Sheldon and Penny Bring the Laughs in Big Bang Theory's Second Season

One of the things I love about January is the tradition my family has established of having TV on DVD marathons while my brother is still home from college. We kicked things off this year with season two of The Big Bang Theory, which I got him for Christmas. No sooner was the wrapping paper picked up off the floor than the flu hit us, and watching the exploits of uber-geek Sheldon Cooper, his three slightly less geeky buddies and his perky next-door neighbor proved the perfect convalescing companion.

Season two of The Big Bang Theory, the CBS sit-com created by Chuck Lorre and Bill Prady, begins with Sheldon’s roommate, Leonard Hofstadter (Johnny Galecki), navigating the uncharted waters of the aftermath of his first date with crush Penny (Kaley Cuoco). Of the main quartet, Leonard is the most down-to-earth, but he still has his fair share of social awkwardness, and when he learns why Penny is hesitant to go out with him again, he botches things badly. Hence, he spends season two just as hung up on her as in season one, but now that they’ve actually dated, an additional element of weirdness comes into play.

Since Leonard had his shot with Penny and feels like he blew it for good, we also see more of Leonard trying to make it with other women. Shy Raj Koothrappali (Kunal Nayyar), who morphs into Mr. Suave whenever alcohol enters his system, and skeezy Howard Wolowitz (Simon Helberg), who is always ready with an off-color pick-up line, also have their eyes on the ladies as before, though neither of them is too picky as to which one. While it seems to me that the second season is a bit less smutty than the first, four of the five main characters have amorous entanglements, and I usually found them pretty eye-rolling. Still, when romance comes into play in any given episode, it’s more likely than not that the would-be wooers will be thwarted, so even though I generally concur with Sheldon that their behavior is pretty silly, I can’t help feeling sorry for the guys getting rejected all the time and for Penny always managing to hook up with jerks.

While Penny and Leonard’s will-they, won’t-they romantic tension is a major thread throughout the second season, the much more compelling relationship is the entirely platonic friendship between her and Sheldon. Throughout this season, we see Sheldon take several more baby steps toward mastering the social conventions that have thus far eluded him, and Penny seems to be his most valuable teacher. Meanwhile, as she figures out how to deal with him, she finds herself unwittingly absorbing some of his interests. Penny is slowly becoming one of the guys, and whether we see her casually drop a Star Trek metaphor into a conversation or become hooked on Internet gaming, Sheldon is most often her doorway into that world.

All of my favorite episodes this season focus on that peculiar friendship. Penny isn’t the sharpest pencil in the box when it comes to intellectual pursuits, but she’s got a lot of common sense, and her blend of empathy and boldness means that she is both the only person in Sheldon’s life – aside from his mother, who lives several states away – who is willing to both coddle and stand up to him. The fact that Sheldon seems to be just about the only man Penny has ever met who is immune to her feminine charms allows a level of ease to exist between them that counteracts his obnoxious tendencies. I love seeing the two of them sing sea shanties together in an effort to mass-produce hair accessories and spend an evening in her apartment when Sheldon accidentally locks himself out of his. My favorite episode of the season, though, is the Christmas one, in which Sheldon is thrown into a panic when Penny informs him that she has a present for him. Seeing his consternation over the social obligation he has now been handed, his clever plot to give Penny something of equal value and, most of all, Jim Parsons’ Emmy-worthy reaction to her gift put this solidly in my list of favorite Christmas television episodes.

As before, Sheldon is the character who most captures my imagination. Yes, his rigidly regimented sense of order, whether it’s where he has to sit or what time he has to use the bathroom every morning, can be a bit much to take, and he never hesitates to lord his superior intellect over anyone nearby, including his brainy friends. Nonetheless, I can’t help finding Sheldon almost unfailingly endearing.  (I'm sure if he lived next door, my opinion might change...)  He may be a super-genius, but in many ways, he’s the most childlike character on the show. When he’s trying to master a new concept, he goes at it with the clumsy gusto of a kindergartener learning to read. He’s as uncomfortable with the idea of driving as I am. He wears his passions on his sleeves and never apologizes for them; his unfettered enthusiasm is infectious. Along with that, he seems physiologically incapable of telling a lie. While this means that he sometimes comes across as brusque, it also makes him refreshingly honest. Since he’s even more sexless than Spock, he has far more free time than his girl-chasing pals for more intriguing exploits like designing killer robots and concocting the rules to Rock Paper Scissors Lizard Spock. It’s also entertaining to see how oblivious he is to the world of hormones on those rare occasions when he manages to unwittingly arouse someone’s romantic interest.

