Here’s a collection of some of the photos that we snapped of Big Bang Theory star Johnny Galecki, and two of the lovely ladies from The Vampire Diaries, Nina Dobrev and Kat Graham!

All Photos Copyright © 2011 TheTelevixen.com

This week begins as Sheldon berates a delivery boy who’s complaining about the stairs while Leonard goes to fetch Penny for dinner and runs into her dad (Keith Carradine, having way too much fun) at her door. While he’s still saying hello, she appears and plants a smooch on him and tells him she’s having dinner with her dad. Dumbfounded, Leonard goes back to his the apartment wondering, “What the hell?” Raj and Howard presume maybe she’s being held hostage and it was a cry for help, and then Penny comes to the door to explain that she told her dad they reconciled. He stifles a “Bwahaha, what, now?” and asks how that happened since she was in the wrong about the break up. She says she told her dad he came running back to her.

They continue the ruse for most of the episode, with Leonard smooching Penny whenever possible, until she finally caves and tells her dad the truth. Dad reads her the riot act and tells Leonard to hold tight for his turn, but after he sends Penny out of the room, he pleads with Leonard not to give up on her, because he’s the only genuinely good guy she’s ever dated. He then pretend-yells while Leonard scoots out the door and promises to friend him on Facebook. In the midst of all this, Sheldon, who only has partial information about the scenario (because he can’t successfully lie), stays up all night redrafting the roommate agreement as it relates to Penny and then has a meltdown when Leonard says there’s no need.

While all this is going on, Raj and Howard, along with Bernadette, are draining a couple of bottles of wine at the university while Raj gets his telescope privileges. The booze comes into play because Raj would otherwise be mute with Bernadette there. Instead, he gets all flirty and they take turns mocking Mrs. Wolowitz, and when Raj moves in to kiss her, Howard jumps in the way and ends up getting the liplock. So that happened. The next morning in the cafeteria, they’re both twitchy, and Leonard and Sheldon just assume they found alien life or some such, and Raj snits out that he can’t believe Howard didn’t call him. Hee.

So, I’m not terribly sure what we’re setting up here but it seems to be step toward reconciling Penny and Leonard for real. I liked them as a couple, and never felt like they overshadowed the show. Similar to the way the Barney/Robin relationship was clicking along on HIMYM, but the show bible had other plans, I think TBBT torpedoed Penny and Leonard before it was necessary. I’d be fine if they’ve realized that and are trying to undo that now.

Photo Courtesy of Sonja Flemming/CBS

First, Leonard is lonely. This takes him through a cringey blind date with Bernadette’s friend after he invokes the friend clause on Wolowitz, and then a resumption of the booty call relationship he has with Raj’s sister, Priya, when she has a layover in LA. This week, he finds his backbone and decides to be more cavalier with the ladies. Unfortunately he test drives that on Raj, who is receptive, and an FBI agent (guest star Eliza Dushku), who is not.

On the Wolowitz front, he’s back with Bernadette and sorting out what that all means and this week, he’s offered a promotion. This involves a background check, which begets the Dushku appearance. Before she gets Leonard’s inappropriate overtures, she’s treated to a drunk-on-rum-cake Raj trying to deflect possible questions about his right-to-work status. After Leonard, she gets Sheldon’s credentials test and a nugget of background information that can nix Wolowitz’s promotion, a passing mention of the Mars Rover debacle.

Sheldon is then panged with extraordinary guilt, which is a new emotion for him, so he (unsuccessfully) tries to drink his troubles away at The Cheesecake Factory, where they have a newly back-to-work Kaley Cuoco stashed behind the bar to hide her leg. Sheldon and Penny have a surprising heart-to-heart about Star Trek and Sheldon realizes how he can make it right with Wolowitz. He offers up his most precious asset, the sofa cushion that is the center of his universe, giving Wolowitz his spot on the couch. That lasts precisely 94 seconds, which nets Penny the pot for the bet from Leonard.

Prior to this week, Sheldon made more headway with the Shamy when Amy asked him to meet her mother. He panicked and tried to break up with her again and she wasn’t having it, so they worked that out with a webcam meet and greet with mom, where they maintained a ruse of intimacy to please her. And, when Sheldon caught Priya and Leonard together last week, he was apoplectic about how not to spill that to Raj.

