< The Big Bang Theory

The Big Bang Theory/YMMV


The show as a whole:

  • Angst? What Angst?: Sheldon after a brief "break up" with Amy. Instead of being sad like a normal human being, he hides it and buys 25 CATS.
    • Well, aside from the cat thing that IS the normal response for most guys after a break-up. Sheldon is just so used to ignoring his feelings that he doesn't realize it himself, which is half the joke.
  • Awesome Music: Amy's short rendition of "The Girl from Ipanema".
  • Base Breaker: The episode "The Good Guy Fluctuation". Leonard briefly making out twice with a girl has earned more scorn than Priya sleeping with an ex boyfriend in India, which implies a slight Double Standard for them.
    • That's because we don't really know Priya, but we expect Leonard to be a nice guy, so it's jarring when he's a Jerkass.
  • Non Sequitur Scene: Lampshaded. Leonard and Wolowitz walk in on Sheldon and Raj with a bird, shooting NERF and marshmallow guns at each other, and listening to Indian music. They promptly walk back out again.

Leonard: ...Anyway.

  • Complaining About Shows You Don't Like/Complaining About Characters You Don't Like/Complaining About Shows You Don't Watch: Probably makes up a good 85% of online discussion of the show. It seems hating The Big Bang Theory has become a popular way to "prove your nerd cred".
  • Crack Pairing: Raj and his mobile phone Siri.
  • Designated Hero: Sheldon. You can find it easy to sympathise with him... until you remember he's the reason alot of his friends hate him and have to obey all the rules he sets for no real reason about punishments that can be counter attacked with a kick to the balls. Also Leonard, as he has gained a generally jerk demenor and holier than thou attitude.
  • Dude, Not Funny: The episode where Leonard and Sheldon come home to find their apartment broken into—Sheldon has trouble sleeping alone and asks for a high-tech security system installed. The Laugh Track to go with these moments can be inappropriate as much of the episode is him being worried the burglar will return. Though moving away was overreacting.
    • Amy's story of the little Vietnamese girl dying in the hospital and Penny's nail salon being a front for human trafficking in the same episode, "The 22 Second Exciatation"
    • This show has several of these moments. Particularly when they reveal the characters' tragic pasts. When Howard cries and asks the Alf doll where his dad is or when Leonard breaks down while giving a speech in "The Pants Alternative", the Laugh Track doesn't feel quite appropriate.
  • Ear Worm:
  • Ensemble Darkhorse: Amy Farrah Fowler has taken this trope and ran with it, resulting in Rescued from the Scrappy Heap. She went from being "female Sheldon" when introduced to being best friends/"besties" with Penny. She is more receptive and reasonable when giving Penny advice than Sheldon would be if Penny went to him. It helps that she gained a degree of Character Development. In her first few appearances she was cold and distant, but she now flips out both positively and negatively when Penny hangs with her, i.e., in the first episode of season 5, she was overjoyed at the thought of Penny staying the night with her and in the second episode she's on the verge of tears when Penny threatens to throw her out for "betraying her" (ie, helping Sheldon).
    • Both Sheldon and Leonard's parents are very popular given their screen time. Sometimes they get just one scene, but steal the show with it.
  • Epic Fail: Basically how the producers described the first attempt at a pilot. The only thing that worked was Leonard and Sheldon's interaction, as well as Galecki and Parsons chemistry. The proto-Penny, Katie, was despised by the test audiences, as her relationship with the guys was reversed. Instead of being (generally) a bright ball of sunshine in their lives she was a manipulator and the guys would work to bring her out of her cynical outlook.
  • Fandom Rivalry: With Community. Besides having a geeky appeal there is little in common with regards to the two series, but when TBBT was moved to compete with NBC's comedy lineup on Thursdays (which includes Community) it sparked the rivalry.
  • Fan-Preferred Couple:
    • Sheldon/Penny, enough that Chuck Lorre even commented on that prospect, saying that while they have an amazing rapport Penny would probably kill Sheldon if they hung around each other too much. Other TV writers have remarked that just the idea of Sheldon being Sheldon is what makes their relationship work, the lack of romantic entanglement. Going for Slap Slap Kiss is too generic a description of their chemistry.
