Season 8 WISH LIST *May contain spoilers*

[Tuesday Pajamas]

Do you mean like this?

"I think you’re the best couple I know...I feel like you guys make each other better. Penny brought Leonard out of his shell. And it seems like Leonard makes Penny think more deeply about the world. I don’t know. Together, you two kind of make one awesome person."



Penny: Sheldon, do you hear that? I mean, Amy is the key to your happiness.
Psychic: Exactly. Personally and professionally. Everything will fall into place once you commit to her.



DO YOU HEAR THAT SHELDON? ARE YOU CONVINCED NOW AUDIENCE?

This is such an insult to the viewer.

And it's making me hate a show that I once loved so much. It's as if the writers have no respect anymore.

Sheldon's face says it all. He's saying "Get me out of this terrible show" and Stuart is saying "Somebody kill of my character because I'm just a mouthpiece for what they can't get across onscreen"

[devilbk]

This is such an insult to the viewer.

And it's making me hate a show that I once loved so much. It's as if the writers have no respect anymore.

Sheldon's face says it all. He's saying "Get me out of this terrible show" and Stuart is saying "Somebody kill of my character because I'm just a mouthpiece for what they can't get across onscreen"

There's a term for what they're having Stuart turn into here...exposition whore.

[Trust No One]

This is such an insult to the viewer.

And it's making me hate a show that I once loved so much. It's as if the writers have no respect anymore.

Sheldon's face says it all. He's saying "Get me out of this terrible show" and Stuart is saying "Somebody kill of my character because I'm just a mouthpiece for what they can't get across onscreen"

I think these two scenes got TPTB it the guinness books by jumping over the most sharks.

[FlyingMonkey]

Do you mean like this?

"I think you’re the best couple I know...I feel like you guys make each other better. Penny brought Leonard out of his shell. And it seems like Leonard makes Penny think more deeply about the world. I don’t know. Together, you two kind of make one awesome person."



Penny: Sheldon, do you hear that? I mean, Amy is the key to your happiness.
Psychic: Exactly. Personally and professionally. Everything will fall into place once you commit to her.



DO YOU HEAR THAT SHELDON? ARE YOU CONVINCED NOW AUDIENCE?

[wellplayedpenny]

Apparently the writers seem to have forgotten the format. It's 'show' first, then 'tell'. All IM needed was Penny's 'box of memories' and there'd be three strikes worthy of an apartment ban. This reminds me of a comic book where they put out #1 and the fans found it so confusing they actually had to put out #0 to explain it before releasing #2.

Re-writing classic scenes with a canon relationship lean is irksome but at least I can now appreciate that some effort was taken to do so. This 'insert a line to alter the perception of the entire canon' is just lazy. It's telling the viewer how to think about what they've seen. If the Lenny is so 'obviously' an A-1 couple I think I have the brains to be able to pick that up for myself. Instead, these blatant insertions make me feel that the writers have basically stuck out their tongues with a 'see, you're crazy for thinking things aren't peachy keen' and can't even be bothered to put up an argument about it. They just shoved the lines in and walked over the corpse and most definitely are not looking back.

[SpaceAnJL]

I have an idea that either Pasadena freezes at midnight so that the past can be rewritten by creepy alien beings in trench coats, or that occasionally random passers-by glitch and morph into suited Agents who are tasked with ensuring that reality happens <i>this</i> way. Neuralisers optional.

(I may or may not also have experienced way too much dystopian mindscrew sci-fi.)

Alternately, Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia.

[Idle Miscreant]

Well we're all apparently drowning in scorn and apathy over this episode, judging from the chat. Personally I've rarely felt so deeply and profoundly bored by a TR. Nothing wrong with the report itself, and kudos to the lasses who reported it, and so promptly, but Jesus Mary and Christ what an anticlimax and a waste of brilliant writers!

Sheldon is somehow EVEN MORE spineless and infantile than before. How the everlovingfuck is this even possible?