I was glad Kaley was back so quick this week. The placard at the end of tonight’s episode was a hilarious do’s and don’ts in light of her injury – gems like “No friggin’ horses” and only consumer liquor at home in a comfy chair. I missed Two and a Half Men to see if there was a similar warning for the Plaza Hotel.

If I can digress for a minute – there’s been talk about professional enablement with Charlie Sheen because he was allowed to go straight back to work, and while I know very well he entered his show with his issues already established, I worry about the lovely cast of TBBT (which shares a production team, studio and network with Two and a Half Men) and whether anyone will cockblock them if they segue into self-destructive behavior (horses aside). I think this cast are solid and grounded and it’s highly unlikely, but it’s crossed the mind of my inner Mama Wolowitz all the same.

PS – It was lovely to have Eliza back on TV, but she sadly had to play it straight in G-woman dress blues while the boys flailed around her, and she even denied recognition of Mulder and Scully (for shame). I hope they run into her again when she’s on civilian time and we perhaps find out that she’s not so button down. Her one personalization was telling Leonard she had a 6’ 2” Navy SEAL husband at home, when his “How you doin’?” attempt failed, so, there’s got to be something there besides the by-the-numbers Feeb.

See you next week!

Photo Courtesy of Monty Brinton/CBS

The Sheldon/Raj arc takes off when Sheldon shuts down Raj’s request for a desk because, ostensibly, there’s no budget for him to have one. Raj offers to buy his own, and Sheldon can’t really argue against it, so of course Raj procures the most ostentatious, obnoxious (Sheldon says it’s “Brobdingnagian”) desk possible, leaving Sheldon a might miffed and more than a little curious about how he got it into the office (Raj says that’s for he, Ramon, Julio, Jesus, and Rodrigo to know and Sheldon to find out). They soon commence with one-upping each other as Sheldon tries to run Raj, and his big badass desk out. He finally succeeds (with an unintentionally explosive mix of hydrogen sulfide and ammonia and Raj’s cinnamon candles). A soot-covered Raj departs (with his parakeet) and vows that it’s not over.

Wolowitz’s story begins with him prepping for some alone time and settling into bed alongside Katee Sackhoff, who wants to know why she’s wearing her Starbuck flight suit in this fantasy (the last time we saw them together, she was in the tub with him). Before long, George Takei appears and there’s some back and forth about Wolowitz’s team affiliation. When the gang gathers at The Cheesecake Factory, Penny gives Wolowitz a heads up that Bernadette is starting her shift and he dives under the table to avoid her.

He later turns up at Penny’s, hilariously playing a recording of Sheldon’s pleading “Penny. Penny. Penny.” while knocking to get her to open the door. She’s not amused, but she lets him come in anyway and he confesses that he and Bernadette ended because she caught him having online sex with Glissinda the Troll. His reasoning was that he and Bernadette weren’t having sex, and Bernadette’s reasoning was they could have been. So, they have a sit down and decide to try dating again (with Penny racing back and forth to the table trying to smooth things and not doing it very well). In a tossed off line as Leonard and Wolowitz witness Sheldon and Raj’s shenanigans, Leonard mentions that the department janitor was Glissinda. (Hee!) When we next see Wolowitz and Bernadette on their date, Sackhoff and Takei are advising from the backseat and it turns out that Sackhoff’s suggestions to be more aggressive are off the mark and Takei’s to be more reticent are spot-on because Bernadette wants to start everything over again.

I was glad to see Raj have a little more to do this week and his drunk-with-power is almost as funny and snarky as his girl-ready drunk. I like that he can exasperate Sheldon so easily and relish in it. I also like that Wolowitz is sort of an admitted screw up and he’s very “take what you get” about it. Points to Sackhoff and Takei for coming in and just being as goofy as everybody else.

Photo Courtesy of CBS

“The Zazzy Substitution” focuses on a temporary breakup of the not couple, Shamy, after a series of gatherings with the larger gang go sideways and Leonard suggests that maybe Amy doesn’t fit them. The episode starts with Amy and Sheldon in the living room, playing some sort of posit theory game and then belittling Leonard when he can’t play it. Later, they have dinner at Penny’s work, and that goes south when Penny tries to be conversationally chatty and Amy belittles Wolowitz for only having a masters (the ongoing joke about him).

