How the Big Bang Theory writing team is like a deadbeat dad

This post contains full spoilers for The Big Bang Theory, up to and including the end of the finale.

Bringing a new baby into the universe means work. You have to care for the baby and the subsequent child and the subsequent teen and the subsequent adult, providing for their physical and emotional and material and logistical needs and launching them into an adult who can function and thrive in the society into which they were born and whatever that society evolves into.

Bringing a new baby into a fictional universe also entails a certain amount of work. You have to figure out and reflect in the story you're telling how this new baby affects their parents and the characters around them, and how they are affected by the particularities of the universe you're bringing them into.  When you're starting with pregnancy, you have to address how the pregnant parent feels about the pregnancy, how this affects their relationship if they're coupled, the implications pregnancy and childbirth and childrearing have for their life (and for the plot).


But the writers of Big Bang Theory didn't do any of this work when they decided to make Penny pregnant in the season finale.

Penny is the one character who has expressed the wish to never have children.  The show has spent some time on this, and on what it means for her marriage to Leonard (who is amenable to having children).

But when they presented her as pregnant in the series finale, they didn't show us how she got from her previously-established point of never wanting children to her new point of having no apparent objections.


As everyone who has ever either made a choice to have children or made a choice not to have children knows, this is not a decision made lightly or on a whim.

And as those of us who have changed our minds know, changing your mind requires even more soul-searching than making the original decision. I myself spent night after night working my way from "Aww, babies are cute and make my ovaries ache!" to "Given what I suffer in day-to-day life, could I really look my child in the eye and justify bringing them into the world" to "You know, what I want isn't actually a human being that I have to keep forever - I just want a small adorable creature to look at me with love in its eyes."

Changing one's mind about whether to have children is an excruciating process of working through hard truths, and that needs to be honoured.

What hard truths did Penny have to work through? What did she think and feel?  What is it like to find yourself with an unwanted pregnancy while married to someone who wants children?  Did she consider terminating the pregnancy?  Did she talk to anyone?  Did she tell Leonard? Before or after she made the decision to keep it?

There's a lot going on here, in a character that the show worked hard to make us care about from the beginning and in a relationship the show worked hard to make us care about from the beginning, and they didn't do the work of showing us any of it.

And it doesn't just stop with the decision to keep and welcome the baby - there's also the future to think about.  How does a baby affect their lives and careers and housing situation?  Penny is the primary breadwinner - how does her pregnancy affect her career?  How does that end up affecting their finances?  How does that end up affecting their relationship? How does a pregnancy affect Penny's health, both during and after the pregnancy?  How does the whole situation affect the baby?  What's it like to be a child who was originally unwanted? How does the fact that Penny originally didn't want the child affect her relationship with the child?  How does Leonard's fraught relationship with his mother affect his relationship with the child?  What happens if the kid gets Leonard's looks and Penny's brains?  And then has another sibling who gets Penny's looks and Leonard's brains?

The writers spent 12 years carefully crafting a scenario that gives rise to all these interesting questions, then abdicated responsibility for answering any of them.


If they didn't want to raise all these questions, they could have not brought up the idea that Penny doesn't want to have children - they could have simply not mentioned it at all and instead focused on the geeky science antics that we're all here for in the first place! But since they did introduce the idea that Penny doesn't want children in the first place, their duty as writers is to work through the consequences of this decision and their subsequent reversal of the decision.


And on top of all this, we live in a reality where the "but what if you change your mind" excuse is all too often used to deny people the reproductive health care that's best for them.  The Big Bang Theory is both set and produced in the US, and this episode aired at a moment when laws are being changed in the US to deny people the reproductive health care that's best for them.  And the Big Bang Theory people who are on Twitter do seem to object to this development.  And yet they made a much-watched season finale that reinforced the excuses used to deny people the reproductive health care that's best for them.


So basically, after 12 years of working on making us care and proactively reassuring us that they wanted a childfree marriage, the Big Bang Theory writers up and impregnated the one person who had expressed the desire never to have children, then ended things and ran off without doing any of the work that resulted from the pregnancy.

