The Jerusalem Duality

Season 1 / Episode 12

 

 

Karma comes to bite Sheldon on the arse in the form of a tiny, North Korean version of himself, 15yr old Dennis Kim, wunderkind and obnoxious git, youngest ever winner of the Stephenson award, and whom the university is endeavouring to poach for their physics department.

 

Having punctured Sheldon’s bubble of self-assurance by pointing out mistakes in his work on quantum loop corrections, the insufferable child sends Sheldon into a deep slough of dispond and despair, wherein he laments his uselessness, citing that in Texas, when a cow stops giving milk, they take her out and shoot her between the eyes. His mildly melodramatic melancholy evidently wanes throughout the night, and next morning he’s up again, full of vim and verve, ready to leap back into work. Although this time the work he’s ready to leap into is that of other people’s. Much to his friends’ horror and dismay, Sheldon has decided that since his own life’s ambition has been rendered fruitless, it only stands to reason that he interfere with, sorry, offer his services to his less gifted colleagues. As his efforts to help are met with the curiously similar response of “Go away”, uttered with increasing degrees of aggression by various souls, Sheldon ponders the possibility of a causal link between the individual instances. Could it be him?

 

Abandoning his efforts, Sheldon decides a new approach to the Nobel Prize is in order. He will win the Nobel Peace Prize by building an exact replica of Jerusalem, complete with Wailing Wall, in the middle of the Mexican desert. The exact thought processes behind this are unclear, and it is perhaps the best for humanity that the furthest Sheldon gets with this project is plotting on a map and singing Hava Nagila in his office.

 

Meanwhile, Sheldon’s increased proximity to his friends’ work has sent them to desperation city, where they’ve been contemplating methods of destroying his rival. Partially, one would hope, to restore Sheldon’s sense of self-worth, but more probably because an idle Sheldon is annoying the hell out of them. They scratch out murder, or deportation, and eventually settle on “Biology”, in the form of a 15 yr old girl, to distract Sheldon’s “obnoxious little mirror” from his focus on science. It succeeds, and relative peace is restored. The prodigy is later encountered boozing it up in the park, in some sort of juvenile hippified love-in. “Screw him. He was weak.” is Sheldon’s sublimely churlish response.

 

by Major Gripe