It’s a satisfying moment for the whole gang, and it leads to a final scene in which all the friends, back in what is now Leonard, Penny, and Hofstadter-Baby-to-Be’s apartment, are sitting around the living room, eating takeout dinner and laughing together, as an acoustic version of the series’s theme song is sung by the Barenaked Ladies. It’s why he puts aside the dozens of pages of a Nobel acceptance speech he’d labored over to share some pithy sentiments about how the accomplishment was not solely his own, but something that came as he was “encouraged, sustained, inspired, and tolerated” by his wife, and “the greatest group of friends anyone ever had.” He not only name-checks his friends, who decided to stay and celebrate his and Amy’s honor, but he also asks each of them to stand as he acknowledges and thanks them. Sturgis) breaks Sheldon’s heart because he recognizes that it’s true.
This harsh truth bomb on what is the happiest day of his professional life (a day, Young Sheldon viewers learn in that show’s season-two finale, that was forecast by his scientist friend and mentor Dr.
It’s the only reason people tolerate you.” “I didn’t mean to,” he says, genuinely taken aback at this news. As he and Amy are donning their best duds (opera gown and tiara for her, tux with tails for him) for the Nobel ceremony, Amy tells him he has broken their friends’ hearts with his callous behavior. So do Howard and Bernie, whose news of some potential drama with their kids is also met with a selfish reaction by Sheldon. By the time the three couples - and Raj - make it to their swanky hotel in Sweden, Penny and Leonard want to hop on the next plane back to California. Still, bringing this up right after a very selfish reaction to the pregnancy news was not the act of a best friend. After all, he says, Penny didn’t want to have children.Īdmittedly, I was sorta wondering how this became good news all of a sudden, too, since as recently as earlier this season, Penny most definitely did not want children, and it was a prickly point of her relationship with Leonard. It’s all about him, and even when a very hurt Leonard confronts him about his lack of excitement for his friends, Sheldon’s first reaction is to question if it’s even good news. When Leonard and Penny decide to tell him the truth to calm him down, he’s calmed, but fails to offer so much as a “congrats” before heading back to his seat. Sheldon thinks she’s gotten some sort of bug, which may get him and his fellow Nobel winners sick. Penny and Leonard have put their own life-changing news on hold - Penny’s pregnant! - so as not to steal the Nobel thunder, and on the flight to Sweden, Penny’s spending a lot of time in the bathroom.
Howard and Bernadette have left their children alone with Stuart and Denise so they can accompany Sheldon and Amy to Sweden to see them accept their Nobel.
In the second half of the series finale, after he has yet again failed to step outside himself - something that, to be fair, his relationship and subsequent marriage to Amy has helped along slowly but surely - to recognize the important life events of those around him, Sheldon’s friends have had it with him.
He knew even less about how to listen to them, connect with them, and empathize with them. Even then, Sheldon, who once bragged to Penny that he had a “working knowledge of the entire universe and everything it contains” simply didn’t know how to talk to people.
Sheldon, of course, was the most socially challenged of them all, unable to read the most blatant examples of sarcasm, and even more unable to behave gracefully in interactions with other humans that involved anything other than something science-related. And in the earliest days, not so much as a group, either. That’s what you hope any set of characters does throughout a series, especially one that runs for this long, but it’s especially poignant that this group did because they were each not-so-socially-adept on their own in the beginning. Congratulations, Shamy.īut the real point of The Big Bang Theory’s two-part series finale, and last week’s episode, and the whole series for that matter, is that this group of friends who’ve become, as Sheldon sweetly said during his Nobel acceptance speech, family, has grown and evolved in ways big and small across 12 seasons. Yes, yes, yes, Sheldon and Amy won the Nobel Prize for their super-asymmetry work, which means that story line that sometimes stretched our patience throughout the final season paid off in as grand a way as it could.