It’s always weird to watch a season finale of The Big Bang Theory. The show’s so generally plotless that an episode that builds to a big cliffhanger—here that Raj and Penny have sex and everybody’s in the apartment to see their walk of shame—often feels kind of bizarre. On the other hand, there’s an argument to be made (as my wife did to me right after this episode finished) that the season finales of the show are slightly more satisfying because season finales often end in a state of the plot being unfinished, and that’s just the way the show is naturally. And, indeed, after a first scene I didn’t like a whole lot, this episode won me over fairly quickly by focusing on the Sheldon and Raj pairing, which has quietly built into one of the show’s best. And the cliffhanger, while kind of shamelessly attempting to set up a love triangle (since the show seems done with the Howard/Bernadette/Raj thing for now) isn’t a bad one, as these things go.
Does the last moment make any sense? Depends on where they go with it. Like most of the folks on sitcoms, the Big Bang Theory gang spends almost all of its time hanging out with each other, rather than anybody else. That means that, like most sitcoms, this show is going to eventually work through as many different couple permutations as it can come up with (especially when you consider that Sheldon’s off the table for anyone but, theoretically, Amy and Howard and Bernadette won’t be cheating on each other if they get married, at least not with anyone in the group). This means that Penny and Raj were going to hook up at SOME point, and the show bit the bullet and got it out of the way in the most logical way possible: They got really drunk. Sure, Penny says Raj is cute and all, but it’s hard to see the two getting together without the influence of alcohol (and that’s discounting my long-standing antipathy toward the “Raj needs alcohol to talk to women” device).
So, of course, we won’t really know how this cliffhanger works until season five. And that’s probably the sign of a good cliffhanger: It creates more story possibilities than it destroys. Already, we’re going to have the obligatory episode where Raj is way more into Penny than she is into him, the episode where Leonard gets a little jealous, the episode where Howard is shocked it happened, etc., etc., etc. Plus, since Leonard and Priya have, apparently, broken up, what with her moving back to India and all, it creates a slightly more balanced love triangle, particularly if Kunal Nayyar and Kaley Cuoco end up having non-drunk chemistry, something Cuoco and Johnny Galecki never had. I can’t say I’m exactly “looking forward” to seeing how this plays out, since it’s all fairly predictable, but I don’t HATE it, like a lot of fans seem to (if a cursory scan of Twitter is any indication). And I admire the writers for getting the “everybody finds out” scene out of the way right away. It could have been ponderous building to that next year, but they ripped the Band-Aid right off.
The rest of the episode was more hit and miss but generally pretty funny. I didn’t really like the opening scene where everyone made fun of Leonard for being lactose intolerant, thanks to its huge number of boring fart jokes (the low-point perhaps being rhyming “rooty tooty” with “booty”), but I sort of saw what the writers were going for all the same: The whole group is as cohesive as it’s ever been. And when they make fun of each other, it’s not meant to be malicious or mean-spirited, just good, fun joking among friends. So we’re setting up the status quo that will be torn down throughout the episode, with Raj having to move out of his own apartment and Priya and Leonard fighting and Howard feeling upset about how he’s not a doctor and all of his friends are (and about Bernadette making him a sort of “kept fiancée) and Raj and Penny sleeping together.