Can love conquer even the OCD-stricken emotional fortress that is Sheldon Cooper?

The Mr. Spock of geek comedy, having ignored an ambience of romantic fervour - and, frequently, desperation - for three seasons of The Big Bang Theory, can't escape the network impetus to mate any longer. Though he's denying it big time and talking about limiting reproductive activity to a sterile session in a fertility lab, it looks like the main strand of the new season might be Dr. Sheldon Cooper's tentative steps towards some kind of humanisation.

It had to happen. With Lt. Data, it was set up to happen in the character's backstory. With Spock, it was biologically ordained in Amok Time. But quite what species of Pon Farr Sheldon will prove capable of is a great starting point for season five, in a great opening episode.

Once again Howard Wolowitz is bringing his work home from the office, but since he's subcontracting for NASA, that means the geek clique spend a delighted half-hour waiting for a multi-million dollar robot arm to serve up their Chinese take-out order. The food's cold, but they're too hypnotised by the science to care. Of course it doesn't take long for horny Howard to figure out that a robot hand might have more erotic possibilities, which leads in short order to an embarassing and hilarious visit to the emergency ward, since Howard's new paramour just 'won't let go'.

The resolution of all this is possibly a nod by the episode writers to Graham Linehan's The It Crowd. Linehan is an acknowledged fan of Big Bang Theory, and the Gordian Knot solution that the admitting nurse finds to Howard's painful conundrum must have pricked up the writer's ears.

In the meantime Sheldon has sequestered Penny for a lift to what he has to admit is probably his first date ever, with equally OCD-stricken scientist Amy Farrah Fowler (Mayim Bialik in a role nerdy enough to justify the neuroscience qualifications she followed up after Blossom). The moderately dumb/normal Penny has a hard time convincing Sheldon that there may be more to getting together with a woman than text messaging and donating of genetic material, but her efforts to get the lovebirds talking on some kind of normal social level only leads to a ruthless calculation of the statistics of her own rather more prolific sexual history by the Sheldon human-calculator. At least Sheldon and Amy have found something to bond over besides molecular biology.

The Robotic Manipulation is one of the most promising starts ever to a new BBT season. CBS seem to have let Chuck Lorre and company have another foot or two of lead by allowing anything as risqué as the robot-hand gag, and the incongruity is part of the reason that it's so funny. And to boot, this episode's title even has a neat double-meaning that relates to both its strands. Now that's clever.

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