  • Fanon: Many fans and even the actors believe Sheldon has Asperger's Syndrome.
  • Fetish Fuel: Elizabeth Plimpton, enough to warrant her whole episode ("The Plimpton Stimulation") Fetish Fuel status.
  • Freud Was Right: The light-stick size duel between Sheldon and Leonard. Big time.
  • Funny Aneurysm Moment: In the episode "The Griffin Equivalency", Raj tells the patron next to his table, Charlie Sheen, that he's going to be in People's Magazine for discovering a celestial body. Sheen then tells him "Yeah? Call me when you're on the cover." This line becomes less funny when Sheen does end up on the cover of various magazines, and not in a good light, nor for any positive things he did.
    • In the ending of the same episode, Raj is forced to verbally apologize to Penny about his behavior towards her, and she hugs him right when Leonard and Sheldon walk out, with their getting the wrong idea that she and Raj spent the night together (she was wearing a bathrobe). Come the Season 4 finale, Penny and Raj, while drunk, do end up sleeping together, and the consequences of which are made apparent in the Season 5 premiere, where it almost shattered the group's friendship.
  • Genius Bonus:
    • Surprisingly accurate math and physics jokes at times. Geek culture references can get very obscure.
    • This is one of the few sitcoms with science advisers. The producers said they went about a day before they realized there was no way they could study the proper material for all of the science, and so recruited David Salzberg from the University of Los Angeles to help with the dialogue and even certain plot points (Sheldon's search for Magnetic Monopoles for instance).[1]
  • Harsher in Hindsight: Several times when together with Leonard, Penny would tease about finding another dumb guy when Leonard is caught up in one of his geeky activities. Come the season three finale, Penny realized that being with Leonard actually made it impossible for her to enjoy dating dumb guys again.
    • In "The Zarnecki Inclusion" Raj jokes that Priya was talking to her ex-boyfriend Sanjay. Then in "The Good Guy Fluctuation" where its revealed that she slept with him.
    • "The Roommate Transmogrification" in Season 4, Bernadette gets her Ph.D and a good job, and the guys joke she's now the female of the relationship, Howard protesting he still has his own life. Leonard snarks "until you have kids". As of Season 5 Howard has discovered Bernadette doesn't like kids and if they choose to have them once married she wants him to stay home to take care of them while she works.
  • Hilarious in Hindsight:
    • YMMV on "Shelbot", the mechanical stand-in for Sheldon. "Shelbot" is a remote-controlled stand with a Webcam and tablet computer screen attached that projects Sheldon's face and voice to the outside world while he stays in his bedroom. This video was eerily reminiscent of that creation. The concept was picked up again for Conan O'Brien's Web series, "The Cone Drone," where Conan sends out someone dressed in a papier-mache costume of Conan, while wearing a tablet screen projecting Conan's own face, to irritate or annoy random people.
    • One episode focused on Howard's space toilet having a possible malfunction and trying to fix it. Well, July 2009 it became an actual issue.
    • In the second season finale, the guys left to try to find magnetic monopoles. About two weeks before the season three premiere, real-life scientists found something that sounds similar: magnetic monopolar quasiparticles - something completely unrelated to Sheldon's experiment.
    • The Mars Rover got stuck in a ditch, just as it did in Season 2. (But it didn't accidentally find life on Mars.)
    • In the first-season episode involving the physics bowl, after Sheldon leaves the other geeks' team, they discuss people who they might be able to recruit as replacements, and one of the people they consider is the actress who played Blossom. Guess who ends up getting the last laugh as Sheldon's date at the end of the third season?
    • When Sheldon and Stuart argue about who will succeed Batman after Final Crisis, Sheldon contends that it must be Dick Grayson while Stuart believes it has to be Jason Todd. The argument is basically Stuart being awesome and smacking down Sheldon's position, calling it "as wrong as calling a tomato a suspension bridge". In "The Battle for the Cowl", Jason Todd actually tries to become a Batman with guns, but in the end Dick kicks his butt into the ground and takes on the Bat mantle
