Should you watch it, wiki it, or wait for the recap? Wiki it.
Howard is asked to throw the first pitch to start a Little League baseball game, even though he’s never played baseball before. Meanwhile, Amy and Sheldon pit their relationship against Leonard and Penny. Will Howard learn to pitch, and will Leonard and Penny’s already unstable relationship be able to weather this trial?
“The First Pitch Insufficiency” is the third episode of the eighth season of The Big Bang Theory. It’s kind of a forgettable one – although the situations are new and creative, it doesn’t lend much development to the characters or (foreseeably) set anything up that can be used later in the season. Well, maybe Howard will be a baseball star.
The thing is that Penny and Leonard’s relationship has been tested to death. We know they’re not going to break up again, so there’s no danger of their relationship fragmenting for the umpteenth time. Again, it’s an interesting interaction of character relationships, but it’s not something fresh anymore.
Highlight
Shamy vs Penny and Leonard
Their relationship has not been explicitly compared and put in a competition before, which is something that admittedly is possible given both of the guys’ competitive natures. It’s funny to see how in control Shamy is, despite them being relatively less experienced and less conventional in terms of relationships. Penny and Leonard’s disdain for comparison, juxtaposed with their horrifying realisation that Shamy might indeed have an equally strong and valid relationship, is the what keeps this plot engaging.
Letdowns
The boring baseball plot
Was there no other way to approach this whole “Howard is bad at sports or anything physical” plot? We know he can’t play. It’s just a matter of how badly. Yet his inability to play sports is not even portrayed in a funny, unexpected way – it’s just so flat and predictable. Couldn’t he have been given some deeper backstory regarding his baseball incompetence?
Wouldn’t Howard have built a machine to throw the ball?
If using the Mars rover to deliver the ball was legal (ie, using a machine to throw the ball), why didn’t Howard just build a mechanical catapult to lob the ball? Isn’t it just as mechanical as the Mars rover solution?
What is Leonard and Penny’s relationship score?
During the Shamy/Leonard/Penny plot, Sheldon dares the other couple to try a relationship test. This leads to the expected argument, but in the end Leonard and Penny don’t even try the relationship test. Why? Why bring it up in the first place? Wouldn’t this have been a fantastic long running arc, if they took the test and scored badly and then vowed to have a better score than Shamy by the season finale?
No true resolution to the Shamy vs Leonard and Penny story
So the whole point of this tale was that they have different relationships and hence different strengths and weaknesses – something that we knew all along? Something that the characters themselves knew all along? Then why did they even agree to compete on the same terms? Why didn’t anybody learn anything or show some character development from this?
“The First Pitch Insufficiency” was truly insufficient in terms of rounding up stories and providing some sort of importance to what the characters went through in this episode. It’s not an episode you need to watch.
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