The Vegas Renormalization

Season 2 / Episode 21

 

 

Want to succumb to the peculiar charms of alcoholism, gambling addiction and sexually transmitted diseases? Or would you rather a blowfly lay eggs and hatch larvae in your auditory canal? Either way, it’s Vegas, baby!

 

With the lads off to Nevada to drown the sorrows of Wolowitz’s demotion from the morally dubious position of being Leslie Winkle’s arm-candy, the solitary Superman who remains gets locked out of his “Big Ice Thingy” and is forced to bunk with Penny. “Bunk with” translating as “commandeering her bed” after a surrealist recitation of the Tall Man From Cornwall, and an entirely too intimate discussion about the nature of the phrase “friends with benefits”. Meanwhile, in Vegas, the optimistically cologne-burdened, condom-toting, peanut-suicide-fancying Howard is being hooked up with a hooker, AKA Esther Rosenblatt, whose brisket-loving charms are cannily catered to Wolowitz’s preferences.

 

As Howard’s night presumably leads to its expected conclusion, we return to the eminently non-prostitutional Sheldon, as he lays in Penny’s bed, carping about homesickness. Despite his home being 20 feet away, Penny is drawn into singing lullabies to the big sook. Perched by his side, a practise-makes-perfect rendition of the mildly ridiculous “Soft Kitty” results in one of Sheldon’s very few unguarded and genuine moments, despite the intimacy between the two being swiftly shattered by the medium’s laudatory devotion to comedic law. 

 

A bed-headed Sheldon departs Penny’s apartment early the next morn, to collide with a Vegas returning roommate. Of that “friends with benefits” business, he now has a much better understanding, he assures a discombobulated Leonard.

 

 

by Major Gripe