    • The entire episode "The Barbarian Sublimation", where Sheldon gets a guy named Tom to date Penny, as he was the result of an dating site Sheldon submitted Penny on to try to find a boyfriend in order to get rid of her MMORPG addiction, but is implied to be gay and thinks Sheldon is the one he's dating, is even better with the knowledge that Sheldon's actor, Jim Parsons, is gay.
  • Hollywood Homely: Averted to a degree. None of the characters would be considered unattractive, but they do make efforts to explain their lack of social success. For example, Johnny Galecki combines the glasses with unflattering hair, awkward posture, unflattering facial expressions and nervous character tics (he frequently plays with his fingers when talking to someone).
  • Idiot Plot: Sheldon's manipulation to get Leonard to sign a new Roommate Agreement involves heavy handed blackmail. The use of coercion to sign a contact if proven, and if Priya is any kind of competent lawyer this would be a cake walk to show, would null and void said contract. So at best Sheldon has only found a temporary solution until Priya and Leonard find a way to neutralize his blackmail threat.
  • Informed Wrongness: Sheldon on occasion. The show likes to play up how he overreacts to things and is generally a Know-Nothing Know-it-All, but there are times where the viewer may side with him but he is still treated as being ridiculous.
    • But since the Roommate Agreement is a strictly social tool and carries no actual legal weight in any case, that hardly seems to matter. The threat was real enough, and Sheldon was taught to be more careful about which rules he imposes on others. It was a war between Priya and Sheldon for Leonard's freedom within the apartment, and Sheldon came out on top. Huzzah.
  • Jerkass Woobie: Leonard. Yeah, he may be considered a Designated Hero and an ass, but the insults that Howard and other characters throw at him about his height or romance life can seem mean a lot of the time. Also his mother can be quite a bitch. Once Leonard is actually with Penny his retorts to them are basically "You said it would never happen, well I made it happen." In fact most of the time whenever he does something mean or socially stupid you can trace its origin to what someone else did to him.
    • Sheldon can be highly difficult to be around, his quirks constantly interrupt the lives of everyone else, he outright insults the intelligence of everyone and berates people for not conforming exactly to his schedule. However, his emotional maturity is that of a 10-year old and whenever he is in distress he responds much like a child would and the few times he will Pet the Dog will sometimes backfire on him. For a few specific examples:
      • Once he startled Penny in her sleep trying to steal The One Ring from around her neck, with her reflex being to punch him in the face. It's treated as being Laser-Guided Karma and is funny, but he ran out of the room crying about his nose bleeding. It was probably justified, but still.
      • "The Excelsior Acquisition", Sheldon is taken to court for a traffic violation and Sheldon's style of defending himself (insulting the judge, among other things) ended up getting him thrown in the courthouse jail. The problem was he doesn't drive much and the ticket happened in the same episode when he "played the hero" taking Penny to the hospital when she dislocated her shoulder; it was Penny's coaching that led to the violation and she directed the ticket to him to avoid an insurance hike. It basically ended up as No Good Deed Goes Unpunished.
        • The fact that Sheldon doesn't always get the help he needs from his friends can be explained quite a bit by his actions towards them. When he gave a drunken speech in season three and humiliated himself, and all the others did was laugh and put it on YouTube, the entire episode up until that point had been about the group trying to help him build confidence, and him fighting them every step of the way, constantly insulting and demeaning their efforts. It also explains when they did nothing to help him with the controlling "girlfriend" (Ramona), he was too afraid of saying anything himself and requested they kill her while they just wanted to stay out of it. The others do have their faults but you can see why they may not always come to his rescue.
  • Magnificent Bastard: Wil Wheaton, you slyboots, especially when he implies he indirectly broke up Leonard and Penny to win a bowling game.
  • Memetic Mutation:
    • "Bazinga!"
    • On /co/, the generic references and laugh track are commonly made fun of in variations of "Hey guys, Green Lantern!" (Audience laughter shakes the studio)
  • Nightmare Fuel: Literally, and in-show: for Penny (and Leonard), it's Howard and Leonard's explanation of how Sheldon might reproduce.

