TEXT: Scene: Howard and Bernadette's apartment. Bernadette: What you doing? Howard: You said clean up. I'm cleaning up. Bernadette: You can't just throw everything in the closet. Howard: Hey, you can tell me what to do or you can tell me how to do it, but you can't do both. This isn't s*x. Bernadette: What if someone looks in there? Howard: They're just coming over for dinner. No one's gonna look in the closet. Bernadette: Well, you don't know that. What if someone's looking for the bathroom and they open that door? Howard: Could work out. For all we know there's a toilet in there somewhere. Bernadette: Fine. But after tonight we need to get a handle on this mess. Howard: You know what we should do? We should show the closet to Sheldon. Bernadette: Why? Howard: Are you kidding? He's like a savant at organizing. Everything in his apartment has a label on it. Including his label maker, which has a label that says label maker. And if you look really close at that label maker label, you'll see a label that says label. Bernadette: He's our guest, we can't just ask him to straighten our closet. Howard: No, we wouldn't ask him. We'd just show him the closet and let the goblins in his head take it from there. Later. Howard: Hey, guys, come on in. All: Hi. Penny: Ooh, it smells good. Bernadette: Thanks. And, Sheldon, I know tonight's the night you eat Thai food, so I went to the Asian market, got all the ingredients and made it from scratch. Sheldon: Oh, you shouldn't have. Bernadette: Oh, it's my pleasure. Sheldon: No, you really shouldn't have. I brought my own. Bernadette: You stopped and got him takeout? Leonard: I had no choice. He kept kicking the back of my seat. Bernadette: Sheldon,
SUMMARY:
Sheldon is tricked into tidying Howard and Bernadette's closet during their dinner party. He finds and reads a letter to Howard on his 18th birthday from his long-lost father. Howard destroys the letter without reading it and otherwise acts strangely. The others trick Sheldon into revealing the letter's content. When Howard finds out everyone knows but him, he storms out of Leonard's and Penny's dinner party. Everyone else heads to Bernadette and Howard's apartment where Sheldon invokes quantum superposition to tell Howard what was in the letter without him actually knowing; each person devises a version of the letter's content, but only one is actually true. Raj says his father sent him a birthday card; Sheldon mentions a map to One-Eyed Willy's lost pirate treasure (this is actually the plot for The Goonies); Amy says his father secretly attended his son's high school graduation and was so proud he cried; Penny says his father's "other life" caught up with him so he left his family for their safety; Leonard says his father wrote of the importance of family, and that Howard should never abandon his family as he did; Bernadette describes a photo of Howard's father holding him as a baby with the words "Howard, my son, my greatest gift". Howard is pleased, wishing all versions were true, and returns to Leonard and Penny's dinner party with everyone else.