"The Pancake Batter Anomaly" is the eleventh episode of the first season of the American sitcom The Big Bang Theory. This episode first aired on Monday, March 31, 2008.
Summary
When Sheldon gets sick, Leonard quickly escapes from Sheldon's grasp, leaving Penny to take care of the needy Sheldon.
Extended Plot
Germophobe Sheldon spraying the premises.
Planet of the Apes marathon.
Leonard is losing at Sheldon's hand in a game of 3-Dimensional Chess . Penny has just returned from Nebraska and stops by for her mail, she adds "It was the worst trip. Everyone got sick over the weekend".
Sheldon springs up and distances himself from Penny and starts spraying the area, as he is afraid he may catch a cold. Leonard quickly dismissed this action as another one of Sheldon's overreactions. Later that night, Sheldon asks Leonard to place a measuring cup in the bathroom so Sheldon can measure his urine output to make sure his kidneys isn't shutting down. Leonard quickly becomes angry because he mixes pancake batter in that cup. After Sheldon proves to Leonard that the measuring cup was always used to measure urine, Leonard sarcastically says he owes the Betty Crocker company a letter of apology. By the next morning, Sheldon discovers he is sick.
Leonard quickly mobilizes and dashes out of the apartment to avoid Sheldon. Leonard, Howard and Raj decide to go to a Planet Of The Apes movie marathon screening to lay low and avoid him. Meanwhile, at the Cheesecake Factory, Penny stumbles upon Sheldon, whose demands for Homemade Soup terrorizing the customers. At the screening, Leonard gets a call from Penny, who asks for his help with the Sheldon crisis, but he makes up an excuse preventing him from helping her, though he feels guilty about it.
After Penny drops Sheldon off at his apartment after leaving work early, out of sympathy she gets pulled into taking care of him. He tells her that when he was a visiting professor in Germany, he got sick. His mom flew back to Texas to help Sheldon's dad with their house. Their house was aluminum [i.e, a pre-fabricated or mobile home] and had slid off the cinder blocks again. He told her that a maid gave him an enema. Back at the screening, just as the ten and a half hour marathon started, Howard accidentally breaks Leonard's eyeglasses after he dropped them, rendering him blind. Sheldon begs Penny to rub some Vicks VapoRub on his chest, he also asks her to sing Soft Kitty to him, a song his mother always sang to him when he was sick.
As Leonard doesn't want to watch the marathon blurred by his nearsightedness due to breaking his eyeglasses, the three go back to the apartment in an attempt to retrieve Leonard's spare glasses. Leonard is caught by Penny; Howard and Raj abandon him. An angered Penny alerts Sheldon of Leonard's presence. Leonard, still blinded, makes a mad dash to escape, but runs into one of the apartment's pillars. Finally on the couch sits Leonard with an ice bag on his head and a sick Sheldon.
Critics
- "A very dull episode. The humor is built around Sheldon being annoying and it just isn't convincing or funny." - The TV Critic's Review
- IMDb user reviews
Notes
- Title Reference: The title refers to the anomalous cross-contamination between Sheldon's urine cup and Leonard's pancake batter.
- Chuck Lorre's vanity card [1]
- This episode was watched by 8.68 million people with a rating of 3.1 (adults 18-49).
- Episode transcript [2].
Costume Notes
 Primary Stripes | Unknown | Caffeine Molecule |
Sheldon starts out wearing the "Prime Stripes" t-shirt from RedBubble. Once he's sick, he's in his robe and pajamas for the rest of the episode. Leonard wears an unknown shirt with a design that looks similar to a centipede, yet is strangely reminiscent of a depiction of epidermal layers with cell and nerve structures. Once he realizes Sheldon is sick, Leonard throws on his caffeine molecule t-shirt and hurries to get as far away from Sheldon as possible.
Set Notes
- The episode opens as we see Sheldon and Leonard playing Star Trek 3-D chess for the first time.
- In Sheldon's bedroom, we see three new comics in the bins on the shelf:
- The Tempest #2 (December 1996 issue)
- The Spectre #5 (April 1993 issue)
- The Flash #14 (March 1988 issue).
Trivia
- Code Milky Green is the emergency code for when Sheldon is sick, possibly because of the color of mucus buildup.
- The song Soft Kitty is introduced. Penny learns it and sings it to sick Sheldon.
- Sheldon revealed that Leonard is a poor chess player in the previous episode, and it is shown how he is not well suited for three-dimensional chess in this episode. Penny can also beat Leonard at chess in The Werewolf Transformation.
- The pseudoscalar meson nonet [3] is clearly seen on the small refrigerator blackboard, which is what Eric Gablehauser was "doodling" in "The Luminous Fish Effect".
