S01E01 - Pilot
No: 1 |
Season: 1
Episode: 1 |
Air Date: 2007-09-24 |
Runtime: mins
Summary
A pair of socially awkward theoretical physicists meet their new neighbor Penny, who is their polar opposite.
Director and Writers
Director: James Burrows
Writers: Chuck Lorre & Bill Prady
Script
Script: S01E01 - Pilot
Quotes
Leonard: Is this the high IQ sperm bank?
Nurse Althea: If you have to ask, maybe you shouldn't be here.
Leonard: Oh, I love cheesecake.
Sheldon: You're lactose intolerant.
Leonard: I don't eat it, I just think it's a good idea.
Leonard: Should we have invited her for lunch?
Sheldon: No, we're gonna start season two of Battlestar Galactica.
Leonard: We already watched the season two DVDs.
Sheldon: Not with commentary.
Penny: Oh, I'm so sorry, I'm such a mess. And on top of everything else, I'm all gross from moving. And my stupid shower doesn't even work.
Leonard: Our shower works.
Penny: Really? Would it be totally weird if I used it?
Sheldon: Yes.
Leonard: No.
Sheldon: No?
Leonard: No.
Sheldon: No.
Penny: Four years I lived with him! Four years, I mean that's like as long as high school!
Sheldon: It took you FOUR YEARS to get through high school?
Leonard: We need to widen our circle.
Sheldon: I have a very wide circle. I have 212 friends on MySpace.
Leonard: Yes, and you've never met one of them.
Sheldon: That's the beauty of it.
Sheldon: I really think we should examine the chain of causality here.
Leonard: Must we?
Sheldon: Event A: A beautiful woman stands naked in our shower. Event B: We drive halfway across town to retrieve a television set from the aforementioned woman's ex-boyfriend. Query: On what plane of existence is there even a semi-rational link between these events?
Leonard: She asked me to do her a favor, Sheldon.
Sheldon: Ah, yes. Well, that may be the proximal cause of our journey, but we both know it only exists in contradistinction to the higher-level distal cause.
Leonard: Which is?
Sheldon: You think with your penis.
Penny: (to Raj) I'm sorry, do you speak English?
Wolowitz: Oh, he speaks English, he just can't speak to women.
Penny: Really? Why?
Wolowitz: He's kind of a nerd. Juice box?
Penny: I'm a vegetarian. Except for fish. And the occasional steak, I love steak!
Leonard: So, tell us about you.
Penny: Um, me? Okay - I'm a Sagittarius, which probably tells you way more than you need to know.
Sheldon: Yes - it tells us that you participate in the mass cultural delusion that the sun's apparent position relative to arbitrarily defined constellations at the time of your birth somehow affects your personality.
Penny: (stares at Sheldon in utter confusion) Participateinthewhat?
Leonard: (scrambling to save face) I think what Sheldon is trying to say is that Sagittarius wouldn't have been our first guess.
Penny: Oh, yeah - lot of people think I'm a water sign.
Sheldon: If by "Holy Smokes", you mean a derivative restatement of the kind of stuff you could find scribbled on the wall of any men's room at MIT, sure.
Sheldon: Do you want to hear an interesting thing about stairs?
Leonard: Not really.
Sheldon: (going on anyway) If the height of a single step is off by as little as two millimeters, most people will trip.
Leonard: I don't care.
(thinks about it)
Leonard: Two milli - that doesn't seem right.
Sheldon: It's true - I did a series of experiments when I was twelve. My father broke his clavicle.
Leonard: Is that why they sent you to boarding school?
Sheldon: No - that was the result of my work with lasers.
Sheldon: And why can't she get her own TV?
Leonard: Come on, you know how it is with break-ups.
Sheldon: No, I don't and neither do you.
Leonard: But I -- I broke up with Joyce Kim.
Sheldon: You did not break-up with Joyce Kim, she defected to North Korea.
Leonard: To mend her broken heart.
Wolowitz: It's a Stephen Hawking lecture from MIT in 1974.
Leonard: This isn't a good time.
Wolowitz: (talking like a computer) "It's befooore he becaame a creeepy computer voooice!"
Sheldon: It's just some quantum mechanics with a little string theory doodling around the edges. That part there, that's just a joke. It's a spoof of the Born-Oppenheimer approximation.
Penny: So you're like one of those Beautiful Mind genius guys. This is really impressive.
Leonard: I have a board. If you like boards, this is my board.
Penny: Holy smokes!
Sheldon: If by "holy smokes", you mean a derivative restatement of the kind of stuff you can find scribbled on the wall of any men's room at MIT, sure.
Penny: So, what do you guys do for fun around here?
Sheldon: Well, today we tried masturbating for money.
Leonard: We brought home Indian food, and I know that moving can be stressful and I find that when I'm undergoing stress, good food and company can have a comforting effect. Also curry is a natural laxative, and I don't have to tell you that a clean colon is one less thing to worry about.
Sheldon: Leonard, I'm no expert here but I believe in the context of a luncheon invitation, you might want to skip the reference to bowel movements.
