Ranking Raj's girlfriends in Big Bang Theory
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I've been watching all of this series from start to finish just as an experiment to see what it was that made it so popular for so many years. I watched it when it first came out and I laughed a bit and thought it was a unique sitcom. I didn't like the laugh-track and after 5 seasons or so the situations that the main characters would find themselves in started to repeat themselves quite a lot.
After all of the main characters got married off there was a lot of conflict that couldn't really happen anymore and honestly, I think they kept the show going for a few years longer than they should have. I have only a handful of episodes left and the only main character that hasn't been married off is Raj Koothrappali, a guy that has been through a ton of relationships but they never end up working out for him.
Over the years he has had more than 10 girlfriends and I am just going to focus on the ones I found the most interesting and / or pretty. I'll just focus on what i consider to be the "top 3" rather than go through all of them.
Lucy
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Lucy had a lot of quirks and was borderline undate-able because of her severe social anxiety. You may recall that until somewhere around season 8 Raj was incapable of talking to women unless drunk so Lucy seemed like she might be a good partner for him. Although she wasn't the hottest girl Raj dated, I found her quirks to add some much-needed life to the show at the time she was introduced. Unfortunately her time in the show was very limited and she only stuck around for a few episodes before walking away from Raj due to him putting her in situations she is not comfortable in despite the fact that she told him that she was trying to overcome some of her fears.
Emily
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There were two Emilys in the show, I am referring to the 2nd one that was not deaf.
Emily seemed like a damn-near perfect match for Raj in that she was pretty, she was sociable, but also not a party animal. She also had an advanced degree and could match wits with Raj and all of his friends except for Sheldon who would berate her career as a dermatologist as not being a real doctor. Sheldon has no respect for anyone on an intellectual level so this was actually pretty amusing.
In the end the breakup with Emily was just a showcase of how Raj self-sabotages all of his relationships even when they are going well. Emily tried over and over to stay with Raj but he no longer wanted her until she wasn't an option for him anymore.
Claire
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Claire was my favorite of Raj's girlfriends and I was disappointed that they only kept her as part of the show for a few episodes. I know this is purely subjective but I also found her to be the prettiest. I thought she was the perfect match for Raj in that their relationship started out in a completely friendly way when he was just serving as a science advisor on a screenplay that she was working on. Raj was with Emily at the time and he genuinely wasn't flirting with her when they would get together.
Eventually they did get together and we could all see this coming because her introduction into the mix didn't really make sense otherwise. I'm thinking that the writers believed, perhaps through some sort of focus group, that viewers found that his relationship with Emily was getting stale and they needed to move on. While it was not directly her fault, Claire was the reason why Emily was eliminated from Raj's life and it was because Raj was trying to date both of them at once that he, predictably, ended up losing both of them.
I really think they under-utilized Claire as a character and I kept waiting for them to re-introduce her into the cast. Sadly, outside of a brief cameo later, they do not.
Perhaps I am over-evaluating this but I think that they kept Raj single because I think a lot of people felt that once the relationship tension was eliminated in all the other character's lives, the show lost a lot of its appeal. Once everyone was married except for Raj I was basically expecting the show to end with him doing so. I looked ahead and spoiled it for myself and found out accidentally that they in fact, do not do this.
In my mind Raj is the least significant of the main 4 male characters and was always a bit of a side show distraction. Al least he found love in one place... with his dog Cinnamon.
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