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.