Sheldon is named recipient of a coveted university award, but he balks at the thought of speaking before a large audience. Leonard, Penny, and Raj each try to help him conquer his fear.
Raj offered to teach Sheldon some meditation techniques to help him be more at ease. Penny took him out to buy a new suit for the awards banquet. Leonard offered to try some psychoanalysis to get at the root of Sheldon’s stage fright. Howard, easily frustrated, as usual, with Sheldon’s quirks, refused to help at all.
I knew more or less how these efforts would turn out. Sheldon frustrated both Raj and Leonard, actually turning Leonard’s impromptu psychotherapy session against him, making him feel insecure. Penny did succeed in buying Sheldon a very sharp-looking suit, but as you can see in picture at the top, by the end, it didn’t matter.
Two aspects of this episode’s premise particularly seemed to stretch logic. First, as a university professor, Sheldon has no problem speaking in front of crowds, almost by definition. Past episodes have shown no problem. Second, just before Sheldon gave his speech, Penny gave him some wine to help him relax. Though he was shown taking swigs from the bottle, I doubt he could get as drunk as he appeared to be in the course of Leonard’s brief introduction.
This was another episode that stretched reality to ridiculous proportions for the sake of comedy. This sort of stretching doesn’t work for me on a show where four of the five main characters know much more than the average person just how far the boundaries of reality stretch. I prefer episodes where some aspect of physics serves the plot and reveals more about the characters.
