“The Meteorite Manifestation” is episode 14 of the final season of The Big Bang Theory, which means we’re entering the final stretch! Only 10 episodes left, and tonight’s was… maybe not the strongest of the season so far.
RELATED: Here’s our recap of the last episode!
The big story of the episode is that Bernadette (Melissa Rauch) and Howard (Simon Helberg) have a new neighbor, Andy (Joel McCrary), who has built a second-floor balcony with ultra-bright, motion-sensor floodlights. This means that Bernadette and Howard can’t use their hot tub anymore at night, because they’re on display.
They go to the city zoning office, where they’re helped by Nathan (Andrew Daly!), who describes all the forms and offices they’ll need to work through in order to address the issue. It’s overwhelming, so they complain about it over dinner with their friends.
Sheldon (Jim Parsons) perks up, because this kind of form-based minutiae is his jam. He volunteers to step in, and the next day he and Amy (Mayim Bialik) visit the Wolowitz home to assess the situation. Sheldon’s questions about basic code issues leads to the revelation that Bernadette’s dad built their un-permitted deck, and that they renovated their bathroom on the DL, too.
Conflicted, Sheldon goes to the zoning office ready to turn in his friends for their violations. He fills in the paperwork and enjoys a laugh with Nathan, but ultimately decides that the unwritten rules of friendship supersede the written rules of the law. He has so much pent-up snitch energy left after making his decision, though, that he ruthlessly informs on neighbor Andy.
As Andy removes his encroaching balcony, Bernadette and Howard picnic on their deck and deny knowing the snitch Sheldon Cooper.
Meanwhile, Bert (Brian Posehn) has found a meteorite with a biological signature, and he wants Raj (Kunal Nayyar) to help him examine it. Leonard (Johnny Galecki) gets jealous, since he doesn’t have anything as cool as that or Amy and Sheldon’s Nobel Prize prospect going on, and also because Bert would rather use a diamond saw than Leonard’s laser to cut into the meteorite.
When Leonard gets sick, he falls into a fever dream in which he steals the meteorite and cuts it open with his laser, only to be infected by an alien virus and become a flesh-eating monster. First he eats Bert and Raj in his lab, then he awakens from the dream to find Penny (Kaley Cuoco) worrying over him and eats her, too. When he finally wakes all the way up, he realizes he needs to apologize to his friends, and he does.
Denise (Lauren Lapkus) and Stuart (Kevin Sussman), who warned the guys against cutting into a meteorite after a lifetime of reading comics in which that starts a catastrophe, aren’t proven right that going ahead would release an alien plague. They decide to lock up the comic book store anyway and start working on repopulating the Earth. Woo woo!
RELATED: Follow my Season 12 recaps here!
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