7.24 The Status Quo Combustion

[Trust No One]

I'm meant to be living on a three-masted frigate moored in the Mediterranean, only leaving to attend book signings. I've let this plan slide somewhat as well. Quite right. We must get back on track! Or boat.

As for the show being about relationships now, I've had some spectacularly idiotic arguments about that...I think we all have. It generally ends with them triumphantly brandishing a ridiculously piss-weak little list of "science moments" from the last season, as though this somehow nullifies the fact that this used to be a show about 5 individuals, and is now a show about 3 couples.
4 couples soon!
And god help you if you're a fan of only ONE hostage...er..member of those couples. I mean if, heaven forfend, you like Penny but don't like Leonard, or like Sheldon, but not his girlfriend. You're utterly screwed if so, because these characters no longer have any independent validity or volition.

In real life nobody expects you to like your friend AND HIS WIFE equally. Or your other friend and her stooge of a boyfriend. You have your pals, whom you care about, and are interested in as individual entities, but suddenly it's as though every time you meet them, their bloody partners turn up as well (usually through some measure of jealously or control) and they both sit there having a domestic argument. Perhaps then they'll make up, and be all lovey-dovey. Which is worse. Point is, it's their private matter, and they shouldn't force it on an audience.

TBBT is now 22 minutes a week of being forced to witness the private matters of your friend and his wife, your pal and her boyfriend, over and over and over....And a few minutes of Bob Newhart in the Degobah swamp doesn't make up for the sense of being smothered in a triumvirate of couples' dirty laundry.

I'll be watching the first episode of Season 8, but if Sheldon returns from his brief respite and moment of freedom, only to have his restraining ropes tightened, or is immediately harpooned and pulled on board the "Deserving Ship Amy" I refuse to witness his subsequent flensing and rendering down to complete banality and broken domestic servitude.

As Monkey says, this is the series Finale for him, and I fear it might be for me also, unless Sheldon is given his high-mindedness and devotion to science back. But that's not going to bloody happen, is it.

So whilst we're retconning finales, I might choose episode 4.19 The Zarnecki Incursion, as the end of TBBT. It has a cracker of an opening line "Why hast thou forsaken me, O deity whose existence I doubt?", the lads charging off to Ride of the Valkyries, Queen Penelope kicking a bully in the nuts for Sheldon and rescuing his battle ostrich, Sheldon with a Bat'leth (briefly) and possibly the oddest line in the whole series "Stale pastry is hollow succour to a man who is bereft of ostrich." Which is just...beautiful...

Cannot see many Shenny's having the patience seeing Sheldon just going back to the same old Sheldon MG. I'm expecting to see something different and not a Sheldon that just goes back to Amy. TPTB have 3 years and they better start thinking up some interesting things for the entire show.