Recap / The Big Bang Theory S 6 E 4 The Re Entry Minimization

Plot

After returning from the Space Station, Howard doesn't receive the hero's welcome he was expecting. Meanwhile, war erupts between genders on Game Night.

Tropes:

• As Himself: Howie Mandel was a passenger in Howard's flight. When they land, Howard thinks the reporters calling for Howie were there for him.
• Battle of the Sexes: Leonard and Sheldon compete against Penny and Amy at a variety of games, from Pictionary to pie eating to wrestling. The boys do terribly.
• Cheating with the Milkman: Howard returns to his mother to find her sleeping with his dentist.
• Continuity Nod: Sheldon is still awful at playing Pictionary, owing to his needlessly convoluted diagrams, as first seen back in the Season 3 episode, The Bozeman Reaction.
• Covered in Kisses: As Penny has Sheldon pinned down, she begins to kiss him, to his horror. He begs Amy for help, but she just joins in on the kissing.
• Curb-Stomp Battle: When Sheldon and Penny wrestle, he gets pinned immediately.
• Girls vs. Boys Plot: Leonard and Sheldon play against Penny and Amy at Pictionary. The boys keep losing, mainly due to Sheldon's Complexity Addiction, and since he refuses to lose, keeps making up new games until he gets a win.
• Hollywood Board Games: Sheldon's Complexity Addiction causes him and Leonard to epically lose a game of Pictionary against Penny and Amy. He is an Insufferable Genius so, of course, he'd insist on drawing (and thinking clues drawings are about) depictions of advanced Physics concepts or Science History obscure trivia. It's not for a lack of knowledge that Leonard fails to figure out what the hell Sheldon is trying to illustrate but because the latter's drawings resemble more mundane objects.
• Mining for Cookies: Invoked. When Penny complains about playing a made-up game, Sheldon counters that "all games are made up. They are not found in nature. No one digs in the ground and finds a rich vein of Rock'em Sock'em Robots."
• Never My Fault: Sheldon fails to guess that Leonard is drawing a chocolate chip cookie even when it is increasingly obvious due to his Complexity Addiction making him think it is something obscure and science related. When Penny gets it right, he blames Leonard due to him not drawing a glass of milk next to it and claims Penny only got it right because he already eliminated all the "obvious" answers.
• Pie in the Face: One of the games is a pie-eating contest. When Sheldon has reservations, Leonard threatens him with this trope.
  Leonard: Sheldon, we haven't won a game all night! Now you either stick your face in that pie, or I'm gonna stick that pie in your face!
• Playing Pictionary: Game night between the boys and the girls starts out with Pictionary, and Leonard and Sheldon completely fail at it. (Sheldon mistakes 'polish' for 'Polish', so draws Polish sausages and things associated with Marie Curie and Copernicus, who were both Polish. When it's Leonard's turn to draw, Sheldon guesses science things like 'quark-gluon plasma', when it's actually a chocolate chip cookie.)
• Screams Like a Little Girl: Sheldon lets out a high-pitched shriek when Penny immediately overpowers him during their wrestling match.
• Unusually Uninteresting Sight: Howard seemed very nonchalant about meeting Howie Mandel.

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