Season 9 begins with the worst marriage ever.
Warning: full episode spoilers follow.
CBS placed a fair amount of hype behind The Big Bang Theory’s Season 9 premiere, with the promise that Leonard and Penny would finally tie the knot after nearly a decade. This despite the fact that Season 8 ended on a pretty down note. The status of both the Leonard/Penny and Sheldon/Amy relationships was left up in the air. It didn’t seem like now was the time for anyone to be getting hitched. But that was really the point this week. Rather than try to brush aside this new relationship drama, “The Matrimonial Momentum” embraced it and kicked off the season on an uncharacteristically depressing note.
Very little time passed between May’s finale and this episode (exactly 11 hours, according to Amy). That meant that Leonard and Penny were still in Las Vegas and about to go through with their plans for a quickie marriage, even as Leonard’s recent revelation about having cheated on Penny during his scientific excursion threatened to derail the whole foolhardy enterprise. Meanwhile, Sheldon dealt with being dumped by Amy about as well as you’d expect. Needless to say, all of this made for a pretty depressing start to the season.
That approach certainly didn’t do much for the episode’s humor levels. The Big Bang Theory sometimes struggles to balance comedy and drama, with the relatively darker episodes like this usually coming up short in terms of the former. To be fair, there was some amusement to be had this week. Sheldon’s stalker behavior helped lighten the mood briefly at Casa Wolowitz. The same can’t be said for Stuart, though, who came off pretty badly in his attempts to take advantage of both Amy and Penny’s situations. Penny’s decision to regurgitate the lyrics of “You’ve Got a Friend In Me” for her wedding vows was also pretty amusing, especially since it seemed to do the trick for Leonard.
Generally, though, this was a very downbeat episode that sacrificed laughs for character drama. And for the most part, it paid off. The worst thing the show could have done was to try and bury the new turmoil between Leonard and Penny and pretend like their Vegas marriage was a healthy move. It clearly isn’t. The two have a lot of unresolved issues. Leonard’s drunken smooching is really just a symptom of a larger problem right now. After all this time, the show hasn’t firmly established whether the two truly belong together. Does Leonard love Penny for Penny, or does he love the idea of having an attractive blonde on his arm who tolerates his nerdiness? Now that Penny is building a successful career of her own and is no longer so dependent on Leonard for support (moral, financial or otherwise), does she still feel the same attachment to him? These questions were on my mind as the two went through with their ceremony. The whole thing felt a little hollow, and not just because most of their friends were too distracted to actually watch the thing unfold on TV.
Not exactly the most exciting wedding night…
Again, that was really the point. Almost immediately it became clear that the marriage wouldn’t be the bandage Leonard and Penny were hoping. They may be legally bound now, but Leonard and Penny are more distant than they’ve since the last time they were broken up. And it doesn’t appear as if things will be improving right away, either. Good thing Penny still has her own apartment.
Sheldon’s storyline complemented this well. If a little more humorous, his emotional struggle was no less sad. If anything, this episode hammered home how attached he had become to Amy over the last couple seasons. He lost a huge part of his life and can’t figure out how to cope. Which, of course, led him to be petty and spiteful and basically remind Amy why she finally dumped him in the first place. Here again, I was glad to see the writers not trying to prematurely wrap up the conflict. Instead, it seems like both fractured relationships are going to be the source of ongoing storylines for the foreseeable future. I’m really eager to see how far the writers take this drama and if they can give the show a slightly more serialized structure than it usually boasts.
It’s also worth pointing out that a third relationship crashed and burned this week – the Sheldon/Penny friendship. That actually hit harder for me than the other two, as the show has done such a great job of building a sibling-esque bond between these two warring personalities over the years. I honestly don’t care if Leonard and Penny patch their new marriage. The roller coaster dynamic is pretty much their thing at this point. But it would be crushing if Sheldon and Penny’s friendship suffered permanent damage. The show can easily get a lot of mileage out of this particular rift in the coming weeks.
The Big Bang Theory defied expectations this week, but in a good way. Rather than treating the long-awaited Leonard/Penny marriage like a happy moment for the gang, this episode leaned heavily on recent relationship drama and delivered an unusually somber and depressing storyline. While the general lack of humor was a bit disappointing, the drama-heavy focus feels right at the moment. Sheldon and Leonard both have a long journey ahead of them, and hopefully one that will anchor the season going forward.