Howard: I'm an advocate of mitosis. One day he'll eat an enormous amount of Thai food and split into two Sheldons.
Leonard: On the other hand, I believe he's the larvae form of his species and one day he'll split the cocoon and emerge with moth wings and an exoskeleton.
Penny: Okay, well, thanks for the nightmares.

    • Leonard does indeed have a nightmare about the mitosis method.
    • Sheldon himself has nightmares about Morlocks and Gollum, specifically himself turning into Gollum.
    • In Season 5, it's never shown what exactly was crawling around inside the couch Penny picked up off the street, and later picked up by Howard and Raj.
    • It was already pretty friggin scary but after Bernadette let's it slip that she and some other microbiologists crossed Ebola with the common cold Leonard asks, "Why would you do that?" and Bernadette responds "We didn't. That would be a terrible, terrible thing." all the while wearing a huge smile on her face. Brrr.
  • Older Than They Think: Check out the movie Ball of Fire (1941) sometime.
  • Portmanteau Couple Name: "Shamy".
  • Refuge in Audacity: Most of everything Sheldon's mother says.
  • Rescued from the Scrappy Heap: When Amy was initially introduced she came across as a Distaff Counterpart of Sheldon competing for the Brutal Honesty lines, which many fans did not appreciate. Once she started up a friendship with Penny, calling her "My Bestie" (best friend), and demonstrating her own personality outside of a female Sheldon fan response has switched around. Particularly her instigation of the rumor-mill in "The Herb Garden Germination" and Sheldon calling her a "vixen" for getting him into the social sciences.
    • Though there's numerous fans still pining for a Sheldon/Penny romance, who hates her guts.
    • And some who are for Penny/Sheldon but still adore Amy.
  • The Scrappy: Priya is considered one In-Universe by Penny, Bernadette and Amy. Few viewers have problems with her, however.
    • Leonard in later seasons, due to having a lot more bitter attitude towards life after dating and subsequently breaking up with Penny.
    • Amy use to be one, but see above, as she was rescued from this. However Leonard and Amy are still this, MOSTLY by Sheldon/Penny fans.
  • Seasonal Rot: Debated in whether this show has gone too cushy with the higher ratings, resulting in weaker stories that rely more on stock jokes and Running Gags.
  • Shipping Bed Death: Leonard and Penny's relationship is much better in theory than on the show as they argued over annoying things for an entire episode plot and by the end of the season they seemed more annoying than usual. Many criticize the third season for this.
  • Some Anvils Need to Be Dropped: Penny tells Leonard to go against a Double Standard and put his foot down and tell Stephanie that he wasn't ready for her to move in.
  • Special Effects Failure: The second season finale featured the characters in a walk-in freezer with their breath visible due to the cold.
    • In the season 5 premier, Sheldon has a nightmare where several bugs start crawling all over him. The bug effects look like something out of windows movie maker. Though that does not stop it from being disturbing.
  • Squick: Howard's subplot in the 4th season premire qualifies as this. He built a robotic arm, and after showing it to his friends, when he's at home he gets it to massage his shoulder. Then, as soon as he realises "it's just like a real hand", well... guess what he tries to get it to do. And it doesn't even stop there - the hand misinterprets what it's been programmed to do, mistakenly believing its duty is about twisting a screwdriver. As soon as Howard no longer has any control over the situation (which is pretty quickly), he has to ask Leonard and Raj for help, and then everything goes downhill from there.
  • Straw Loser: Played with. With Penny it can be that she's too stupid to know who Adam West is without bringing up Family Guy and basically is set up so the guys can be geeky. With the guys, it could be that they're too geeky for a normal person like Penny or Bernadette to relate to.
  • Straw Man Has a Point: One episode follows an Escalating War between Penny and Sheldon where the viewer is meant to side with Penny, as Sheldon is the show's Jerkass and Penny won the war. However, aside from throwing her clothes onto the street, Sheldon's actions were reasonable and mature (or as mature as an Escalating War can be), whereas Penny's exploited his psychological quirks to drive him insane. Besides that, her actions are entirely inappropriate—she implies she somehow tampered with Sheldon's meal when she serves him, something no one would tolerate, and she used all the washing machines at the time Sheldon normally does so he can't, which is rude to all the other tenants in the building too.
