Kaley Cuoco credited as playing...
Penny
- Penny: This is between you and me. You can't tell Leonard any of this.
- Sheldon Cooper: You're asking me to keep a secret?
- Penny: Yeah.
- Sheldon Cooper: Well, I'm sorry, but you would have had to express that desire before revealing the secret, so that I could choose whether or not I wanted to accept the covenant of secret-keeping. You can't impose a secret on an ex-post-facto basis.
- Penny: What?
- Sheldon Cooper: Secret-keeping is a complicated endeavor. One has to be concerned not only about what one says, but about facial expressions, autonomic reflexes. When I try to deceive, I myself have more nervous tics than a Lyme disease research facility.
- [pause]
- Sheldon Cooper: It's a joke. It relies on the homonymic relationship between "tick", the blood-sucking arachnid, and "tic", the involuntary muscular contraction. I made it up myself.
- Sheldon Cooper: You must release me from my oath. I can't keep your secret, Penny. I'm going to fold like an energy-based de novo protein in conformational space... like a Renaissance triptych... like a cheap suit.
- Penny: Why is it so hard for you to keep one little secret?
- Sheldon Cooper: I'm constitutionally incapable. That's why I was refused clearance for a very prestigious government research fellowship at a secret military supercollider located beneath a fake agricultural station 12.5 miles southeast of Traverse City, Michigan.
- [pause]
- Sheldon Cooper: Which you did not hear about from me.
- Penny: Has Leonard ever dated any regular women?
- Sheldon Cooper: I assume you are not refering to digestive regularity. It has been my experience that asking that is highly inappropriate.
- Penny: I get it! Leonard has no business being involved with a waitress-slash-actress who felt so insecure that she lied to him about finishing community college.
- Sheldon Cooper: Why would you lie about that?
- Penny: Well, he was going on and on about this college and that grad school - and I didn't want him to think I was some kind of stupid loser.
- Sheldon Cooper: You thought the opposite of stupid loser was community-college graduate?
- Penny: You know, there are a lot of successful people who graduated from community college.
- Sheldon Cooper: Yet you are neither.
- Penny: Has Leonard ever been involved with someone who wasn't a braniac?
- Sheldon Cooper: Well, a few years ago, he did go out with a woman who had a Ph. D. in French literature.
- Penny: How is that not a braniac?
- Sheldon Cooper: Well, for one thing, she was French. For another, it was literature.
- Leonard Hofstadter: Well, good night.
- Penny: What are you doing?
- Leonard Hofstadter: There was a draft.
- Penny: I didn't feel a draft.
- Leonard Hofstadter: Why don't we just go into your...
- Penny: Oh, yeah, you know what, maybe we should just slow things down a little.
- Leonard Hofstadter: No, no, I didn't mean to go into your apartment to... go fast.
- Penny: No, I know, I... I know what you meant, it's just... it's only our first date.
- Leonard Hofstadter: Yeah, okay, sure, no problem, why don't we just figure out where we're going, and when we want to get there, and then rate of speed equals distance over time. Solve for R.
- Penny: Or we could just wing it.
- Leonard Hofstadter: That might work too.
- Penny: Goodnight, Leonard.
- Penny: Hi.
- Leonard Hofstadter: Yeah, hi, listen, I know what's been bothering you about us, and I have the answer.
- Penny: What are you talking about?
- Leonard Hofstadter: First I want to say that it's not Sheldon's fault, he tried very hard to keep your secret, if Howard hadn't drugged him he would have taken it to his grave.
- Penny: He told you?
- Leonard Hofstadter: Yes, but it's okay. Now that we know what the problem is, there's a simple solution.
- Penny: Pasadena city college?
- Leonard Hofstadter: A place for fun, a place for knowledge. See, this man here's playing hacky sack, and this girl's going to be a paralegal.
- Penny: Wow, I get it, because Dr Leonard Hofstadter can't date a girl without a fancy college degree.
- Leonard Hofstadter: Well, it's really not that fancy, it's just a city college.
- Penny: Right, but I have to have some sort of degree to date you?
- Leonard Hofstadter: That doesn't matter to me at all.
- Penny: So, it's fine with you if I'm not smart.
- Leonard Hofstadter: Absolutely.
- [She slams the door in his face]
- Leonard Hofstadter: Okay, this time I know where I went wrong.