tells him the pain level will be a two, or what he equates with eating a whole Altoid — the resulting primitive network and its off-the-charts response to various stimuli has Sheldon acting like a proud papa.
He even tries to compare the co-mingled cells to Bernadette’s bun in the oven, countering her point that the fetus has a fully functioning immune system with “We didn’t need to have sex with Howard for ours, so we win.â€
As the Shamy cells react to stimuli in increasingly impressive ways, Sheldon wants to lock Amy’s lab door, “pull down our underpants a little, and make a baby.†Amy, not so much. She isn’t ready to get pregnant just yet — though Sheldon rather creepily assures her that she can in the next 36 hours, as he’s been tracking her cycles. When that sweet talk doesn’t work, he resorts to flashing his butt after “accidentally†dropping a pen on the floor and bending over to pick it up. Still resisting his seductive ways, Amy arrives home that day to find a line of rose petals leading up to the apartment door. Inside, Sheldon’s got his hair slicked back, smooth jazz filling the room, and an untied bow tie slung around his neck. Add in a pair of too-short plaid dress pants, and the effect is what Amy will later describe to Penny and Leonard as “Rat Pack Pee-wee Herman.â€
Sheldon has one more move up his sleeve: a seductive flamenco dance, which he springs on Amy and performs rather gracefully. Nevertheless, it sends her running from the apartment, apparently unmoved by his sexy dance and undeterred in her decision about baby-makin’. Apparently.
An episode-ending shot finds Amy out in the hallway, all hot and bothered, fanning her face and muttering to herself, “That was a close one.†Never thought we’d see a Shamy pregnancy before a Shamy wedding — what would Bible-totin’ Mama Cooper say? — but Sheldon just might make it so.
And then there’s Raj, finally at the center of an episode, and it’s one that doesn’t involve him breaking up with someone or being the dumpee. Instead, he meets the building’s cleaning woman, Isabella, and they click immediately. He asks her out to dinner after offering to help her clean toilets in the building just to spend time with her. The single mom tells him she doesn’t have time to date because she has two jobs, so he surprises her with a microwaved dinner he has set up in the telescope room, complete with table setting and two office chairs.
There’s clearly chemistry between them, and Isabella is about to tell Raj she has some free time over the weekend when Howard walks into the room. Raj had told his friends he’d met someone named Isabella … who was a fellow scientist. When Howard meets her and assumes she’s an astronomer, she realizes Raj lied about her job because he’s embarrassed by her work.
Sitcom cliché would demand this budding relationship come to a quick end, but Raj chases an angry Isabella down the hall, admits he did have a problem with her job, and then apologizes for it. He tells her she’s going to be embarrassed about plenty of things he does, like letting his dog eat out of his mouth. (Not because Cinnamon likes it, but because he does.)
Isabella, eschewing some sitcom clichés of her own, doesn’t allow herself to feel embarrassed about her blue-collar work. She agrees to give Raj a second chance, making a joke in the process that shows her sense of humor and that she noted an earlier assumption he made about where she’s from. (He assumed Mexico; she’s actually from Cuba.) In ten seasons of TBBT, Isabella already might be the best of Raj’s potential mates.
THEOR-EMS:
- The rest of Sheldon’s pain scale: One is a pebble in your shoe, ten is “the monkey you thought was your pet biting your face off.â€
- Sheldon compares the new brain cells he and Amy created with hatching Sea Monkeys from his childhood. Except these are “Me Monkeys,†as he calls them. Amy points out they’re a combination of both of them. “We Monkeys,†Sheldon renames them.
- Howard, Penny, and Leonard guess Raj has a new love interest when he orders broccoli for dinner, because the only time he eats healthily, according to Penny, is when there’s a possibility he might have to take his shirt off.
- Bernadette: “I can’t believe you can turn ordinary skin cells into functioning brain cells.â€
Amy: “Well, I turned this one into a functioning boyfriend, so, sky’s the limit.†- Chuck Lorre’s vanity card reveals his pithy reaction to this week’s election: “Uh-oh.â€