As in season one, most of the interaction on the show occurs among the five main characters, but a few minor players do change things up. Abrasive colleague Leslie Winkle (Sara Gilbert) returns to infuriate Sheldon as she puts the moves on Leonard and, more surprisingly, Howard. The two also share a romantic interest in Stephanie Barnett (Sara Rue), a doctor whose attraction to Howard is limited to her fascination with the Mars Rover. Meanwhile, all the guys – except, of course, for Sheldon – lose their heads when Sheldon’s insistence upon taking a train to a conference leads to their sharing a compartment with Firefly star Summer Glau.

Penny goes through a series of insufferable suitors; the only rival for Leonard’s affections who is actually a decent guy is comic book store employee Stuart, played by always-awkward Kevin Sussman. This unlikely pairing really gets under Leonard’s skin, but Stuart isn’t much of a Romeo; all it takes is a hypothetical comic book argument from Sheldon to make him forget that he’s still on a date with Penny and might actually have a chance with her. We also finally get to meet Leonard’s mom, played with a severe detachment by Christine Baranski; while it makes us sympathize with Leonard for his affectionless childhood, it’s funny to see how instantly she and Sheldon take to each other as true kindred spirits.

While the first season of The Big Bang Theory is a lot of fun, the show really hits its stride in season two as Penny begins to get assimilated into the collective and Sheldon discovers that there can be more to life than logic. We’re already plotting getting our hands on season three…

Sheldon Cooper Is a Spock-Magnitude Masterpiece in The Big Bang Theory

I am not an especially scientific person, but I’ve always had an odd attraction to fictional uber-geeks. Spock, the original Blue Ranger and LOST's Daniel Faraday are just a few of the eggheads who have won my affections. It was Spock who helped me discover another to add to this list.

It was the fall of 2008, and seemingly every time I flipped the channel to CBS, I saw a promo for The Big Bang Theory in which Sheldon, the brightest, most socially awkward of the main quartet of young scientists on the show, explains the rules to “Rock, Paper, Scissors, Lizard, Spock,” a more complex version of the traditional game. That’s supposed to make it more interesting, but naturally, once Spock is in the mix, everybody chooses the Vulcan, turning it into one big stalemate. I’d seen ads for the show before, but this was the one that hooked me, the one that convinced me to check it out during its second season. I’ve been a fan ever since. My brother Nathan bought the first season on DVD, and over spring break he brought it home, so I was able to catch up on everything I missed, so now I can consider my fandom complete.

Season one consists of seventeen episodes, each with a title that sounds like an oddball experiment or theory. For instance, The Luminous Fish Effect, The Middle Earth Paradigm and The Nerdvana Annihilation. Right off the bat, we are in introduced to the comedy’s five key players. Sheldon Cooper (Jim Parsons) and Leonard Hofstadter (Johnny Galecki) are roommates. Both are physicists, and both have a tendency to amuse themselves with things like Klingon Boggle, Halo tournaments and arguments over arcane bits of Marvel trivia.

But Sheldon resides in the upper stratosphere of nerdiness, so wrapped up in his own brilliance that he is both unwilling and unable to grasp even the most basic of social niceties. Leonard is a bit more down-to-earth, and when Penny (Kaley Cuoco), a beautiful, sweet-natured waitress moves in next door, he immediately develops a raging crush on her. Soon thereafter, we meet girl-crazy Jewish aerospace engineer Howard Wolowitz (Simon Helberg) and painfully shy Indian astrophysicist Raj Koothrappali (Kunal Nayyar). All four scientists work at Caltech.

