This review contains spoilers. Sheldon’s feeling a bit long in the tooth – he can no longer play online video games as well as teenagers, he doesn’t understand emojis and he finds himself spending time wondering what’s for lunch. Age has always been a kind of nebulous concept on The Big Bang Theory, with Sheldon often appearing to be significantly younger than his real-life counterpart Jim Parsons, 44, but the rest of the gang existing in a vague 30-40 range. We’re told Penny is younger than Leonard, and that fits with the fact that Kaley Cuoco is around 10 years younger than many of her co-stars. But after finding out that the peak age for winning a Nobel Prize is 40, he and Raj make croissants, he juggles, rides a unicycle and (almost) walks on stilts in an effort to improve his mental and motor skills. Meanwhile, while the girls are hanging out (yay!) Penny bumps into her old flame Zach, who lets her know about a job opening at his company. It’s in the sales department, which she has experience in, but it doesn’t involve quite as much lying to sick people. She wants to take it, but Leonard is uncomfortable with his wife working in such close proximity with someone she used to sleep with. Perhaps this will be dropped given that Zach’s unseen fiance vetoed the idea, but it’s been obvious for a good long while that the show needs to do something new with Leonard and Penny. A competitor for her affections is an obvious route (and we know this show loves its obvious routes) to go down and would tie in with the idea that, now that they’re married, Leonard isn’t trying as hard in the relationship. Howard and Bernadette get a very small part of the episode with the latter making fun of her husband for being into juggling when he was younger. To get his own back Howard digs for dirt on her from Bernadette’s mother, and finds out that she used to be into ventriloquist dummies. The dummy in question – Tammy-Jo St Cloud – is terrifying, and the scene should be prefaced by a trigger warning for dummy-phobes. We’re almost done with season ten now, and next week the boys will be similarly celebrating with the completion of their navigation system. Read Caroline’s review of the previous episode of The Big Bang Theory, here.
