“The Big Bang Theory” ran for 12 years and as many seasons, and as a result, it featured plenty of guest stars along the way. Some, like Wil Wheaton, played themselves, and if we’re talking about Wheaton, the show also played host to a ton of “Star Trek” veterans … but some people played clearly defined characters, as was the case with Riki Lindhome. She first appeared as Ramona Nowitzki but returned much later in season 10. It’s a pretty big gap between seasons, but it was all by design.
In an interview with TVGuide just before the season 10 finale, showrunner and executive producer Steve Molaro explained that Lindhome’s return as Ramona was specifically meant to cause conflict in Sheldon Cooper’s (Jim Parsons) slow-moving romantic relationship with Amy Farrah Fowler (Mayim Bialik). Back in season 2, Ramona made it abundantly clear — to everybody but the oblivious Sheldon — that she had a huge crush on Sheldon, so in season 10, Ramona makes herself even clearer.
“With Amy away for a few months, we liked the idea that Sheldon was essentially on his own for the first time as far as what we’ve seen on ‘Big Bang Theory,’ living in an apartment by himself, his girlfriend who he’s very attached to is now far away, and we wanted to explore what that would mean for his character,” Molaro told the outlet. “One of the things we thought could be interesting based on that was what would happen if another woman came along while Amy was gone and what would that do to Sheldon as well as his group of friends.”
“And then once we had that thought, what if another woman comes sniffing around after Sheldon, the next question was who would that woman be?” Molaro continued. “And we had always loved when Riki played Ramona in season 2, so we quickly called her to see if she was available, and she was, and it happened very quickly after that. Everything fell into place. We love her.”
What does Ramona Nowitzki do in season 2 — and then in season 10?
Let’s back up regarding Ramona Nowitzki for a second, because she makes quite the impression on Sheldon and all of his friends when she first pops up in season 2 of “The Big Bang Theory.” In an episode appropriately titled “The Cooper-Nowitzki Theorem,” Ramona, a post-doctoral researcher, former graduate student at the California Institute of Technology (where Sheldon and his friends work, aside from Kaley Cuoco’s Penny), and ardent admirer of Sheldon, alarms everyone in Sheldon’s periphery when she starts acting as his defacto assistant not just in work, but in life. As Sheldon slowly starts to realize that the obsessive Ramona is preventing him from doing fun stuff like video games and paintball — as she prefers that he focus on his potentially groundbreaking scientific research — his friends all realize that Ramona isn’t just interested in Sheldon’s brain. By the time the episode is over, Sheldon has ended his project with Ramona solely because she wants to name it “The Cooper-Nowitzki Theorem.” (Yes, that’s right — Sheldon doesn’t object to anything about Ramona until she asks for shared credit on their work.)
Much later on, in the season 10 finale “The Long Distance Dissonance,” Sheldon is vulnerable with Amy doing research across the country at Princeton University (hence the distance Steve Molaro mentioned in his interview). Armed with her PhD, Ramona hangs around Sheldon until he finally asks if she’s interested in him romantically … and she responds by kissing him. Alarmed, Sheldon simply leaves and boards a plane … to New Jersey.
Ramona’s very presence helps inspire a grand romantic gesture for Amy … from Sheldon
The season 10 episode where Ramona Nowitzki reappears isn’t just important because the very funny Riki Lindhome is in it. It correspondingly happens to be the episode where Sheldon gets down on one knee and proposes to Amy. Ramona’s impetuous kiss sends Sheldon right into Amy’s arms, which technically provides a cliffhanger for the season 10 finale (although it’s not entirely surprising that, in the season 11 premiere “The Proposal Proposal,” we learn that Amy said yes and that she’s grateful to Ramona for basically pushing Sheldon to propose whether the other woman meant to or not).
Writer Tara Hernandez explained how this all came to be in Jessica Radloff’s 2022 oral history “The Big Bang Theory: The Definitive, Inside Story of the Epic Hit Series,” saying that it all came together incredibly quickly. “We wrote that episode in a day,” Hernandez revealed. “Chuck [Lorre, one of the show’s creators] came in and said, ‘What are we doing?’ and we said, ‘We’re doing the finale; we think we’re doing this story.’ He was like, ‘Okay, but I feel like we need more conflict for Sheldon to get to the decision [to propose].'” It was apparently Lorre’s idea to bring back Ramona, and after finding out that Lindhome was available, they got to work on writing the episode, knowing that some audience members wouldn’t even remember her character. “But we decided to try it and wrote through lunch, through pee breaks, etc. It was total magic, and the episode just had this charge of building to the eventual proposal,” Hernandez said. “That to me is a season finale I cherish the most in addition to the series finale.”
“The Big Bang Theory,” including all of Lindhome’s appearances as Ramona, is streaming on Max now.