They never gave a moment's thought to our feelings and the expectations that they had spent 12 years building up. They never gave a moment's thought to what this means for the baby. They never gave a moment's thought to what this means for the mother. They never gave a moment's thought to what this means for the marriage. They never gave a moment's thought to the example they're setting for the many other people over whom they have influence that they've carefully cultivated over years.

Where I come from, we call that a deadbeat dad.

Shamy

This post contains spoilers for the most recent episode of Big Bang Theory. If you follow the show but haven't been spoiled for this episode yet, I highly recommend not reading this post.


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I got spoiled for last week's Big Bang Theory, so I knew going in that Sheldon and Amy were going to have "coitus", as Sheldon likes to put it.  I had some speculation about this that didn't end up getting blogged because life got in the way, but there was one thing I didn't see coming, and actually didn't realize was even possible: the writers created a situation in which the sex was actually better for both people because one party wasn't actively into it.

Mayim Bialik (who portrays Amy) has blogged about how people keep asking her "Is Sheldon good?"  But the first thing that popped into my head when I got spoiled is "Is Amy good?"

As we know, Sheldon is a finicky person with a tendency towards self-absorption. If he's half as particular about his sex as he is about his meals, it's quite possible that an inexperienced partner like Amy won't be able to meet his expectations first time around - especially if, like nerdy virgins since time immemorial, he's been getting ideas from the shadier parts of internet.  What would that do to the relationship? What would that do to Amy's self-esteem?

I was also contemplating whether the writers would hand-wave this by making them both end up being surprisingly good together. (They're intelligent people, they would have researched, if they used good sources instead of porn and happen to have certain physical compatibilities, it might just work out fine the first time.)  Then I was hoping the writers wouldn't overdo it and make it a joke that awkward nerds might be good at sex.

I was also pondering the situation from the other direction: what if they're not able to have good sex together at the outset, but the show chose to explore that?  Not every couple can always have good sex together the very first time, and the likelihood of it not going perfectly increases it when it's a first time for both. But this isn't something you often see depicted in media or fiction, so it would be an interesting approach to take. Then I was hoping that the writers wouldn't overdo it and make it a joke that awkward nerds have awkward sex, or make it cringingly horrible with Sheldon's finicky nature.

However, the Big Bang Theory writers did something that I didn't know was coming: they had Sheldon come up with the idea of having sex with Amy as her birthday present.

Normally I dislike the dynamic of a sex act being a gift and it's certainly not something I'd want in my own private life.  But, by making it a gift from Sheldon to Amy, they eliminated the problem of Sheldon's finicky nature.  He doesn't actively want sex for himself, so he doesn't have highly specific needs and preferences like he does with seating arrangements and bathroom schedules and take-out food. He's simply interested in making the experience work for Amy - kind of the sexual equivalent to accompanying your partner to a high-school reunion or something (which is quite an emotional/interpersonal milestone for Sheldon!)

The fact that Sheldon (as the person who's less enthusiastic about sex) came up with the idea of having sex on this particular occasion himself, without any pressure or suggestions from Amy or anyone else, goes a long way towards mitigating the any potential distastefulness of the "sex as a gift" dynamic.  It's also somewhat mitigated by the fact that both parties are nervous and tentative beforehand, and that we learn that the experience ultimately exceeded expectations for both of them.

Another fantastic choice by the writers and producers is that the combination of script, editing and choreography gave us no indication of exactly what sex acts they engaged in, or whether they were perfectly successful or it was a trial-and-error kind of situation. This was an excellent choice because it attends to the audience's emotional needs.  Certain people have certain feelings about certain sex acts, including feeling that certain sex acts are degrading or humiliating or other negative emotional baggage. It would probably ruin the heart and sweetness of the scene to see a likely-asexual character engaging in a sex act you consider humiliating or degrading as a birthday gift for his partner. As it stands, all we know it that Sheldon was at peak emotional generosity, both parties were nervous beforehand, and both parties were happy afterwards. And every viewer can fill in the blanks with whatever fits those criteria in their own worldview.

Despite the fact that I still think it would be helpful for sexual novices if the spectrum of media portrayals of sexuality included occasional (and sympathetic) depictions of  unsuccessful first-time sex, I think the writers did right by Sheldon and Amy.  And I hope that the physical part of their relationship can now fade into the background where they can explore it in private, much like the show did when kissing was introduced into their relationship.