Season five of The Big Bang Theory began last night with two episodes that filled a full hour.  While the first episode proved to be disappointing the second was redeeming.

Season four ended with Penny and Raj sleeping together and then Leonard and the group finding out.  This was the step we needed for the show to take that jump forward, for it to shake off the stale formula and reach further.

[About Catherine the Great] She engaged in inter-species hanky panky and people still call her Great.  I’m sure your reputation can survive you shagging a little Indian boy. – Amy

They didn’t.

They spent the episode fixing things up, partially retconning the actual sex, and ignoring the whole Bernadette/Howard conflict.  The prize gems of the episode were Amy and Sheldon.  Both of which normally shine when they are in a supporting roles and in the premier they did just that.  Sheldon was fixated on a paint-ball game and Amy was intent on doing her ‘Besty’ duties.  The episode also guest stars Christine Baranski returning as Leonard’s mother.

We get to further see the awkwardness and undeveloped social skills of Amy and she is overcoming them.  We also get to see a major difference between her and Sheldon, something I always praise, where she grew up always wanting to have friends and boys and romantic entanglements whereas Sheldon did not.

Kiss me where I’ve never been kissed before – Amy

You mean like Salt Lake City? – Sheldon

Where the episode could have had the guts to stick with a defining event and grow from it, they decided to cheap out and basically hit the undo switch which led to a disappointing episode with no resolution whatsoever

The second episode was much better.

TBBT’s cast is rapidly growing.  It started as five starring character and now has grown to seven with a very large supporting cast.  This means that the stories have to become stronger and multi-directional in order to meet with the demand of having so many starring characters and the demand from fans for favourite guest to return.

This episode is a perfect example of how it was achieved.   The episode had two major plot lines.  The first is Penny taking a chair off the street into her apartment and it upsetting Sheldon, and the second is the difficulties that Leonard is having maintaining an inter-continental relationship with Priya (who I still hate) and being forced to rely on webcamming and the internet for ‘personal intimacy.’

The cast (with no appearance from Bernadette) quickly split off into the two stories.  Amy get pulled between her friendship with Sheldon and Penny in the feud between the chair, where Raj, Howard and Priya deal with the cyber love issue.

With everything said and done it was not a bad hour, it evens out pretty good which was a wize decision to put two episodes back to back because one was not strong enough to stand on its own.