Virtually all of the show’s humor derives from the interaction among these five characters. It’s fun when the guys get together and revel in their own nerdiness. For instance, in one episode, they are invited to Penny’s Halloween party, and each of them decides to go as The Flash. After they agree to wear different costumes, their choices range from Leonard as Frodo Baggins to Sheldon as The Doppler Effect. In another episode, Leonard buys the time machine from the movie of the same title, and the other three eagerly chip in for some time with the impressive prop.

I love it when the show focuses on the guys’ appreciation for science fiction and fantasy. I’m not so crazy about it when it the concentration is on their hormones. Sheldon remains utterly detached from the entire notion of romance, despite the fact that in one episode he unintentionally woos a date away from Raj. But the other guys are always bringing it up. Howard is the worst, always ready with a sleazy one-liner and obsessed with hooking up with pretty much any girl who will have him. While Penny generally enjoys the company of the other three, she shows consistent disdain for Howard. Raj, meanwhile, is quiet and sensitive, and throughout much of this first season he is physically incapable of speaking to a woman unless he is intoxicated. He’s much more likable than his best friend, but the two are rarely out of each other’s company, so if Raj is around, you have to put up with Howard, easily my least favorite of the quintet.

Leonard’s intense attraction to Penny is reminiscent of Niles’ obsession with Daphne in Frasier. There’s a similar dynamic between the two of them, with Penny the kind, salt-of-the-earth, attractive woman and Leonard the infatuated intellectual. The two quickly form a bond of friendship, and Penny’s genuine good will is what makes it so easy to root for the relationship. She has a habit of getting together with real dirt bags, and despite the major differences in their characters, you want to see her with a nice guy for a change, and for his devotion to her to be rewarded.

But it’s Sheldon who makes the show so riveting for me. A fascinating character brilliantly portrayed by Parsons, he is one guy who would have no trouble making sense of LOST’s time travel season. The gears in his head are always turning, allowing him to turn the most ordinary of objects into the inspiration for a head-spinning diatribe. Sheldon is hyper-intelligent, as well as just plain hyper. He has dozens of little ideosyncrasies, from the fact that he always has to sit in the same chair to his insistence on preceding each attempt to enter a room with a forceful series of three knocks and shouting the name of whoever he expects to be inside, and repeating the process until someone opens the door. On the one hand, intellectually speaking, he’s far ahead of even Leonard, Raj and Howard, but this is balanced out by his utter confusion with ordinary social conventions. It takes him most of the first season to begin to understand sarcasm, and empathy tends to elude him too, though in his own strange way, he proves to be a pretty devoted friend, especially, oddly enough, to Penny, who can never seem to decide whether she finds him infuriating or endearing.

All of the guys have issues with their mothers. We don’t meet Leonard’s in the first season, but she is a psychologist with a forceful personality whose methods have clearly scarred him a bit. Raj’s mother is occasionally seen via internet videoconferencing, along with his father, and they both try to control his life from afar, particularly in the romance department. Howard lives with his mother, and we’ve heard her voice in several episodes but never seen her. Their interactions consist of her bellowing at him from across the house.

Sheldon’s mother has made only two appearances on the show, one of them in the first season, but we also occasionally hear his side of a phone call with her, and he often mentions his upbringing in a conservative Christian home. While he and his mother have radically different worldviews, he does have a great deal of respect for her, and she is about the only person who can truly keep him in line. He also recalls her fondly in moments of distress. In one episode, he falls sick, and he yearns to replicate the conditions of his childhood, even asking Penny to sing the song his mother sang to him on such occasions. Sheldon becomes even more childlike when mentioning his beloved grandmother, whom he calls Mee-maw.

In general, I enjoy Sheldon’s background, but I’m very annoyed by the canned laughter that follows any statement his mother makes relating to her faith. None of the main characters is overtly religious, and logic-driven Sheldon clearly has no time for it, but I see no need for the outright contempt the show seems to display for Christianity whenever his mom is involved. Howard’s cracks about his own cultural heritage sometimes rankle too, but then so does almost everything he says.

So yeah, sometimes the treatment of religion on the show bugs me, and I would prefer a little less smut and a little less Howard in general. But as long as Sheldon is the show’s centerpiece, which he certainly is in the first season, I intend to keep tuning in.