‘The Big Bang Theory’ season 6, episode 23 review: Rolling the dice

For those of you who love “Dungeons & Dragons,” it is possible that Thursday night’s new episode of “The Big Bang Theory” felt like a weird, bizarre love letter to the popular game. After all, we feel pretty confident at this very moment that we saw Sheldon try to do something with Amy that guys have tried to do with women who have played the game with them in real life: If you can’t have them in-person, isn’t an in-game romance the next best thing?

With that being said, Sheldon’s awkward delivering about undoing Amy’s armor made a wedding on World of Warcraft somehow feel intimate. No rational human will probably ever understand the attraction that exists for Mayim Bialik’s character, and maybe that is part of the point: She is just as alien to the real world as he is.

The whole premise of having romance start up via an ill-timed game of “Dungeons & Dragons” with the ladies (who were there after an airline snafu involving a pat-down gone horribly awry) was smart, mostly in that it gave “Shamy” fans a moment of joy without keeping Sheldon from being the oddball that we have all come to know and love. It would have only been slightly better had Simon Helberg, who is apparently the sitcom version of Jimmy Fallon when it comes to impressions, had some more voices in his arsenal that appealed to the geek (or the young) fanbase rather than movie stars from 10-20 years ago. (His Nicolas Cage voice is the only one to make us truly giddy).

On the other side of this love story, Raj kissed a girl … and he liked it! Next to that upside-down kiss with Tobey Maguire and Kirsten Dunst in “Spider-Man,” the kiss-through-a-chain-link-fence has to be up there when it comes to memorable screen smooches. It also gave us a chance to see some growth for the character, and while we don’t necessarily see all of the chemistry that is there between him and Lucy just yet, it is starting to build.

It’s hard not to leave Thursday’s episode without some sort of good feeling about the show’s direction. The writers did a nice job giving us a taste of what we really wanted to see: Romance, hook-ups, ogres, bizarre chants, and an in-game potion creating real-life memories.

If you want to watch some videos from this episode, you can do so over here.

Photo: CBS