Sheldon's feeling a bit flat this week, while a Geek God makes a guest appearance...

"The Cruciferous Vegetable Amplification"

With about 22 episodes to go in season four, we can't expect every week to advance the story arc of our nerdy heroes, and this week proved aimless but ultimately funny. Determined to live long enough to reach that inevitable stage of human evolution where we essentially become immortal cyborgs, Sheldon decides to join the vanguard and create a real-world 'avatar'. It's not blue, sexy or even able to open doors, though - actually, it's basically a motorized hat-stand wearing a t-shirt and a monitor for a head, but it keeps Dr. Cooper away from the real world he came so shockingly close to last week.

In the meantime the ill-named Penny is broke as usual and racking up debts with ex-boyfriend Leonard, even though - as Raj elliptically points out - she's not really 'doing anything for it' anymore. Hints at a reunion?

When Sheldon-bot makes an arguably pointless visit to the restaurant Penny works in and is offered by Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak to autograph his vintage Apple II, the sharp limitations of the nutty doctor's cybernetic amanuensis quickly come into focus; within minutes, both the classic computer and its owner are lying broken at the bottom of the stairwell. And it's better than this week's fart gags, it has to be said.

(Actually one of the cool things about Big Bang Theory is how a show this offbeat can keep playing up something as dumb as the notion that the stairs surrounding the broken lift actually have more than one flight. Is that table outside the third-floor apartment on wheels?)

There's nothing to this episode, except milking the hilarity of inappropriately-used genius. Sheldon-bot doesn't quite have the personality of the NASA-financed robotic onanism device that Howard sequestered last week, but Vegetable Amplification gets funnier and funnier as the episode goes on. And it enjoyably delays the possibility of Sheldon's transition to an actual human being - in fact it quite reverses the process.

I'm glad Chuck Lorre and Co. seem to have recognized where the heart of Big Bang Theory is. It took three seasons to play out the Leonard/Penny dynamic on which the show was founded, with Sheldon spending far too many episodes as scenery, and now that there isn't anywhere further to go with that, I think the writers feel their collective leash getting longer.

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