Subscribe
Previous Post
Original Air Date: March 24, 2008
SHELDON and LEONARD arrive home while having a discussion about why Skynet would create a hot, petite, 17-year-old Terminator on the Fox TV series Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. As they climb the stairs, they hear PENNY singing, an event one roommate describes with the comment that if cats could sing, they’d hate it, too.
Penny meets them on the steps on her way down to rehearsal, and she tells them she just got a part in a workshop production of Rent because the original actress fell ill. She also invites them to her showcase performance on Friday, but Leonard lies on the fly that the roommates have to attend a symposium at the exact same time. Sheldon notes Leonard lied without even showing a physiological response, a clear sign of a sociopath.
Unfortunately, Sheldon isn’t comfortable being included in Leonard’s lie, and he becomes obsessed with Penny finding out. To preclude that happening, he tells her Leonard lied in order to spare him embarrassment. The real reason they can’t go to the production is because Leonard has to drive him to his first cousin Leopold’s drug intervention in Long Beach after the relative supposedly skipped rehab.
This lie is supposed to be superior to Leonard’s because it makes Leonard look noble — trying to protect Sheldon — while also being unravelable. That is, Penny can’t find any information to the contrary about it (surprise — Sheldon doesn’t really have a cousin named Leopold), while all she has to do to unravel Leonard’s lie is go online to the right place.
The next morning, following a trip to Long Beach with HOWARD and RAJESH to have dinner at a murder-mystery restaurant, Leonard goes into the kitchen to find TOBY LOOBENFELD, a research assistant in the particle physics research lab who also majored in theater at MIT. Loobenfeld is pretending to be Sheldon’s cousin at Sheldon’s request. But, when Penny arrives and meets him, he and Sheldon get into a heated discussion about the true made-up source of the fictional relative’s pretend addiction.
While they spar verbally, Penny invites Leonard over to her apartment to watch a tape of her performance, which apparently was so bad that by the end of it, only two people were left in the audience. Poor Leonard is forced to lie again and say he wants to see it, and worse, Penny gets to watch him watch it.
RESOURCES
