A good enough episode. I loved the fencing stuff and the clown bits, don’t love the Stuart part. But I do think it is fair that a person that fell as low as he did, is broken now. People fall into depression with life failures and don’t readily come out of it in real life all too often so why not Stuart.
A friend’s son is a serious fencer, and has to check his epeés when he flies to out-of-state tournaments. He actually caught some baggage handlers holding an impromptu meleé with his swords.
Obviously you know you’ll get disagreement, but yeah, strongly disagree. I don’t see anything funny in it because the jokes are predictable. Haha he’s creepy and pathetic and horribly non-self-aware! There’s nothing clever about that.
I did really like the Kripke sex-pic joke though… I admittedly did not see that one coming.
Unpredictable jokes are overrated.
I hope they don’t get back together. Sheldon’s emotional abuse of his friends already wore thin; his abuse of Amy just made the character seem awful and not funny.
The scene where Kripke was on the phone and the guys start totally swordfighting in the background was one of the funniest scenes on that entire show, IMO.
All I know is I don’t know how the guy who plays Kripke can do that speech impediment without busting out laughing all the time.
Sure, but without them together Penny has to put up with a lot more from both Sheldon and Amy.
They have done some real character growth of Amy. And clearly she still loves him. She is able to not only tolerate his eccentricities but to count them as assets. She is now secure enough that she won’t be a doormat in service of them though. They cannot go back on that, I hope.
The question is whether or not they can do the hinted at in progress character growth of Sheldon beyond cognitively gifted emotionally stunted man-child and do funny at the same time. If they can do that then getting them back together … fine.
They need to hook Stuart up with Emily and let Raj embrace his inner “clarinet player.” He’ll never be happy with a woman and he knows it.
Amy doesn’t realize Sheldon was going to propose, right? I think she’d change her mind in an instant if she knew that. I can see Sheldon going overboard on a proposal now. Maybe it will be another Saturnalia miracle.
Post deleted because I was factually incorrect…
Since when has that stopped anybody on this board? 
Can Sheldon learn to be a better boyfriend? He has been forced to learn how to be a better slightly better roommate. Also, being a man-child is not an impediment to marriage in the BBT universe. Look at Howard. If anyone is being abused in a relationship, it’s Bernadette.
Yes, the fencing stuff was pretty realistic, both in terms of what students start out learning, and in what students want to be learning. Also, based on my experience, fencing really is popular with nerdy types…
I would have liked it better (from a fencing perspective) if Kripke had disabused them of the notion that slapping swords has anything to do with fencing.
If I recall correctly (it’s been a quarter of a century since I fenced), there are situations when foil fencers will slap their opponent’s foil aside.
True. That’s often followed by a lunge. But you want to be careful not to confuse Hollywood sword clanging and true competitive fencing.
There was also the joke when one of them (was it Wolowitz) said he was going to feel the effects the next day. Well, yeah, all those crouches and lunges do take a toll, especially on muscles that aren’t used to it. If he was doing it right, he would feel it the next day.