Forget any option we'd hoped for of showing Sheldon on the road, with optional Rashomon effect (for example, as suggested by Toad). They've ignored the blatant opportunity they had to recharge his character. They COULD have given him his dignity back, let him return with hope, or a bloody PURPOSE, a Vision - to hell with that - we're exactly back where we were in S7, only Sheldon has once more failed, and must now be pardoned by Saint Amy, apparently.

"I know you're not perfect and I'm okay with that" MY ARSE. Sheldon's issues with infallibility aside, they can have Amy say on eternal loop that she likes him the way he is, but her actions - to wit, complaining about him every second sentence for the last 2 years - show otherwise. It's still all tell not show. If Amy likes Sheldon so much the way he is, "quirks and all", then WHY ISN'T SHE HAPPY. Why the constant moan and badgering? Why not cut the poor bloody character free and let her have her own stories? The way she's written these past few years is acting like an unbalanced weight on deck, making the plot and Sheldon's character list, and everything dreadfully WET. In real life that ship would sink.

Again, early Amy I can get why people might like/identify with, but this Amy is such a self-pitying passive doormat that it's appalling she's in anyway considered a role-model for women. And Pajamas knows I usually don't notice whether women are depicted well...We had a particularly heated discussion about Zorba the Greek, I seem to recall.

They could have done so much with the Amy character. It's so disappointing.
And they can't keep trying to replace Penny and Sheldon scenes with Amy and Sheldon scenes. The dynamic is completely different. One's enormously suited to comedy, the other's like a depressing mini-drama.

Anyroad, then cue recycling;
Parsons pantless - check. Prison bail out - check. Amy angry with Sheldon - check. Sheldon humiliated - check. Then the obligatory joke about Amy's sexual frustration. I saw one interpretation from a Shamy fan somewhere that the coitus line was evidence Sheldon was "thinking about coitus". No, I think he (meaning the writers) chose it because it was the one line she'd definitely hear. That was the joke. No deeper meaning whatever. She's become a one-joke pony.

At least we correctly predicted the plot of the premiere. And isn't that just a bit fucking sad.

I always thought I'd stop watching this show because it was heartbreaking to watch the disintegration of Sheldon, not because it was DULL for heaven's sake!

We are going to have to recalibrate our Predictions.

And let's hope the actual show plays out better. Parsons may even pull out a few Vintage mannerisms, or use Sheldon's S1-3 voice, we don't know! The taping reports are never interested in such things.

EDIT - The second version of the taping report was better. The Stuart/Howard clash looks interesting, and Sheldon's train journey was elaborated on a little. But still! *shakes fist*

[Wisp]

This show is just a massive shambling pile of missed opportunities. They've mentioned so many little ideas that could have been comedy gold mines if in competent hands, then sort of went "eh" and brushed them off. Of course Sheldon buggering off for a while and having some sort of personal epiphany that his girlfriend is a bit... you know... rubbish... would have been entertaining, and would probably have made many of us breakdance with joy. The writers and cast seem to be scared to play around with the format a bit. Even the dream sequences they try and give Sheldon the obligatory few times each season to bulk out the promos and pretend that the show is still good are VERY bland and not entirely worth the santa costume or CGI Cracken.

The moments that save human relationship-oriented shows like Scrubs, 3rd Rock From The Sun, Community, etc from getting stuck in a mire of couples or random group-rifts is the weird ass shit that they pop in every now and then (or deftly weave into every character arc in Community's case) for those of us who aren't massively bothered if so and so has sex with whatserface again. Watching Scrubs I get annoyed every time JD starts mooning over Elliott or any female because I know it's going to end in self-sabotage and withering looks from the other characters, but that only goes on for a few episodes at a time, then we're back to the FUN. I know you can't really compare Scrubs to TBBT at all, but whatever. Scrubs is made from shape-memory alloy and TBBT is made from wool.

They NEED to break away from plot and whatever character arcs they've pre-prepared and offer some relief from the new core "goal" (couple troubles) of the show and have some self-contained escapades. I might have sort of liked Amy if they'd given her something other to do than be Sheldon's girlfriend. The show needs POV episodes, minor character focus-shifts, AU episodes, a bit of meta-commentary, anything to possibly reverse the rot that's going on now.