“Oh, baby, it’s addendum time!”
Warning: Full spoilers for the episode below.
The last few episodes of The Big Bang Theory have been fairly eventful, with Howard and Bernadette announcing their pregnancy, Howard desperately searching for a way to provide for his growing family and Raj managing to screw up his relationships with both his steady girlfriend Emily and his new crush Claire. All of those conflicts fed into “The Application Deterioration” this week. It made for a solid episode, even if Raj’s subplot threatened to derail the whole train at times.
In the previous episode, Howard, Leonard and Sheldon put their heads together and came up with a way to monetize Leonard and Sheldon’s quantum super-fluid theory. They hit a major hurdle this week when they discovered that the university not only was entitled to the lion’s share of their profits, but that legally Howard wasn’t allowed to be cut in at all. This conflict required a fairly large suspension of disbelief in terms of the characters being blindsided by this revelation. That sort of arrangement between researchers and universities is pretty standard, as far as I’m aware. It makes sense. Why would a university pay your salary, provide all sorts of expensive equipment and fund your research and then not expect to profit from any potential applications of said research? Heck, as much as Sheldon’s love of excessively long contracts was a focus this week, why wasn’t he at least aware of that stipulation?
Ignoring that gap in logic, this latest bump in the road made for an entertaining storyline. Leonard and Sheldon did the morally right thing by agreeing to form a partnership and split all profits with Howard equally. If nothing else, this episode was a solid showcase for how decent Sheldon can be when push comes to shove. The writers also got a lot of mileage out of Sheldon’s lame attempts at patent puns and his giddy excitement about drafting new contracts. Leonard’s joke about finding a stack of old contracts secreted under Sheldon’s bed was especially amusing.
I was worried Bernie’s arrival would derail this storyline by turning Howard against his friends and sparking some sort of petty civil war. She’s been portrayed in a fairly one-not manner this season, and it’s easy to picture Bernie swooping in and nagging Howard into turning against Leonard and Sheldon. Luckily, that wasn’t the case. As Howard angrily pointed out, Bernie merely voiced some logical, practical concerns about the idea of entering into a business agreement with Sheldon. It was hard to argue with her points. Sheldon is self-centered and egotistical, and it’s true that his past collaborations with Howard haven’t always worked out swimmingly.
Bernadette dropping some truth bombs.
Instead of using that as a catalyst to bring the partnership crashing down, the three men behaved like adults and adjusted their already massive contract accordingly. This was another chance for Sheldon to prove he can be a decent, thoughtful person. Not only did he make an ironclad pledge to stop insulting Howard, he donated part of his share to set up a college fund for Baby Wolowitz. It was a really sweet gesture that says a lot about how far Sheldon has come in the past few seasons. It made for a proper end to an all-around enjoyable storyline.
Unfortunately, Raj couldn’t hold up his end of the deal. If nothing else, it was great to see him given so much attention and for the show to bring Emily and Claire back into play after seemingly writing them both out of the picture last month. The problem is that neither Raj nor Emily nor Claire were handled particularly well this week.
Initially, it was funny to watch Raj become crippled by indecision and the girls try to coach him through his phone call with Emily. The POV shots of Penny, Bernie and Amy whispering and gesturing frantically were a nice touch. But after a while Raj’s indecision only served to make him look like a jerk. This is a character whose entire arc on the show boils down to his quest to build a meaningful relationship with a member of the opposite sex. But now he doesn’t seem motivated by love so much as a clinical desire to choose whichever relationship will provide the most benefit. The main takeaway from Raj’s dilemma this week is that he doesn’t really deserve either woman.
Raj’s subplot also suffered from the fact that neither Emily nor Claire have been developed much as characters. What do we know about Claire other than the fact that she’s a no-nonsense bartender/aspiring screenwriter? The show has done absolutely nothing to explain why she likes Raj or why she would bother to put up with his back-and-forth nonsense. Emily is even worse. She’s technically been a player on the show for multiple seasons now, but it’s as if the writers can hardly be bothered to acknowledge her presence most weeks. There’s no sense of Emily as an actual person. Why would she be so desperate to get back together with a guy who cruelly dumped her on Valentine’s Day, much less buy him an expensive astrolabe?
The answer appears to be that Emily is emotionally manipulative and possibly just as screwed up as Raj himself. With the way Claire’s warnings came true, it seems Emily may be evolving into an antagonist rather than a love interest to Raj. This is an interesting development and might have potential depending what direction the writers take Raj and Emily’s relationship. At least it adds depth to a character who had almost none before this episode. But considering how poorly the show has handled Emily up till now, I’m not overly optimistic about what’s next.
This episode did a generally good job of pushing the show forward and addressing several recent developments. The business partnership between Sheldon, Leonard and Howard yielded plenty of laughs.. And while the episode could have used this storyline to build a new rift between the characters, it instead chose to focus on Sheldon’s magnanimous side. But while it was nice to see Raj’s lousy love life in the spotlight again, his storyline quickly deteriorated into a mess of questionable characterization.
