‘The Big Bang Theory’ Episode 6.08 Recap: Leonard’s Jealousy and Sheldon’s Mystery

The latest episode of “The Big Bang Theory” managed to be funny despite not featuring either Amy or Bernadette. While those two characters are brilliant, it’s nice to see an episode that throws back to the first couple of seasons of the show. In this episode, Leonard gets increasingly jealous of Penny’s classmate while the other guys launch an investigation into Sheldon’s strange disappearances each day. Here is a recap of the latest episode, “The 43 Peculiarity.”

Jealous comes to Leonard

Leonard and Penny are hanging out in her apartment, and she starts getting texts from a male classmate. Leonard almost immediately shows signs of jealousy, but Penny says the two are merely working on a school project. Leonard asks Penny to tell him that she has a boyfriend. She does just that over text, but it doesn’t stop Leonard from getting jealous. She tells him that he is coming over the next night to work on their project, and Leonard’s concern gets even worse.

The next night, Penny works on her project with her classmate while Leonard tries to watch through his peephole. He tells Sheldon that he’s going to stop because he trusts Penny, but Sheldon gets in his head even more when he points out Leonard’s shortcomings compared to the rest of the world. When Penny’s friend leaves, Leonard follows him down the steps and tries to scare him by saying that Penny’s boyfriend is a tough guy. This upsets Penny, who is standing at the top of the stairs waiting for Leonard. The two eventually make peace later in the episode after Penny says that Leonard should trust her, and says that she loves Leonard for the first time. It’s a little awkward at first when they start to shed tears, so Penny darts off to work. All seems fine in their relationship, although jealousy might not be done yet. Sheldon’s assistant clearly has a thing for Leonard, even though he is completely oblivious to it.

Sheldon’s mystery

Howard and Raj start taking an interest in Sheldon after they realize that he disappears for 20 minutes at 2:45 every afternoon. They decide to follow him, and see Sheldon enter a storage room in the basement. They begin to speculate on all of the different things that he could be doing, but nothing seems reasonable. Later, Howard and Raj break into Sheldon’s secret room when he isn’t there. It turns out that the room is mostly empty, except for the number 43 written on a chalkboard. This makes the mystery grow even more for them, and they start to obsess over what the number means. Ultimately, they place a webcam in the room to see what Sheldon does. However, Sheldon discovers the webcam, and makes a fake video in which he sneaks into a wormhole and is attacked by an alien. An angry Sheldon scolds Howard and Raj, and tells them that they will never know what he does in the room. At the end of the episode, it’s revealed that Sheldon plays with a hacky-sack in the room, and is trying to break his record of 43 hits in a row.