Why "The VCR Illumination" is the best episode of The Big Bang Theory for me

Sheldon and Amy have been working on their paper describing the universe as asymmetrical. An idea that they came up with on their wedding day. While getting ready for the wedding ceremony Sheldon's mother came to his room and looked at his somewhat asymmetrical bow tie, she asked why it was like that and Sheldon said it was supposed to be a bit asymmetrical. Mary then said something that would spark the idea of an asymmetrical universe. That was, "Sometimes the imperfect stuff makes things perfect". This statement made Sheldon realize that his math was indicating an asymmetrical universe and the very moment he shared this idea with Amy, the very notion of Super-asymmetry was born.

However, several months forward, Sheldon and Amy had quite a lot of progress in their paper and were at the final stages of publishing it. They thought Leonard Hofstadter, Sheldon's best friend who was an experimental physicist would be the most trusted individual to share the paper to point out the citations. Leonard along with Raj (An astrophysicist and a beloved friend of the group) went through all the old papers and landed on a Russian paper that seems to disprove super-asymmetry, which is terrible news for Sheldon and Amy because that have working for several months and more importantly, they came up with the idea on their wedding day. 

Back when Sheldon was a kid, he thought someday when he would face a setback and will start to question his very nature, he might be in need of his advice so young Sheldon recorded a tape with advice addressed to future Sheldon. Amy borrowed a VCR from Howard and came to the apartment to play the tape Sheldon recorded thinking it might help him get over the grief of losing the paper. They started watching the tape and right at the pinnacle of the moment they discovered that his dad taped over a high school football game on his tape, that night was hard but Amy was in an attempt to find at least any part of the speech that could be recovered to help her husband. Now, this part is interesting, Amy and Sheldon both came up with the idea and they both worked hard to shape the idea into a paper, but when the blow came, even though Sheldon was broken and no matter how devastated Amy was, she stood strong to hold everything together. That is something you need to have in life, I guess. However, there was nothing left over from the speech but the tape had something that eventually resulted in the reborn of Super-Asymmetry. It was a speech by Sheldon's father George Cooper Sr. that he delivered to cheer his losing football team up and to give a last try and give their all.

 "I know we are down and I am being honest with you we're probably not going to win this one, in fact, we are definitely not going to win this one. We are not going to quit either and if we do lose you need to know that doesn't make you losers. You learn as much about who you are and what you are made of from failing as you do from success, maybe more. So, you can just spend the next half feeling sorry for yourself or you can get out there and give'em hell.", George said to get the spirit of losing team-up. Even though they didn't win and the speech didn't work that day, the speech became the reason and even paved the road to a bigger idea for his son and daughter-in-law.

That led Sheldon to understand that the thought he had that his and his father's lives were different but from the core and from a different perspective their lives mirrored each other more than he thought. "Sheldon, what if symmetry and asymmetry are observer relative? That would mean the Russian paper was right..." Sheldon interferes and said, "But only from one perspective, if we look at it with a deeper view and more dimensions, our theory still stands". "Not only stands, but it might be a bigger idea than the one we are originally proposing", Amy added.

The reason why that episode is so beautiful is that it made me realize how the smallest events of our lives often connect with something bigger and brighter, something that might end up benefitting the whole of mankind. There are no boundaries, every setback, every failure, and every success is worth celebrating in their own manner. And documenting them is important. If that speech from George was not taped, Super-Asymmetry would never be a thing. I don't know what the actual physics is and I don't know if Super-Asymmetry is a real thing. I am just a high school graduate and a physics enthusiast. Maybe one day I will understand the idea and will be able to do the math but the last five months have been hard as I am preparing for university entrance exams and this episode helped me a lot with that. There were setbacks and failures but I am not stepping back. I am going to give'em hell.