The Pancake Batter Anomaly

"The Pancake Batter Anomaly" is the eleventh episode of the first season of the CBS sitcom, The Big Bang Theory. This episode first aired on March 31, 2008.

Summary
When Sheldon gets sick, Leonard quickly escapes from Sheldon's grasp, which leaves Penny to take care of him the needy Sheldon.

Extended Plot
The episode opens with Leonard losing at Sheldon's hand in a game of 3-dimensional Chess. Penny has just returned from Nebraska and stops by for her mail, she adds "It was the worst trip. Everyone got sick over the weekend".

Sheldon being a "mysophobe" (a fear of germs), springs up, distances himself from Penny and starts spraying the area, as he is afraid he may catch a cold. Leonard quickly dismissed this as another one of Sheldon's overreactions. Later that night, Sheldon asks Leonard to place a measuring cup in the bathroom so Sheldon can measure his urine output to make sure his kidney isn't shutting down. Leonard quickly becomes angry because he mixes pancake batter in that cup. After Sheldon proves to Leonard that the measuring cup was always used to measure urine, Leonard sarcastically says he owes the Betty Crocker company a letter of apology. By the next morning, Sheldon discovers he is sick.

Evidently, this has happened before because Sheldon had an ear infection in 2006 as Leonard quickly mobilizes and dashes out of the house to avoid Sheldon. Leonard, Howard and Raj decide to go to a "Planet Of The Apes" marathon screening to lay low and avoid him. Meanwhile, at the Cheesecake Factory, Penny stumbles upon Sheldon whose demands for soup and slightly terrorizes the customers. At the screening, Leonard gets a call from Penny, who asks for his help with the Sheldon crisis, but he makes up an excuse preventing him from helping her, though he feels guilty about it. After Penny drops Sheldon off at his apartment after leaving work early, out of sympathy she gets pulled into taking care of him. He tells her that when he was a visiting professor in Germany, he got sick. His mom flew him back to Texas to help Sheldon's dad with their house. Their house was aluminum and had slid off the cinderblocks again. He told her that a maid gave him an enema. Back at the screening, just as the ten and a half hour marathon started, Howard accidentally breaks Leonard's glasses after he dropped them, rendering him blind. Sheldon begs Penny to rub some Vick's VapoRub on his chest, he also asks her to sing Soft Kitty to him, a song his mother always sang to him when he was sick.

As Leonard doesn't want to watch the marathon blurred by his shortsightedness, Leonard, Howard and Raj go back to the apartment in an attempt to retrieve Leonard's spare glasses, Leonard is caught by Penny and Howard and Raj abandon him. An angered Penny alerts Sheldon of Leonard's presence, Leonard, still blinded, makes a mad dash to escape, but runs into one of the house's pillar. The episode ends showing Leonard with an ice bag over his hurt head and a sick Sheldon.

Quotes
(Howard is asleep, when the phone rings.)

Mrs Wolowitz: (From downstairs) HOWARD, IT'S THE PHONE!

Howard: I KNOW IT'S THE PHONE, MA! I HEAR THE PHONE!

Mrs Wolowitz: WELL, WHO'S CALLING AT THIS UNGODLY HOUR?!

Howard: I DON'T KNOW!

Mrs Wolowitz: WELL, ASK THEM WHY THEY'RE CALLING AT THIS UNGODLY HOUR!

Howard: HOW CAN I ASK THEM WHEN I'M TALKING TO YOU?!

Howard: [Answers the phone] Hello?

Leonard (in the apartment lobby, hiding from Sheldon.) Hey Howard, it's Leonard. Code: Milky Green.

Howard: Dear Lord, not Milky Green.

Leonard: Affirmative, with fever.

Mrs. Wolowitz: WHO'S ON THE PHONE?!

Howard: IT'S LEONARD!

Mrs. Wolowitz: WHY IS HE CALLING?!

Howard: SHELDON'S SICK!

Mrs. 'Wolowitz: WERE YOU PLAYING WITH HIM?!

Howard: FOR GOD'S SAKE, MA, I'M 26 YEARS OLD!

Mrs. Wolowitz: EXCUSE ME, MR. GROWN-UP! WHAT DO YOU WANT FOR BREAKFAST?!

Howard: CHOCOLATE MILK AND EGGOS, PLEASE!

Leonard: Howard, listen....

[Phone beeps.]

Howard: Hang on, call waiting.

Leonard: Wha..? No, don't -

[Howard takes the call.]

Howard: Hello?

Sheldon: Howard, I'm sick!

(Howard doesn't know what to do until he decides to pretend to be his mother answering.)

Howard as Mrs. Wolowitz: Uh, HOWARD'S SLEEPING, THIS IS HIS MOTHER! WHY ARE YOU CALLING AT THIS UNGODLY HOUR?!

Sheldon: I need soup!

Howard as Mrs. Wolowitz: THEN CALL YOUR OWN MOTHER!

[Raj steals some of Howard's popcorn.]

Howard: Take your stinking paws off my popcorn, you damn dirty ape.

Critics
"A very dull episode. The humor is built around Sheldon being annoying and it just isn’t convincing or funny." - The TV Critic's Review

Notes:

 * Title Reference: The title refers to the measuring cup that Leonard uses to make pancakes and Sheldon uses to measure his urine output.
 * Chuck Lorre's vanity card
 * This episode was watched by 8.68 million people.

Trivia

 * Code Milky Green is the emergency code for when Sheldon is sick, possibly because of the color of mucus buildup.
 * This is the episode where the song Soft Kitty is introduced where Penny learns it and sings it to sick Sheldon.
 * Sheldon revealed that Leonard is a poor chess player in the previous episode, and it is shown how he is not well suited for three-dimensional chess in this episode.
 * The pseudoscalar meson nonet is clearly seen on the small refrigerator blackboard, which is what Eric Gablehauser was "doodling" in "The Luminous Fish Effect".
 * Sheldon states he has an IQ of 187, and in "The Codpiece Topology", he says he has an IQ which can’t be accurately measured by normal tests and he’d have to lose 60 IQ points to be classified as smart.
 * Sheldon claims that this is only the second time he has been sick by himself. The first was when he was 15, at the Heidelberg Institute in Germany as a visiting professor. The sausage based cuisine causes "an intestinal blitzkrieg", and his mother had to return to Texas to help deal with their aluminum house slipping off its cinder blocks during tornado season.
 * Leonard advises Sheldon to "get some rest and drink plenty of fluids". With characteristic appreciation and charm, Sheldon responds, "What else would I drink? Gases? Solids? Ionized plasma?"
 * Even under the stress of illness, Sheldon retained his rapier wit sufficiently to crack a "physics funny". It's "common knowledge" from Physics 101 class that gases and plasma are also fluids, just like liquids, and make refreshing "virgin" drinks.


 * Bazinga !


 * Technically, the applicability of a fluid approach for a collection of free particles (gases) lies in comparing the collisional mean free path to the macroscopic length scale of interest. For ionized gases,the subject goes by the name magnetohydrodynamics when the methods of continuum mechanics apply, and by plasma physics   when they do not.