Sheldon’s Meemaw comes to town.
Warning: Full spoilers for the episode below.
It’s hard to believe The Big Bang Theory is more than halfway through its ninth season and we’re just now meeting Sheldon’s grandmother. “Meemaw” clearly had a profound influence on Sheldon’s childhood as one of the few adults in his life who knew how to deal with his eccentric personality. The idea that Meemaw would finally appear in the flesh was an enticing one. Sadly, “The Meemaw Materialization” did very little with this long-awaited guest appearance.
This episode pretty much ticked off every single box on the list of stale, formulaic old people humor. There were the obligatory nods to everything from dentures to butterscotch candies to Bengay. The humor was so formulaic that Meemaw barely felt like a real character at all, but rather just another generic sitcom grandmother. Actress June Squibb (Nebraska) didn’t have much opportunity to inject life into her character. More often than not her slow line delivery made her seem like she was on a different wavelength from the rest of the cast. As memorable a character as Sheldon’s mother is in her sporadic appearances, it’s a shame Meemaw couldn’t achieve the same effect.
The conflict did take an interesting swerve when it became clear that Meemaw wasn’t simply paying a friendly visit to Pasadena. It was interesting to see so much friction between Meemaw and her potential future granddaughter-in-law, especially since Amy is poorly equipped to handle that sort of situation on the best of days. But this conflict lost its edge when it was revealed that Meemaw was simply worried about Sheldon getting hurt again. That made the whole ordeal seem like a lot of fuss over nothing. Not to mention that Sheldon more than deserved that breakup, so seeing Amy taken to task for hurting his feelings was a little frustrating.
The best that can be said for this storyline is that it forced Sheldon to choose between his devotion to his grandmother and his loyalty to his girlfriend. There was some humor to be had as Sheldon ducked out of the room and fretted over how to handle the rapidly deteriorating situation. And at least he backed the right horse in the end, however reluctantly. Plus, now there’s added tension in Amy and Sheldon’s life now that she knows about the engagement ring. But on the whole, Meemaw’s grand debut was a fairly significant disappointment.
Sheldon dealing with some Meemama drama.
Raj’s subplot was somewhat more enjoyable, at least. It often seems like the show doesn’t put Raj to full use, especially now that he’s the last remaining member of the group who isn’t in a stable, healthy relationship. Heck, with as rarely as his girlfriend Emily appears, it’s easy to forget Raj has a girlfriend in the first place. This episode kicked off what looks to be a recurring conflict in Raj’s life as he met a new potential love interest, Claire (Caprica’s Alessandra Torresani) and began to question his commitment to Emily. Claire was a pretty unremarkable character in this episode, with straightforward personality and little to distinguish her character beyond her dream of being a screenwriter. Most of the humor came from the fact that Raj immediately reverted to his old habit of idealizing a girl simply for being friendly to him.
Hopefully Claire will have room to grow and develop over the course of this storyline. Presumably the producers didn’t bring in someone of Torresani’s caliber just to be a minor footnote of a character (though that has happened in the past, unfortunately). Whatever happens with Claire, it’s good to see the writers finally building on the previous season’s revelation that Raj may like the idea of being in a relationship in general more than he actually likes being with Emily. This could be the start of something big for Raj. At the very least, it’s past time the show started making use of actress Laura Spencer and her series regular status.
On a related note – the closing How I Met Your Mother-style scene was pretty darned amusing. It’s not exactly a stretch to imagine Raj marrying Calire and simply neglecting to tell Emily about it for years.
This episode should have been a banner moment for The Big Bang theory given how many years the show spent building up to Meemaw’s debut. Instead, “The Meemaw Materialization” wound up being one of the weaker installments of Season 9. Between the forced Amy/Meemaw drama and the bland senior citizen humor, there wasn’t a great deal to like in this storyline. Raj’s conflict certainly helped offset that problem, but not enough to truly salvage this episode.