- Sheldon states he has an IQ of 187, and in "The Codpiece Topology", he says he has an IQ which can’t be accurately measured by normal tests and he’d have to lose 60 IQ points to be classified as smart.
- Sheldon claims that this time is only the second time he has been sick by himself. The first was when he was 15, at the Heidelberg Institute in Germany as a visiting professor (This very institute does not exist. What is meant here is the renowned Heidelberg University with its many diverse institutions). The sausage based cuisine causes "an intestinal blitzkrieg", and his mother had to return to Texas to help deal with their aluminum house slipping off its cinder blocks during tornado season.
- Leonard advises Sheldon to "get some rest and drink plenty of fluids". With characteristic appreciation and charm, Sheldon responds, "What else would I drink? state of matter Gases? Solids? Ionized plasma?}}"
- Even under the stress of illness, Sheldon retained his rapier wit sufficiently to crack a "physics funny". It's "common knowledge" from Physics 101 class that gases and plasma are also fluids, just like liquids, and make refreshing "virgin" drinks.
- Technically, the applicability of a fluid approach for a collection of free particles (gases) lies in comparing the collisional mean free path () to the macroscopic length scale () of interest. For ionized gases, the subject goes by the name magnetohydrodynamics when the methods of continuum mechanics apply, and by plasma physics when they do not.
- The domed building visible from Leonard and Sheldon's apartment window is the Pasadena City Hall.
- When Sheldon was trying to test if he was sick, he had to use a cultured food (dairy). Sheldon said "because SOMEONE polished off the apricot yogurt," implying that it was Leonard. However, Leonard is lactose intolerant, so either the yogurt was soy-based, the writers made a mistake, or Leonard did not actually eat it.
Quotes
(Howard is asleep, when the phone rings.)
Mrs Wolowitz: (From downstairs) HOWARD, IT'S THE PHONE!
Howard: I KNOW IT'S THE PHONE, MA! I HEAR THE PHONE!
Mrs Wolowitz: WELL, WHO'S CALLING AT THIS UNGODLY HOUR?!
Howard: I DON'T KNOW!
Mrs Wolowitz: WELL, ASK THEM WHY THEY'RE CALLING AT THIS UNGODLY HOUR!
Howard: HOW CAN I ASK THEM WHEN I'M TALKING TO YOU?!
Howard: [Answers the phone] Hello?
Leonard: (in the apartment lobby, hiding from Sheldon.) Hey Howard, it's Leonard. Code: Milky Green.
Howard: Dear Lord, not Milky Green.
Leonard: Affirmative, with fever.
Mrs. Wolowitz: WHO'S ON THE PHONE?!
Howard: IT'S LEONARD!
Mrs. Wolowitz: WHY IS HE CALLING?!
Howard: SHELDON'S SICK!
Mrs. Wolowitz: WERE YOU PLAYING WITH HIM?!
Howard: FOR GOD'S SAKE, MA, I'M 26 YEARS OLD!
Mrs. Wolowitz: EXCUSE ME, MR. GROWN-UP! WHAT DO YOU WANT FOR BREAKFAST?!
Howard: CHOCOLATE MILK AND EGGOS, PLEASE!
Leonard: Howard, listen....
[Phone beeps.]
Howard: Hang on, call waiting.
Leonard: Wha..? No, don't -
[Howard takes the call.]
Howard: Hello?
Sheldon: Howard, I'm sick!
(Howard doesn't know what to do until he decides to pretend to be his mother answering.)
Howard as Mrs. Wolowitz: Uh, HOWARD'S SLEEPING, THIS IS HIS MOTHER! WHY ARE YOU CALLING AT THIS UNGODLY HOUR?!
Sheldon: I need soup!
Howard as Mrs. Wolowitz: THEN CALL YOUR OWN MOTHER!
Howard: Ma, can my friends come over?
Mrs. Wolowitz: I JUST HAD THE CARPETS STEAMED!
[Raj steals some of Howard's popcorn.]
Howard: Take your stinking paws off my popcorn, you damn dirty ape.
Soft kitty...
Sheldon: Can you sing “Soft Kitty”.
Penny: What?
Sheldon: My mom used to sing it to me when I was sick.
Penny: I’m sorry, honey, I don’t know it.
Sheldon: I’ll teach you. “Soft kitty, warm kitty, little ball of fur, happy kitty, sleepy kitty, purr purr purr.” Now you.
Penny: (after a loud sigh) Soft kitty, warm kitty…
Sheldon: Little ball of fur. Keep rubbing.
Penny: (through gritted teeth) Little ball of fur.
Gallery
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