The latest episode of The Big Bang Theory, ‘The Closet Reconfiguration’, attempts to be both funny and serious, unsure of what it wants to be.
Sheldon sees Bernadette and Howard’s messy closest, is seized by his compulsive desire to clean, sort and organise the world around him, and tidies it up. In the process, he finds an unopened letter from Howard’s father (who left Howard and his mother when he was a child), intended for his eighteenth birthday. Sheldon, being who he is, opens and reads it in order to know where to file it.
Howard is outraged, kicks Sheldon out, and burns the letter without reading it. Since Sheldon has an eidetic memory and cannot keep a secret, soon everyone but Howard knows the contents of this letter.
This upsets Howard further, as he feels all of his friends, and his wife, have betrayed him. In an attempt to make it up to him, rather than tell Howard what was in the letter (since he really does not want to know), they each tell him a possible version of what the letter said, with only one of them telling the truth, leaving it up to Howard to decide what he wants to be true.
This was quite an emotionally in-depth episode for The Big Bang Theory, so to counter this, many quite obvious jokes were thrown in to lighten the mood. To me, this was not as well done as it could have been, because every emotional moment was followed by an over the top joke in the same scene, which gave the episode quite an erratic quality. I was not sure whether I was meant to feel sorry for Howard and what he was going through, or whether I should be laughing at those around him struggling to deal with his emotional display. I think it would have been better to have kept Howard’s story quite serious, and to have the second story light and amusing (like ‘The Killer Robot Instability’ in Season Two - I know it’s been done before, but it works). I guess since the Howard storyline was quite large they didn't have the time to properly develop a second story.
The other story this week was quite basic: Leonard and Penny want to host a formal dinner party, and they do. Although it was simple it served as the backdrop to the dénouement of this episode, with everyone dressed in their formal best as they each tell Howard their different versions of his letter.
Review by Heather Bale.
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