    • It is debatable how mature and reasonable Sheldon was during the Escalating War since Penny's ban was his own oversensitive and bullying nature. He makes attempts to make his actions justifiable but in the end the strike system is merely his own way of controlling the group. He gave no reference to Penny's first 'strike' to her or even explain what pertains as a strike beforehand. He choose to give the others of the group a strike out of his own whim because they attempted to help Penny even though that probably wasn't part of the predetermined system. Through and through Sheldon from a point of view could seem much more the bully in this situation then Penny.
  • They Changed It, Now It Sucks: Disregarding the few rational comments about the current quality of the show a good portion of the fandom is upset that the guys are having some success in long term companionships, claiming that the show has become just another stereotypical sitcom with a focus on relationships. The thing is that even the early seasons were focused on relationship stories, mostly on how the guys would strike out (especially Howard). Whether or not the changes to the cast and the formula have been handled well (balanced cast, creative stories, insider jokes, etc) is a different subject altogether.
  • They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: Leslie Winkle got dropped after the second season and made a cameo in the third season finale. Before that she was a good version of a nerdy girl that isn't conformed into a stereotype and was very casual about her wants and needs for sex. Also in season 3 there were two ancillary women that were interested in Sheldon and Raj and they were both, which one of them was largely impressed with the Green Lantern power battery. They were, besides the comic book writer woman in season 5, the only women that have been interested in comic books and would've made fine additions to the cast.
  • Unfortunate Implications:
    • Drinking and getting drunk is often seen as a solution to problems: Raj being able to talk to women and have sex, Leonard and Penny seem more open with each other when drinking, Leonard's mom giving him a hug for the first time, etc.
    • In the ep where all the main four's secrets come out, Howard lied to Raj about some American customs when they first met. Their entire friendship started off from an American manipulating a foreigner to get presents for non-gift giving holidays.
    • In-Universe there is "The Gothowitz Deviation". Sheldon is pleasant and polite to Penny, feeds her chocolates, and Penny in turn is nice to Sheldon and enjoys him being civil and giving. It's arguably the nicest their friendship has been. The problem is what was actually going on—Sheldon was praising Penny and awarding her when she acted in a manner he approved of as a means of positive reinforcement to modify her behavior. Essentially, he was conducting passive Mind Rape.
    • In "The Speckerman Recurrance", Penny realizes she was a bully and Leonard meets with his old bully. The show seems to swing to the Idealist end of the scale with Penny and Leonard's bully apoligizing, but it takes a sharp turn to cynicism with Penny failing and then just giving clothes to the poor for room in her closet with no real grasp of altruism and the bully just wanting to use Leonard for a project and then going back to bullying him. And Penny goes to steal some clothes for the poor with Amy and Bernadette. As the Av Club said, it was an episode condemning forgiveness and charity.
    • Would the episode The Psychic Vortex apply here? Penny admits to believing in psychics and Leonard goes on about how stupid psychics are. Granted, Leonard went a little too far but at the end, Leonard is willing to go see a psychic with Penny but Penny is unwilling to read a book about how psychics are nonsense. The moral being that there should be no give and take dynamic in a relationship.
  • What Do You Mean It's Not for Kids?: Penny asks a comic book store what to buy for her thirteen-year old nephew. He recommends Hellblazer. After they explain the concept, she buys it anyway. To be fair, any thirteen year old kid who receives that comic is going to award instant and irrevocable brownie points to the giver. As said by Penny:

