Not every single episode of “The Big Bang Theory” is a winner — which makes sense. Chuck Lorre’s hit CBS sitcom, which ran from 2007 to 2019 and spanned 12 seasons and 279 episodes, was always pretty well-received by audiences, but again, that’s no guarantee that every single installment won them over. Aside from the show’s unaired pilot, which is famously weird — and even features a totally different actor as Penny, who would eventually be played by Kaley Cuoco — there are a handful of episodes that just sort of stink, and we’ve compiled five of the biggest duds.
Whether it’s because the characters are extra infuriating, there’s a new character who really sucks, or the central group ends up separated, there are plenty of things that can make a “Big Bang Theory” episode less than great. These five are especially grating and ridiculous, so if you don’t want to suffer through them, call this a handy list of episodes to avoid during a rewatch (ranked from “least worst” to “absolutely terrible”).
5. The Speckerman Recurrence (Season 5, Episode 11)
There are already a lot of characters on “The Big Bang Theory,” so adding new ones in from the characters’ pasts just feels frustrating — especially when you know they’re not going to stick around. With that said, nobody wanted Jimmy Speckerman, played by Lance Barber, to ever come back after the season 5 episode “The Speckerman Recurrence.”
“The Big Bang Theory” loves driving the point home that the main guys — Sheldon Cooper (Jim Parsons), Leonard Hofstadter (Johnny Galecki), Raj Koothrappali (Kunal Nayyar), and Howard Wolowitz (Simon Helberg) — are huge nerds, so naturally, they talk a lot about how much they were bullied in high school. Enter Jimmy Speckerman, who asks Leonard if they can meet up for a drink despite the fact that Jimmy spent their shared time in high school absolutely traumatizing Leonard.
If you think anyone learns a lesson in this episode, you’d be utterly and completely wrong! After they meet up, Jimmy shows up at Leonard’s door completely wasted, so Leonard tells him to crash on his and Sheldon’s couch rather than let him drive home. When Jimmy wakes up, he’s just as awful as he was in high school and ends up chasing Leonard and Sheldon out of their apartment. It’s just a complete waste of time when all is said and done. Add in a dull, weird subplot about Penny, Amy Farrah Fowler (Mayim Bialik), and Bernadette Rostenkowski (Melissa Rauch) stealing clothes from a donation booth — and the fact that Barber also plays Sheldon’s dad George Sr. in the spin-off “Young Sheldon” — and you’ve got a cruddy episode on your hands.
4. The Skank Reflex Analysis (Season 5, Episode 1)
After Chuck Lorre and his creative team made the absolutely baffling decision to toss Raj and Penny into bed together at the end of season 4, audiences had to deal with the fallout in the season 5 premiere “The Skank Reflex Analysis.” (The title is just the gross cherry on top of this entire outing, honestly.) The entire run time of the episode is just the core group arguing about whether or not Penny and Raj actually hooked up, because she was too drunk in the moment to remember precisely what happened after and Raj is telling everybody that they’re in “love.” Leonard, as usual, is having the calmest and sanest reaction to all of this. No, I’m totally kidding. He acts like a jerk towards both Penny and Raj the whole time.
While the guys squabble over who Penny “wants” the most (other than Leonard, who she’s already dated), Penny is just completely freaked out over what she may or may not have done and hides out at Amy’s house, even though Amy’s pretty rude to her about the whole situation too. So, what’s the resolution here? Raj finally tells Penny that, actually, nothing serious happened; when she touched him, he got a little too excited and then they both went to sleep. Between the absolutely bizarre conclusion to this awful storyline and the way everyone treats Penny throughout the episode, “The Skank Reflex Analysis” is definitely avoidable.
3. The Itchy Brain Simulation (Season 7, Episode 8)
Sheldon treats his friends like garbage throughout pretty much all of “The Big Bang Theory,” but in the season 7 episode “The Itchy Brain Simulation,” he takes his behavior to a new and pretty reprehensible level. When he asks Leonard to locate some skeeball tickets he won years beforehand, Leonard is forced to tell Sheldon that he keeps a box of old Sheldon-adjacent junk … which includes a DVD of “The Super Mario Bros. Movie” they forgot to return to a video store. Sheldon is incredibly bothered by this loose end and tries to get Leonard to understand why it bothers him so much by making him wear an itchy red sweater (made by Leonard’s aunt) until he can return the DVD. Why? Sheldon says stuff like unreturned DVDs make his brain “itchy,” and he needs Leonard to commiserate as penance.
Unfortunately for Leonard, the video store is closed and its owner has died. When Leonard tries to find the owner’s next of kin, only to discover that they live in either Armenia or Lebanon, he flips out at Sheldon, at which point Sheldon finally admits that he paid the late fee for the DVD seven years ago and there’s actually no issue whatsoever with the fact that they still have it. This is particularly nasty behavior from Sheldon, and the fact that Leonard’s rash from the sweater just gets grosser and grosser throughout the episode certainly doesn’t help matters. Also, Raj — the character Kunal Nayyar very nearly didn’t even play — is weird to women. That’s his whole storyline.
2. The Romance Recalibration (Season 10, Episode 13)
“The Big Bang Theory” pairs a lot of its main characters up pretty early in the narrative, which means that the writers have to constantly keep introducing issues into the story to cause conflict amongst the couples. This brings us to “The Romance Recalibration,” the 13th episode of the show’s 10th season, which sees Penny feeling taken for granted by Leonard. As a result, she decides to bring Amy along with her for a spa weekend instead of her husband. This all sounds sort of normal, but what’s really weird about this entire thing is that the show seems to temporarily forget that Sheldon hates all forms of intimacy and is pretty mean to Amy, and sets these two up as the superior couple just for one single episode.
No, Leonard isn’t exactly a prince where Penny is concerned, but the idea that Sheldon and Amy can teach Leonard and Penny a thing or two about relationships just because they have a “relationship agreement” in print is completely absurd. (It gets worse: Leonard and Penny practically beg Sheldon to make them their own “relationship agreement.”) After this episode, Sheldon and Amy never act like that ever again — and certainly never have an extended makeout sequence on-screen again — making it clear that this dull, irritating episode was a complete divergence from the rest of the series.
1. The Matrimonial Momentum (Season 9, Episode 1)
What’s with bad season premieres on “The Big Bang Theory?” The season 9 premiere, “The Matrimonial Momentum,” makes a huge mistake right from the jump — it separates Penny and Leonard from the rest of the gang as they plan a hasty elopement in Las Vegas rather than have a wedding with all of their loved ones present. The wedding is live-streamed for everyone back in Pasadena, but the whole thing just … really sucks. Penny recites the entirety of Randy Newman’s “You’ve Got a Friend in Me” from “Toy Story” in lieu of writing any actual vows for her husband, and Leonard ends up ruining the entire day when they get back to their hotel room because in the season 8 finale, “The Commitment Determination,” he revealed to Penny that he kissed another woman on a boat in the North Sea while he was away on a research trip. (This reveal is the entire impetus for their elopement. Real healthy stuff here.)
Despite Leonard telling Penny that the kiss was terrible — “If you’re imagining that it was sexy, it wasn’t. We were both drunk, and she smelled like an ashtray. The boat was moving a lot, so I chipped her tooth” — it obviously ruins the entire day, and the end result is that Penny and Leonard’s wedding sucks so hard that they do it all over again in the season 10 premiere “The Conjugal Conjecture.” The show should have just skipped their first wedding entirely, to be honest.
