The Euclid Alternative

Season 2 / Episode 05

 

 

If you knew someone as prone to obsession, extreme behaviour and with a propensity for collecting Restraining Orders as Sheldon, would you attempt to mobilise him?

 

Or put another way, is your first thought when confronted by an otherwise spatially-confined lunatic; Let’s give him a car! No of course not. Whatever vague semblances of cognition are firing through Leonard and co’s synapses, there’s little resembling Reason. When Sheldon’s private chauffeur service tires of his winsome ways (the catalyst being his immediate and other-people’s-life-overriding need to return a pair of sleep-preventing Darth Vader sheets) and his attempts to safely utilise public transport by lashing himself to the seat with bungee cords meet with failure and citizen alarm, Sheldon’s friends stage an Intervention to inform the Texan aristocrat that learning to drive would truly be in their…er…HIS best interests.

 

Having previously been booted out of Penny’s car for demonstrating an excessive wilfulness in favour of playing “car games” in addition to his usual quota of questioning the health of her check engine light, and recently having endured a scream-ridden ride on the back of Howard’s Vespa, Sheldon seems rather pliable to the idea.

 

A rage-inducing and potentially violent visit to the DMV later, Sheldon is all hooked up to a home-installed simulated driving machine, complete with simulated airbag (Penny hitting him in the face with a pillow). Having obliterated a Pet Store on the second floor of the simulated Glendale Galleria, Sheldon determines that driving is possibly not for him, nor indeed for any Homo Novus, a species of which he conveniently happens to be the sole representative. His mind is better spent unravelling the mysteries of the universe. Leonard leaves the biologically superior species pondering how he is to get to work tomorrow, a question shortly resolved by Sheldon’s practical yet faintly disturbing decision to live at the University, raiding the vending machines at night in his dressing gown like some sort of tacky Phantom of Caltech.

 

by Major Gripe