So, things look like they’re going to stay as they are, but Sheldon and Amy do actually split. The weird thing was that when they threw down their philosophical disagreement about whose career was more important (in the middle of the cafeteria at a table with the boys), they were so matter-of-fact about it that I thought it seemed a plant and not an actual fight. But it is, and they agree to dissolve their friendship right then and there, so Sheldon retreats home and begins to find comfort in many, many cats (one of whom he calls Zazzles because he’s “Zazzy,” while the others are named for physicists) as a replacement for Amy’s companionship. When one cat turns to four and then scary many, Leonard initiates a momervention, and Mrs. Cooper (the always-welcome Laurie Metcalfe) swoops in and puts Shamy back together.

The side arc has Leonard, Wolowitz and Raj gathering at Penny’s as an alternate hangout when they feel out of place around Sheldon and Amy. Out of that we get a drunk/obnoxious Raj telling Penny to clean up her place once in a while, and Wolowitz showing Penny the finer points of pumicing her feet (in the living room, mind you). The coda of the episode has Sheldon and Amy back together (but not that way) as they tag-team disburse the kitties to a line of children (along with $20 bills).

Not a great episode, but it did have a couple of good moments in it. One odd thing, especially given the timing, was Leonard’s dig at Sheldon and Amy that they were the Yoko and Yoko of the group, which seems to be a point of reference too old for these characters (i.e. a writer-imposed reference), but it also popped up in Hellcats last week, so maybe they are more aware of it than I thought.

I’m not sure where we’re going with Sheldon and Amy. One of the early interviews about the show had the producers very committed to the idea that Sheldon has “opted out” of a romantic life, which I thought was a very bold thing to put in a sitcom. He’s got a full life without it, so there’s no “there” there. There are people in the world who live that way, very happily, so I hope they’re going to stick to that idea of Sheldon and not flip a switch and have him decide he wants to actually date Amy. For now, she’s just a new friend in the group mostly closely aligned to Sheldon’s psyche, but I’m not sure we needed that. The show’s worked for three seasons with the core five characters. It’s awesome to have Mayim Bialik back on TV. I’m just not in love with her character here.

Photo Courtesy of CBS

Penny is shanghaied into letting Sheldon run with her (and we find out that Raj peeps on her via binoculars and a parked car while she runs), but after they fall down the stairs together (which I totally thought was a setup for Kaley’s injury hiatus, but wasn’t), Sheldon realizes he is too fragile for the “vicissitudes of this world” and resigns himself to staying in his bedroom for safekeeping. To do this, he launches a “mobile virtual presence device” a.k.a. a ShelBot, which is essentially an LCD monitor on top of a vacuum cleaner frame (onto which is hung his signature T-shirt), that he can drive from his laptop from the safety of his bed.

Leonard’s immediate response is that Sheldon can’t live his life that way; of course, Sheldon is insistent and gives Leonard instructions on how the ShelBot can go to work (it breaks down into four easy pieces). When Leonard asks him to stop talking on the ride the next morning, Sheldon offers up a spot-the-difference game and a music video accompanied by him playing the recorder. It was a bit of a character diversion for Sheldon to distract Leonard while driving when he is usually completely terrified of people not driving carefully. At the outset of the scene, he even remarks how delightful riding in a car is with the possibility of a fiery death removed, so the “look over here” aspect fell flat for me.

They get to school and Sheldon goes on about his day (after Raj happily opens his office door in exchange for Sheldon calling him a lamb). Later on, they’re all at the Cheesecake Factory when Penny refuses to wait on Sheldon because he’s not actually in the restaurant. He starts to cause a scene and stops short when he sees Steve Wozniak at another table. Leonard explains to Penny who Wozniak is, and she cuts him off. “I know who he is. I watch Dancing with the Stars.” Hee. Sheldon rolls over to him and fawns a little bit, telling him he’s his 15th favorite technology visionary. Wozniak is disappointed at the ranking until Sheldon tells him he’s ranked above Steve Jobs. He tells Wozniak he has an old Apple Two and Wozniak says if Sheldon had it on him, he’d sign it. Sheldon asks him to wait 15-30 minutes (so he can catch the bus) and the ShelBot powers down right there at the table. Cut to the apartment and Sheldon is racing out the door with his dinosaur computer and then we hear him fall down the stairs again.

