THE BIG BANG THEORY: Bill Prady Teases What May Come Next

[Spoiler Alert: If you haven’t seen tonight’s episode of THE BIG BANG THEORY, please stop reading and go watch it. Trust me. You won’t want to read this post until after you’ve viewed the season finale because it will spoil a very important aspect of the hour.]

It’s crazy to believe, but Wolowitz is a married man! And not only is he married, but he’s actually up on a space mission. And so with many things left up in the air at the end of the episode, I’m guessing you guys have a few questions about what’s next, right? Well, you aren’t the only ones.

“For four years, we’ve written ourselves into corners at the end of the season and then looked to see where that would lead,” Bill Prady told reporters last week. And while the team is notoriously episode-by-episode with their storytelling, Prady did allow for a few teases about where the show might be going…

What’s next for Wolowitz?

With Howard off in outer space, the question is now where he’ll be when the show returns. But if you were hoping to get an answer on that right now, there’s a slight problem…the writers haven’t decided yet.

“We talked about leaving Wolowitz in space for the first couple of episodes,” Prady said. “We have to make a decision about where we come back with continuity — are we in time and the hiatus happened in the show as well? Or are we coming back like we did between the end of season 4 and season 5, which is roughly continuous. But we’ve talked about coming back and discovering Howard is still in space. One of the things — and this came from our very first conversation with [NASA astronaut/THE BIG BANG THEORY guest star] Mike [Massimino] — is the possibility exists that…something could interfere with the schedule of his return…there have been delays on launches and things like that, so he winds up there longer than he’s comfortable with. But at this point, that’s a conversation we haven’t really gotten to.”

Will the Bernadette/Wolowitz marriage change the group?

“I think it has to, doesn’t it?” Prady replied when I posed that question to him. “I’m very happy that of the characters we met at the beginning, that the guy who seemed to have the most of his life invested in not being with one single person is the guy who is married first. But that was always my belief about Wolowitz — that his desperate wolf-like behavior from woman to woman was to find someone to be with, so it’s always made sense to me. It’s the natural evolution of a group of people of this age. It would be odd if they didn’t start getting married. But yeah, one of the things we have absolutely not resolved is what their living situation is going to be. We’ve had every discussion from they do live at the Wolowitz house, they live at the Wolowitz house but they take over the master bedroom, that they get their own place, that they get their own place but Mrs. Wolowitz moves in temporarily because the house is being tented — but it never ends. So we’ve had all of those discussions.”

Another thing they haven’t nailed down yet? Whether they’ll show the promised wedding reception and/or a honeymoon — if they can find the right story, they’ll write it, but if they don’t find something that fits, we’ll just hear it mentioned.

But if you were wondering who to thank for the unique twist of having all of Bernadette and Wolowitz’s friends perform the impromptu wedding ceremony, apparently we have the entire writers’ room to thank for that.

“That was just a goopy moment in the writers’ room,” Prady said. “Like, ‘Why don’t they all do it?’ And we were like, ‘Aww, that’s adorable.’ A lot of the decisions about the wedding and things like that that are sentimental were just stuff that made us sentimental. And there is stuff in the wedding that comes from people’s weddings in the writers’ room. Get a little goopy.”

Where do the Leonard/Penny and Sheldon/Amy relationships stand?

“The Leonard and Penny relationship is rocky, and the Amy and Sheldon relationship is as baffling to us as it is to everybody,” Prady noted. “What amazes me about that relationship is that Sheldon has no interest in that relationship being any different at any point than it currently is, and Amy has managed to drag him forward…Amy is a worthy adversary. She certainly is as bright as Sheldon. And I think that she is a little more savvy about some things. And she’s managed to exert her will. We’ll figure out a move for her to make and Sheldon has no counter-move. She backs him into a corner and it seems to work.”

And yes, things potentially could remain rough for Leonard and Penny after his botched proposal.

“They could come back from this, they could not come back from this,” Prady said. “For me, it’s always been that they met each other at the wrong point relative to each other in their lives. I think it’s just a messy, rocky relationship. That’s what I’ve always said. I think there’s any possibility they could say, ‘This is crazy, let’s just stop this.’ They could say, ‘Let’s push forward.’ They have very strong feelings for each other, and their issues have to do with what they currently want in their lives right now. I don’t think Penny wants to get married, and Leonard is five years older than her…the issue of whether you love each other isn’t a question, it’s what you want your lives to be and what do you want to be doing with your life right now? I think that ends up being the downfall for a lot of relationships. As an adult, love is not sufficient. ”

What may be sufficient for Amy? Having Sheldon be the one to reach out for physical contact while Wolowitz’s shuttle was taking off. But just because he made that move, Prady warns that doesn’t mean the character himself is changing.

“There will be no changes in the character; I think the character is capable of things we haven’t seen,” Prady noted. “And I think that’s an important distinction to make. Sheldon, from the beginning, is the character that represented withdrawal from the world. And the beginning dynamic was Sheldon was caught between Penny, who pulls him out into the world, and Sheldon, who offers him the opportunity to withdraw. That’s his choice in life. We’ve seen him be capable of things that are surprising but we hope haven’t been inconsistent with his character.”

Did you catch the very special — and very brief — cameo in the finale?

Thanks to Google Earth, we finally got our first “glimpse” of Mrs. Wolowitz! But given how many times she’s been, um, affectionately, described by the characters, how did they decide on how to portray Howard’s never-before-seen mother?

“Well, if you listen to the characters on the show, she seems to weigh in at about 800-900 pounds,” Prady laughed. “She’s been described as larger than a bus. I think when we talked to the fellow who does our special effects we used the phrase, ‘A stout woman with an ugly dress and a hat.’ I think it’s kind of fun because it’s just for a second and she has a hat on, so you kind of just see that mass of pink. There’s been a desire not to go into the HOME IMPROVEMENT territory and start seeing pieces of her on-screen. It was a conscious decision not to do that, but this seems fine.”

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What did you think of THE BIG BANG THEORY finale?

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