ztemhead Posted January 4, 2014 Share Posted January 4, 2014 The longer I watch the show, the less I like Penny and wish she and Leonard would break up. In a show where most of the characters have matured, she has hardly grown at all. Episodes like this week make it seem like they're still running the gag of "Leonard will say anything to keep this fine hottie around." When most shows end, I am hoping for a happy ending. In this case, I think a "happy ending" would be that they break up and become best friends, and now Leonard has the confidence and experience to go find a true partner. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sci-2 Posted January 4, 2014 Share Posted January 4, 2014 I hardly see Leonard as some paragon of virtue. How much will he appreciate Penny when she gets older, or even if she gained a significant amount of weight. Leonard reminds me of the type of person who thinks he was an emotional connection to a Playmate. Like Hiro's friend in Heroes who finds the webcam girl. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ztemhead Posted January 4, 2014 Share Posted January 4, 2014 I hardly see Leonard as some paragon of virtue. How much will he appreciate Penny when she gets older, or even if she gained a significant amount of weight. Leonard reminds me of the type of person who thinks he was an emotional connection to a Playmate. Like Hiro's friend in Heroes who finds the webcam girl. Indeed, I don't think that he would ever _dump_ her, but I think he could grow to resent her. The true relationship killer long term is a lack of respect, and I still don't get the sense that Leonard respects Penny. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gneisenau Posted January 4, 2014 Share Posted January 4, 2014 What if Penny gets an actress job as a scientist on a tv show ? I wonder if Leonard would be satisfied with that. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
The Monkey Posted January 4, 2014 Share Posted January 4, 2014 The show would have been a thousand times better without Leonard. The biggest party-pooper on the planet and the most boring character in the history of comedy. Seinfeld and It's Always Sunny prove you don't need a "straight act" among the main characters. How I Met Your Mother features the same problem in Ted. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Datepalm Posted January 4, 2014 Author Share Posted January 4, 2014 The longer I watch the show, the less I like Penny and wish she and Leonard would break up. In a show where most of the characters have matured, she has hardly grown at all. Episodes like this week make it seem like they're still running the gag of "Leonard will say anything to keep this fine hottie around." When most shows end, I am hoping for a happy ending. In this case, I think a "happy ending" would be that they break up and become best friends, and now Leonard has the confidence and experience to go find a true partner. The show would have been a thousand times better without Leonard. The biggest party-pooper on the planet and the most boring character in the history of comedy. Seinfeld and It's Always Sunny prove you don't need a "straight act" among the main characters. How I Met Your Mother features the same problem in Ted. Dunno, this episode went a long way to making me like Penny and Leonard both a lot more. Or, at least, to find them interesting. Putting her into that humiliating, vulnerable spot (maybe I'm a sadist, but I loved the moment when there was nothing left for her but to run out of the room.) They're both making really, really dumb, but totally in-character decisions and there isn't any real right answer or any way to move through it that isn't going to get someone hurt in some way...it works for me. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jaxom 1974 Posted January 5, 2014 Share Posted January 5, 2014 I'm kinda sick of Stuart. Raj is kinda pathetic but there's an upbeat cheeriness to him that balances that out. Stuart is just a caricature of a person. I'm sure there are lots of single nerds but even when I worked at a comic book shop I can't think of that any Stuarts. But then there is that weird 4chany place where anyone who flirted with a girl gets banned so...Oh I knew a Stuart or two at the shop I worked at in the 90s. Knew/Know a Howard too...This episode was depressing, yes. Hopeful. Maybe. Subversive? Absolutely. Not knowing what is going to happen next week but this episode was absolutely not finished... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Datepalm Posted January 5, 2014 Author Share Posted January 5, 2014 I'm kinda sick of Stuart. Raj is kinda pathetic but there's an upbeat cheeriness to him that balances that out. Stuart is just a caricature of a person. I'm sure there are lots of single nerds but even when I worked at a comic book shop I can't think of that any Stuarts. But then there is that weird 4chany place where anyone who flirted with a girl gets banned so... Wait, what? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jaxom 1974 Posted January 5, 2014 Share Posted January 5, 2014 Wait, what?I wanna know what that was supposed to be too... :lol: Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Datepalm Posted January 5, 2014 Author Share Posted January 5, 2014 Random aside...could the choice of NCIS and Mark Harmon be a very, very quiet Community shout out? It's probably unfair, but I can't help but see the two as pitched against each other. TBBT is like the Thomas Covenant to Community's Belgariad. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jaxom 1974 Posted January 5, 2014 Share Posted January 5, 2014 Random aside...could the choice of NCIS and Mark Harmon be a very, very quiet Community shout out? It's probably unfair, but I can't help but see the two as pitched against each other. TBBT is like the Thomas Covenant to Community's Belgariad.That could be a bit of over think.NCIS is one of the top shoes on TV (I know, who actually watches it, right?), and its a fellow CBS show... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Datepalm Posted January 5, 2014 Author Share Posted January 5, 2014 That could be a bit of over think. Really? To the girl who started a thread about a sitcom with a quote from Dostoyevsky? :drunk: It's been a long night. Though I can't help but enjoy the irony of geeking out in overinvesting and overanalyzing a piece of media about the social and emotional causes and effects of geeky overinvestment and overanalysis, which of course demands a further ourouborous of geekery. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Datepalm Posted January 5, 2014 Author Share Posted January 5, 2014 You know what Penny's problem really is? It's all down to praxis.* Society shapes consciousness. Penny is good at society, which is another way of saying she's good at fitting in. She gets social norms, mores and practices in a reflexive and intuitive way, and she's extremely adept at using them. Gender is the easiest example: she knows how to do femininity, and prettiness, and and she knows how to leverage that into a job ("tenure is like being a pretty waitress") or favours or a place in life ("I'll marry for love. Or money.") And she also knows how to do masculinity - she's the one who is often required to teach the guys how to do guy-things, like fishing or beating up bullies or getting spiders out of the bath tub, just as much as teaching Amy how to curl her eyelashes, but Penny would never go out in a dirty sweatshirt. Contrast Sheldon, who is incapable, probably at least partially medically, of internalizing ordinary social norms. He demonstrates that this is not a trivial thing. The cost of that alienation is real and significant, but it does allow him a certain freedom in terms of his expectations from himself and his ability to develop a completely individual sense of achievement and self-actualization. It's so obnoxious precisely because it cares nothing for anyone else. Penny, on the other hand, completely can't do that. The highest aspiration of late-stage consumer capitalism in early 21st century America is celebrity, so celebrity is what she's after. Of course, it leaves her a hollowed out zombie of a person, trapped in a menial, lower class job while chasing an impossible illusion. False consciousness, thou art a heartless bitch. (The show actually shows us how both Sheldon and Penny handle money, specifically (how awesome is that!?!?) Sheldon doesn't care about money, in a way that is almost stupid. He's got a pile of uncashed cheques because there's nothing that he wants to buy. He is consumerism's worst nightmare. Penny is in a totally classic cycle of shopping-as-fun consumption fueled by credit card debt.) But, Sheldon is an extreme case. Leonard and Raj seem to have a perfectly normal grasp of the social norms, but what they're bad at is preforming them. They know when they're acting weird, but they can't control it. Sheldon (and Howard, back when) can't even see it. This isn't as simple as the dumb blonde who is hamstrung by letting anything into her pretty little head and the smart guys who are awesome becuase they are outside of it. If all it took to escape praxis was to be a little smart and awkward and you're a happy camper, it wouldn't be worth much, would it? Leonard and co. show the costs of not getting it. The sanctions the hegemonic paradigm has to place on those who aren't participating - in the form of loneliness, humiliation, internalization of worthlessness and general unhapiness - are crushing. Being bad at preforming the praxis is not the same as being free of the praxis. There is no freedom from praxis, by definition, unless you literally have no ability to communicate with people, but that is a price not worth paying, because it's impossible to be fully human like that. Hence why Sheldon is saddest character, for all that he's the freest. Leonard et al. still internalize what the praxis tells them, it just tells them they suck. You do not want to be these people, you really don't. Sociability has real value. Stepping outside of the rules is not a way to be happy - it's not even a way to be cool. It just sucks. I couldn't have illustrated dialectic materialism via bad bathroom jokes better if I had set out to do it. *yes, i'm goofing off in a class that went surprisingly commie. It's more fun to talk about dialectical materialism in considering the lives of Big Bang characters than it is about dialectical materialism in the academic discourses of the west about the functions of civil society in the middle east. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ashara Posted January 6, 2014 Share Posted January 6, 2014 In all honesty, as much as I love the post above, I pretty much don't see anyone but Sheldon in the whole 'not Penny' group to be anything but artificially removed from the relationship stage. They are all pretty nice, reasonably attractive, and it is by now completely unbelievable that they are still single, lonely etc. Heh, I had such high hopes when Amy said something to the extent that she doesn't want to go out with Sheldon any more or whatever over that dictionary. I agree with whoever was saying penny's refusing to grow up, but it is not uncommon. The world is full of Pennies and had always been. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Datepalm Posted January 6, 2014 Author Share Posted January 6, 2014 In all honesty, as much as I love the post above, I pretty much don't see anyone but Sheldon in the whole 'not Penny' group to be anything but artificially removed from the relationship stage. They are all pretty nice, reasonably attractive, and it is by now completely unbelievable that they are still single, lonely etc. Well, Howard is married and Leonard is, er, almost engaged. Raj and Sheldon are a little exaggerated, but not wildly so, I think - they are at the outside of what one might consider a reasonably normal, healthy sort of progression, more so than Leonard and Howard who do seem to kind of have it figured out, but, well, those people are out there too. (Or, if anything, they're kind of too-functional, since I guess if those characters were played completely straight they might both be veterans of a lot of serious therapy and possibly drugs and god-knows-what.) Heh, I had such high hopes when Amy said something to the extent that she doesn't want to go out with Sheldon any more or whatever over that dictionary. I wonder where that's going. Over on the shipper board everyone is sure it's absolutely nothing (like any number of times Sheldon has said he "might have to let her go" or things of the sort), since they had such a sentimental last episode with the screen saver and everything, but they have very rose tinted glasses. Everyone else seems to think it might really harken a breakup. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jaxom 1974 Posted January 6, 2014 Share Posted January 6, 2014 Well, Howard is married and Leonard is, er, almost engaged. Raj and Sheldon are a little exaggerated, but not wildly so, I think - they are at the outside of what one might consider a reasonably normal, healthy sort of progression, more so than Leonard and Howard who do seem to kind of have it figured out, but, well, those people are out there too. (Or, if anything, they're kind of too-functional, since I guess if those characters were played completely straight they might both be veterans of a lot of serious therapy and possibly drugs and god-knows-what.) I wonder where that's going. Over on the shipper board everyone is sure it's absolutely nothing (like any number of times Sheldon has said he "might have to let her go" or things of the sort), since they had such a sentimental last episode with the screen saver and everything, but they have very rose tinted glasses. Everyone else seems to think it might really harken a breakup. First: I think Howard's a little more ironic in his "figuring it out". He's still absolutely dependant on his mother in so many ways and he still expects Bernadette to be the same in a lot of ways. Sure he's put it all together in finding a stable, apparently lasting, relationship there is still a whiff of charicature there. Just a basic impression though and it may just be me. Second: Odds on Penny and Leonard making it through this bump and actually getting engaged? I think highly probable. It'll open up a whole other aspect of exploration that Howard and Bernadette's engagement couldn't/didn't explore with the nerd/popular dynamic (Bernadette's really good looking, but she's still a pretty damn smart scientist). The whole Kansas angle (plus Penny's dad is awesome and I want to see him in a room with Leonard's mom...). Items like that. Third: If there is any kind of Amy/Sheldon break up, it doesn't last. They explored this idea briefly before, and Sheldon't mom drove them back together. I still believe they're in it for the long haul, but there are a lot of twists to come still. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sci-2 Posted January 6, 2014 Share Posted January 6, 2014 I think the comfort food aspect of this show will keep every major existing relationship in tact for the long run, with possible break ups in the short run. Raj will probably improve glacially, though he won't find a girl (or possibly come out) until close to the end of the show. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Datepalm Posted January 6, 2014 Author Share Posted January 6, 2014 I think the comfort food aspect of this show will keep every major existing relationship in tact for the long run, with possible break ups in the short run. Raj will probably improve glacially, though he won't find a girl (or possibly come out) until close to the end of the show.I think viewer-desire at this point is overwhelmingly for some kind of major break with Sheldon and Amy, at least, but I think that's going to be dragged out for a while yet, especially if it's positive - if it's negative, it might come sooner. (I will go down with that ship, mind, even while agreeing that Amy can do better.) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sci-2 Posted January 6, 2014 Share Posted January 6, 2014 They'll break up, Sheldon will change, they will get back together. I am curious if Amy will just fuck someone else before that. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Datepalm Posted January 6, 2014 Author Share Posted January 6, 2014 They'll break up, Sheldon will change, they will get back together. That seems the obvious route, I suppose. My pet guess/prediction/head-fanfic is that there'll be a curveball of some kind - they get drunk or she poses and ultimatum, they sleep together and it's the worst thing ever for both of them and that splits them up. I am curious if Amy will just fuck someone else before that. I figure he's going to at least be her first - or not at all. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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