"If this doesn't make me the favourite aunt, I don't know what will."

  • The Woobie:
    • Leonard is generally a decent guy who tries to find some sort of emotional attachment and rarely getting it. But then we find he was never hugged as a child, his parents never celebrated any birthday and often directly mocked for his struggles (especially by Sheldon, but Raj and Howard also teased him about Penny frequently with no provocation).
    • Woobie status will shift to Sheldon sometimes. Especially here, where he nearly has a panic attack because the guys cut off one of his long rants, and they did it on purpose.
    • You kind of have to feel bad for Raj in "The Wiggly Finger Catalyst," when the one woman he actually can date without his "selective mutism" problem (she is deaf and thereby Raj could actually talk to her) is only in it for his money.
    • When Amy was first introduced she was rather cold and distant to most people, only becoming friends with Sheldon because of feeling a kinship between them. As she became friends with Penny she opened up extensively and often recalls having a rough and lonely childhood, probably moreso than any of the guys. While her dialogue is still meant to be funny, a lot of it hints towards her being very sad and depressed before she met them. When Penny is staying at her place and Raj shows up Amy said, "A sleepover and a man at my door. I wish I could tell my thirteen year old self it does get better!"
      • It Gets Worse in the season 5 episode "The Isolation Permutation" where Amy has an emotional breakdown because Penny and Bernadette don't ask her to pick out wedding dresses with them. She spends most of the episode agonizing over how no one wants to hang out with her and recounting some pretty horrible experiences where people have humiliated her, at one point calling herself "the tumor nobody wants around." Yea pretty safe to say she's the show's biggest Woobie by now.

Leonard

  • Die for Our Ship: As the Amy example below... SheldonPenny fans never seem to catch Leonard a break even once, guy isn't allowed to so much as make a tiny mistake without them calling him a prick. Leading too...
  • Ron the Death Eater: Is frequently turned into this in order to promote the Sheldon/Penny pairing. Correspondingly, Sheldon becomes a Draco in Leather Pants where Leonard is a horrible person for teasing, pranking or otherwise making fun of him, supposedly because Sheldon is a child and unaware of the hurtful things he says and does.

Sheldon

  • Base Breaker: Viewers tend to either think he's the best part of the show, or wish that he'd remove that gigantic stick from his ass for once.
    • Some think since he grew up with undiagnosed Asperger's and obsessive compulsive traits (in addition to having an extremely high IQ), and not particularly supportive parents, you can imagine that he was very misunderstood as a child. But others lay claim that Asperger's is still a "functional" disorder and doesn't excuse all behavior as simply "He doesn't understand" or "We don't understand him," as there are plenty of people with Asperger's who are capable of interacting normally.
      • In-Universe Howard admits that him and Raj probably wouldn't be friends with Sheldon if Leonard wasn't his roommate. Though the flashback episode did show them excluding him from the group because he didn't fit in, but it also showed that Sheldon was once much worse than he is today and the others owed him for not bringing up Leonard's illegal actions (experimental rocket fuel meeting the elevator). The other guys could be suffering from some form of the Geek Social Fallacies, particularly including Sheldon in their group just because "only jocks exclude people."
  • Draco in Leather Pants: To a degree; Sheldon isn't really a bad guy, but correspondingly to the Ron the Death Eater effect that Leonard can be subject to, Sheldon's character flaws, arrogance and Jerkass tendencies can be drastically downplayed.
  • Ensemble Darkhorse

Wolowitz

  • Base Breaker: Either he's hilarious or he's a prick who needs a punch to the face occasionally.

Bernadette

  • Ensemble Darkhorse: She's the first "brainy" character who's not socially inept, snarky, or frumpy. That combined with her sheer cuteness has endeared her to many fans (especially the male ones).

Amy

  1. ↑ Other shows like this are Futurama and 3rd Rock from the Sun.
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