In the coda, the ShelBot, wearing Sheldon’s robe, rolls against Penny’s door three times while Sheldon repeats “Penny. Penny. Penny.” on the monitor. She opens the door and asks him what’s up and he asks her to sing “Soft Kitty” to him because he’s confined to his bed with a hurt ankle. She balks at singing it to the screen and he says she can come over if she likes. She ponders that for about a second before she starts singing, very sweetly. He asks her to come closer to the microphone and then start over, which she does, and he begins accompanying her on his recorder.

Something new we learned in this episode – Penny is running up her debts again, and there’s some back and forth between Raj/Wolowitz and her about it being a neat trick that she can run up a tab with Leonard without putting out for him anymore. Not sure if there’s something coming there plotwise, but she’s up to $1400 and the last time she had a debt and borrowed money from Sheldon, it was to do with her car … which isn’t mentioned this time.

It was a very neat trick to have Jim Parsons essentially give an entire performance with just his face, which is so expressive anyway, but here we got all of the Sheldon even without the full physicality – very clever! I love that “Soft Kitty” is Sheldon’s go-to feel better song and Penny will always sing it for him. I’m digging the Thursday move, although I have to choose between it and The Vampire Diaries for real-time, but I like that it’s now a “Friday eve” show and is doing well there.

Photo Courtesy of CBS

Hilarity ensues when he calls Leonard and Raj to come help and they make light of his predicament with a variety of uncomfortable suggestions. They finally end up in the ER and the ever-reliable nurse Althea (the still awesome Vernee Watson, making her third appearance) just reaches over to the laptop driving the arm and turns it off. Sweet freedom! Unable to learn from his mistake, the episode ends with Wolowitz calling Leonard because he’s done it again.

The parallel story involved Penny chaperoning Sheldon on a proper date with Amy Farrah Fowler (and yes, all of her names are used each time). It seems Sheldon and Amy have had quite the Twitter/textmance going but haven’t actually seen each other since their initial coffee meeting four months prior (in the third season finale). Since they’ve reached the conclusion that they should bestow upon the world (via in vitro) their genius progeny, Penny suggests they might actually want to spend some time together.

So, of course Penny has to drive them, and then eat with them. Unfortunately for her, she becomes a research project of sorts as Sheldon breaks down her sexual history on the basis of what he’s observed and his assumptions about what that means for the rest of her habits. It turns out Amy also has a kind of sexual history via sensory stimulation of the brain, which Sheldon accepts as very interesting. They do not broach that Sheldon is the virgin at the table.

The episode didn’t click along like some of its stronger outings but it’s still one of the best ensemble sitcoms out there. Jim Parsons didn’t win his Emmy by accident. The real gem of the night for me was Kaley Cuoco trying to keep things conversational during Sheldon’s date. Watching her deflect the suggestion that Penny has had 31 sexual partners and the way she cycled through “No, that’s not right … No, that couldn’t be right … Noooo, is that right?” was some genius timing. She’s going to be out for a few episodes due to a broken leg, so I was happy she was showcased in the premiere. The ratings rocketed with the move from Monday to Thursday, and the gang just got a huge payday through season seven. The success couldn’t happen to a nicer group.

Photo Courtesy of CBS

Happy Monday! I hope that all of you have been enjoying my little blog series Has Geek Become Chic. Later this week, I’ll have the penultimate post, but readers, I need your help for the final installment!

I want to know your favourite “geeks” currently on television. I’m not talking about the actors themselves, but rather the characters. Over the weekend, I’ll pick the top 5 characters, based on your choices.

The possibilities are endless, from any of the boys on The Big Bang Theory to 24′s Chloe O’Brien, from The Office’s Dwight K. Schrute to Topher on Dollhouse, comment below with your selections for favourite geeks, and include why you think they should wear the geek crown!