Last week, Sheldon showed us a side of him we’ve never seen before: a side that shows us he’s capable of loving a woman. This week, we see that there’s another relationship Sheldon also cares deeply for. No matter how many jokes or how many insults he aims at Leonard for his career choice of studying an “inferior” science, Sheldon loves his little Short Round. Any storyline involving Sheldon is automatically funny and delightful, but when his emotional, human side kicks in, it’s pure entertainment. It’s rare that we see Sheldon outwardly show affection to those in his life, so when we do, it’s always special.
As the title of this episode suggests, we’re dealing with a deviated septum. Leonard’s deviated septum to be exact. After visiting the doctor, Leonard decides to get surgery. He can’t breathe, he snores, he gets sinus infections. He’s had enough. Sheldon, however, is not on the same page with Leonard. He doesn’t believe he should risk his life for elective surgery. At first, he says it’s because he’s going to miss Leonard’s snoring. Through the years, it’s become his “mucus powered white noise machine,” but eventually the truth comes out: he’s worried for his friend. He’s worried that something will go wrong with the surgery, and he won’t make it. He even goes so far as to calculate the odds of something going wrong. Turns out 1 in 700,000 people die during surgery due to general anesthesia, but the ever-adamant Sheldon narrows Leonard’s own chances to be 1 in 300.
Since Sheldon is acting childish, Leonard treats him so, and tells him he’ll think about it for the next week whether or not he’ll go through with the surgery, when in truth he was planning to go through with it all along. He even moves up the surgery date, and uses going to the public swimming pool as his excuse. Therefore, Sheldon catches a ride to work with Amy, where we learn some facts about public pools and Amy’s mouth. Sheldon being Sheldon, he doesn’t question Leonard’s trip to the pool because he’s too busy figuring out how many parts per million of urine they would be swimming in (18 parts per million!). Amy then tries to distract him with how odd her behavior is. Just the night before, she stuck Fava beans in her mouth to see how many would fit. (56 fava beans!) Still, Sheldon eventually realizes he was tricked. Leonard would never go swimming without his swim shirt, and he urges Amy to drive him to the hospital. Not only because he cares, but because he wants to tell him “I told you so” at his bedside if he does indeed die.
Once at the hospital, there’s a small earthquake, the power goes out, and a panicked Sheldon insists on going to check in on Leonard in his surgery. He’s unstoppable, that is until a closed glass door stops him, right in the nose. Now, both Sheldon and Leonard are recovering from their septums. At the apartment, there’s a lot of back and forth about how they can’t stand each other, but in the end, we all know that deep down, these two love each other.
Meanwhile, the other half of the gang is having its own emotional bonding time. Raj’s parents’ 40th anniversary is coming up, and he doesn’t know what to get them. Unfortunately, he doesn’t have to get them anything because they’re getting a divorce. This puts Raj in a blue mood for some time, and there is nothing that can cheer him up. Not Bernadette’s muffins, nor her bad quips. Raj eventually gets to talking, and believes that his parents’ marriage failed because they never spoke about their problems. They just let their resentment build over time until they couldn’t deal with each other anymore. This makes Bernadette and Howard consider their own relationship, so Bernadette suggests to talk about their problems out in the open. Howard, on the other hand, doesn’t think any good would come of this. Instead, he proposes they each say what they love about each other. It’s a sweet exercise, until their loving compliments turn into spiteful remarks that make us laugh at these two.
All in all, this episode was one of the best of the season because it took us back to the relationships that made up the show in the beginning. Before there was Penny and Leonard or Sheldon and Amy, there was Leonard and Sheldon.
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Best Bazingas!
“I’m not even sure if that’s a person or a typo.”—Sheldon, referring to Jay-Z “I’m listening to you snore. I’m wondering how I’ll ever sleep without it.”—Sheldon “I’m not going to die.” —Leonard ”You don’t know that.” —Sheldon “I do know that it won’t be from an asteroid strike.” —Leonard “You know who else said that? Every cocky T-Rex currently swimming around in the gas tank of your car.” —Sheldon “So I found this fencing school in Burbank that has a Jedi class. If you’re cool being the only adults there, they said they are.”—Howard “It’s sweet that you care about him so much.”—Amy “I do. And I wouldn’t be able to forgive myself if something happened to him, and I wasn’t at his bedside to tell him, ‘I told you so.’”—Sheldon “I assume this medical center has already treated the burns on your bottom from the recent pants fire.”—Sheldon “Because I’m a liar liar?”—Penny “That’s for the fire marshal to determine.”—Sheldon “Hey, what’d you get?”—Leonard “Oh, I ordered it before your surgery. It’s the urn I was going to put you in.”—SheldonEPISODE RATING: 9/10
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