This episode was much, much better than the opening episode of Season 8, and a lot of the dialogue included science, something which has been relatively rare from Season 5 onwards, although Season 6 did improve upon Season 5, and Season 7 improved upon Season 6 likewise. Hopefully, Season 8 will be as good as Seasons 1-4; I doubt this will be the case, but if it includes more episodes like this one, then it'll be a great season. Sheldon's storyline concerning his research area is interesting, and the dialogue between Howard and Sheldon was very good in this episode. Sheldon also referenced Fig Newtons not being named after Isaac Newton, which is the second time this fact has come up in the series, the first being in a Season 3 episode. Whether it was done intentionally or not, I don't know, but it signified a return to the 'science-y' dialogue, at least for this episode. As for Sheldon's teaching career, he has, of course, had to teach students before in the series, and he didn't do very well at it then, but hopefully he'll stick with it. It's also interesting that Dennis Kim, in Season 1, stated that Sheldon's string theory research was a dead end - it turned out to be prophetical: perhaps he really can see the Matrix!
Review of The Junior Professor Solution
