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The Staircase Implementation

Leonard tells Penny about how he met Sheldon for the first time…and what happened to the elevator.Source: CBS

Synopsis

A squabble over the thermostat setting leads to Leonard going over to Penny’s and recounting for her the story of how he met and moved in with Sheldon.

Full Recap

As Penny is preparing to paint her toenails, she overhears Leonard and Sheldon arguing over the apartment temperature—adjusted two degrees by Leonard—and allows Leonard to sleep on the couch. He tells her of how naive he was when they met seven years ago. His first clue should have been the escaping ex-roommate, who warns him to “run fast, run far.”

By mistake, Leonard first meets the huge transvestite that used to live in Penny’s apartment, and finds even he describes Sheldon as “crazy”. He meets Sheldon, who doesn’t make eye contact and quizzes him for the barriers to roommate-hood. Leonard correctly identifies radon as the sixth noble gas and chooses Picard over Kirk (albeit Original Series over Next Generation), and thus passes the first barrier, allowing him to enter the apartment. The common area is barely furnished, with a TV on cinder blocks, a small table holding only a game console, and two lawn chairs, the right one (in relation to the TV) in “a state of eternal dibs”. The interview continues with Leonard agreeing to drive Sheldon to the university every day, with Sheldon covering up his lack of driving ability by saying, “I can. I choose not to”; and correctly assigning “preserving the knowledge” as the highest priority in a post-apocalyptic world, although Sheldon would have accepted any answer other than “procreating”, thus passing the second barrier. He passes the third barrier by choosing 7:30 AM as the time to “evacuate [his] bowels”, winning the right to see his room, which has “Die Sheldon Die” painted in red on the wall. Before Leonard officially moves in, other details are ironed out, including reserving Friday nights to watch Firefly, sure to be on for years; the apartment flag, which is never to be flown upside-down unless in distress; and, if either invents time-travel, to make their first stop that date in five seconds, which, to their disappointment, doesn’t happen. When Leonard fails to generate any sympathy from Penny, he tells her about the first time he had a girl over. When Leonard and the previously-unseen Joyce Kim are in bed, Sheldon incessantly knocks until Leonard answers. Sheldon presents him with a roommate-agreement violation, as Leonard failed to give twelve hours notice of “impending coitus,” causing Joyce to storm out. This gets a little sympathy from Penny.

Leonard, who is now doing Penny’s nails, tells her he couldn’t get too mad at Sheldon, because Joyce was a North Korean spy and Leonard hadn’t revealed anything important about the high-end government research he’d been doing. He then goes into the incident with the elevator, which was working when he moved in.

Sheldon comes home to find Leonard playing video games with Howard and Raj, whom he’d just met, on, to his horror, a couch Leonard had bought in place of the lawn chairs to make room for company. He noted the agreement allows him half of the common areas, but Sheldon claims a breach due to lack of e-mail notification, which is rectified when he checks his spam folder on his Palm Pilot. He tries each seat on the couch, trading with whoever sits there at the time, and doesn’t like the middle because he keeps having to turn his head; the right because there’s a draft on his neck; and is still not comfortable on the left because there’s too many people. The other three go to Howard’s place, which, from what Leonard imagines, leaves Sheldon relatively overjoyed.

As Penny does Leonard’s nails, he continues with the story. In Howard’s room, Leonard admires Howard’s three-stage rocket, which might break Mach 1 if he had the rocket fuel, which Leonard was going to show to Joyce. When they get back to the apartment, Leonard mixes the fuel into Tovex, which Sheldon notes won’t work because the formula wasn’t adjusted correctly from full-scale rocket to model. Leonard realizes this too late as he rushes the now-smoking container out the door, while Sheldon turns the flag upside-down. Leonard takes the container with him into the elevator, when Sheldon takes it from him, places in the middle of the elevator, shoves him out, and closes the doors. Three seconds later, the container explodes, thus destroying the elevator. Leonard goes on to say that Sheldon saved his life and didn’t rat him out to anyone. Leonard asks what Penny did seven years ago, and she says she was in high school studying and volunteering-in her flashback, she was glad the pregnancy test came out negative.

Leonard goes back to the apartment with fresh-coated nails and the fight is over…until Leonard turns on Babylon 5, which Sheldon hates, leading to another loud argument as Penny listens with a bit of a smile.

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