Sheldon: You're not done with her, are you?
Leonard: Our babies will be smart *AND* beautiful.
Sheldon: Not to mention imaginary.
Leonard: (discussing Sheldon's work) At least I didn't have to invent 26 dimensions just to make the math come out.
Sheldon: I didn't invent them. They're there.
Leonard: In what universe?
Sheldon: In *all* of them, that is the point!
Leonard: Come on! We have a combined IQ of 360 we should be able to figure out how to get into a stupid building.
(two girls selling cookies ring every bell, the door opens)
Sheldon: What do you think their combined IQ is?
Penny: So, what do you guys do for fun in this town?
Sheldon: Well, today we tried masturbating for money.
Sheldon: Leonard has a lady over.
Wolowitz: Yeah, right, your grandmother's back in town?
Wolowitz: Enchant?, mademoiselle. Howard Wolowitz, Caltech department of applied physics, you may be familiar with some of my work, it's currently orbiting Jupiter's largest moon taking high resolution digital photographs...?
Penny: Penny... I work at the Cheesecake Factory!
Sheldon: I don't know your odds in the world as a whole, but as far as the population of this car goes, you're a veritable mac daddy.
Sheldon: But then some poor woman is going to pin her hopes on my sperm, what if she winds up with a toddler that doesn't know if he should use an integral or a differential to solve for the area under a curve?
Leonard: I'm sure she'll still love him.
Sheldon: I wouldn't.
Sheldon: So, if a photon is directed through a plane with two slits in it and either slit is observed, it will not go through both slits. If it's unobserved, it will. However, if it's observed after it's left the plane, but before it hits its target, it will not have gone through both slits.
Leonard: Agreed. What's your point?
Sheldon: It's no point. I just think it's a good idea for a t-shirt.
Sheldon: Uhm, Penny, that's where I sit.
Penny: So sit next to me.
Sheldon: No, I sit there.
Penny: What's the difference?
Sheldon: What's the difference?
Leonard: Here we go.
Sheldon: In the winter, that seat is close enough to the radiator to remain warm, and yet not so close as to cause perspiration. In the summer, it's directly in the path of a cross-breeze created by opening windows there and there. It faces the television at an angle that is neither direct, thus discouraging conversation, nor so far wide as to create a parallax distortion. I could go on.
Wolowitz: Bonne Douche!
Penny: I'm sorry?
Wolowitz: It's French for "Good shower". It's a sentiment I can express in six languages.
Leonard: Save it for your blog, Howard.
Notes and Trivia
Darth Vader Shampoo and Luke Skywalker Shampoo actually exist, but there isn't a conditioner.
Howard's belt buckle is a Nintendo controller.
Leonard (Johnny Galecki) and Sheldon (Jim Parsons) buy lunch from House of Tandoori, which is a real restaurant in Pasadena.
Leonard (Johnny Galecki) states that the combined IQ of Sheldon (Jim Parsons) and himself is 360. In a later episode of season 1 Sheldon states his IQ as 187 meaning that Leonard's IQ is 173.
Penny offers to pay for dinner near the end of the episode. This is one of the few times Penny is assumed to be responsible for paying for food during the show's entire run. It is a long-running plot point that Penny does not pay for food. This is the only time she actually offers to pay for her food and the food of others when she says, "Dinner is on me."
Raj (Kunal Nayyar)'s hat in this episode has the number 42 on it, likely paying homage to Douglas Adams's book Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy where the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything is 42.
The opening scene at the sperm bank was cut for syndication. Showrunner Chuck Lorre realized that the scene was no longer compatible with the rest of the show, where Sheldon is so protective of his DNA that he would never sell it so carelessly at a sperm bank. It is also established later on that Sheldon has plenty of savings, removing the need for him to earn quick money that way.
The receptionist in the sperm bank was played by Vernee Watson. Watson has played a nurse in nearly every episode that a character has ended up in the hospital. Including Bernadette's first birth and the time Sheldon needed a haircut. More recently she continued that streak when she time traveled and appeared in Young Sheldon (2017) as Nurse Robinson.
The scene where Sheldon (Jim Parsons) and Leonard (Johnny Galecki) observe Penny (Kaley Cuoco) through her open apartment door would be repeated as an homage in the series' 100th episode (The Recombination Hypothesis (2012)). The characters would even be dressed similarly, right down to Penny wearing the exact same blue top that she wears here.
The sign on the wall at the sperm bank reads "Donations Assistance Materials Available."
The song that Howard (Simon Helberg) sings in the car at the end is "Baby, Don't Get Hooked on Me" originally recorded by Mac Davis.
This is the only episode where Raj (Kunal Nayyar) is seen with a hat.
Goofs
None
Cast
Johnny Galecki | Leonard Hofstadter |
Jim Parsons | Sheldon Cooper |
Kaley Cuoco | Penny |
Simon Helberg | Howard Wolowitz |
Kunal Nayyar | Raj Koothrappali |
Vernee Watson | Althea |
Brian Patrick Wade | Kurt |