The Big Bang Theory will have been on-air for 12 years by the time it comes to an end in 2019. This means someone who wasn’t even a teenager when the show began will be well into their twenties when it closes its doors. That’s a heck of a long time to be on TV and this makes The Big Bang Theory a much-loved show indeed. Of course, no show would have had this level of longevity if it didn’t have likable characters, and The Big Bang Theory has these aplenty.
Leonard Hofstadter is the name that is voted in when people think of the nice guy group of nerds. Leonard is a pushover, but he also keeps the best interests of everyone at heart. The other characters have all shown varying degrees of selfishness or nastiness, but Leonard has more often than not kept this at a minimum. Still, it doesn’t exempt him completely from going down that road.
While we’ve never seen Leonard go full crazy or defy initial characterization – such as Bernadette, who was supposed to be a sweet girl but now is downright unpleasant – he has several traits that go against the image we think of him. But these are the parts of Leonard we’ve all silently accepted and generally look past because they are those aspects of him that are usually used for comedic purposes or are overshadowed by his more humble nature.
However, if you’re curious, here are 20 Things Wrong With Leonard We All Choose To Ignore.
He’s Too Desperate
For a guy who is supposed to be the nice guy if the group, Leonard sure has done some bad boy things. For one, he wasn’t truly faithful to his girlfriend Priya in Season 5 with a girl he had met just a couple days earlier.
At that point, he and Priya had been together for a while which meant Leonard should have thought It up a little bit more. However, then Leonard is always too desperate for a girlfriend as we saw him get together with that crazy scientist woman in Season 3 mere minutes after meeting her, and while he was supposedly still mourning the end of his relationship with Penny!
His Not-So-Genuine Love For Priya
Almost all of Season 4 was spent on Leonard and Priya’s relationship. It seemed as if Leonard was really serious about her and wanted to potentially become engaged to her. Then Leonard went ahead and almost fully went unfaithful on Priya, although he admitted this to her, only for Priya to admit her infidelity.
They broke up off-screen and Priya has only been mentioned twice since. But since Leonard has been shown to be very emotional, why wasn’t he affected in the slightest by this breakup. He went to great lengths to be her boyfriend, but didn’t care when they broke up.
He Didn’t Value Raj’s Friendship
Not only was Leonard an unfaithful boyfriend, but he was also an unfaithful friend first. Everyone knows you’re not meant to mess with your friend’s sister, but Leonard not only did that, but he also broke up a pact that promised he wouldn’t make the moves on her.
He’s gone on and on about fulfilling all of Sheldon’s demands because he’s a great friend but Leonard has no qualms going after his friends’ sisters as he also attempted to woo Sheldon’s sister Missy. So if you’re Leonard’s friend and have a sister, keep her far away from him.
His Inconsistent Pursuit Of Penny
Leonard seemed to have moved on from Penny in Season 4 when he easily gave up his friendship with her on Priya’s request. When Penny had supposedly been with Raj, Leonard stated he wasn’t angry because he wanted to be with Penny, it was just weird that his friend and ex-girlfriend would be together.
All this was ignored when Leonard all of a sudden made a move on Penny in the 100th episode. After that, Leonard thought up an elaborate fantasy about him and Penny together. For the rest of the season, Leonard was once again head over heels for her. Where’s the consistency here?
He Saw Non-Existent Icebergs
At the end of Season 6, Leonard heads off to the North Sea for work purposes and at the beginning of Season 7, it is shown he’s having way too good of a time there. Leonard tells Penny he and the gang had a game where they had to spot an iceberg first.
But hold on, there are hardly any icebergs there at all! So what game was Leonard playing there? Not only is that game not really possible, but it also means all those physicists were wasting their time there because they weren’t even at the right location. This also makes Leonard look rather silly.
Taking Out The Best Friend
This may have been thrown in as a joke, but it sure was dark. At the end of Season 2, the guys went to the North Pole for research. Their efforts were all in vain as it turned out they couldn’t prove String Theory.
During their hellish time there, Leonard and the others were so done with Sheldon’s fussiness that they actually came up with a plan to let him freeze until he met his maker in the cold! In-universe, this wasn’t even a joke as Leonard confirmed they had devised the plan completely before shelving it at the last minute.
His Opinion Of Stuart
For Leonard, it never matters what a person is like as long as that guy is a threat to him towards his feelings for Penny. However, there was an inconsistency here with Stuart as Leonard at one point saw the comic book store owner as a romantic rival.
In recent seasons, however, Leonard’s only interactions with Stuart are when he’s either taking pity on him or treating him like garbage along with the rest of the group. In Stuart’s first appearance, Leonard had evaluated everything about him to determine what he could do to one-up Stuart. At some point though, Leonard barely started giving Stuart any consideration and the thought of him being jealous of him is a joke.
His Relationship With Joyce Kim
Leonard’s one constant ex-girlfriend mentioned in the first seasons had been Joyce Kim. She was always mentioned at the expense of Leonard, as it was funny that the one time he got a girl she ended up abandoning him.
However, none of this matches what we saw of Joyce Kim in a flashback. In this occasion, Joyce and Leonard had only met a few hours ago before retreating to his room, and the reason why Joyce left wasn’t because she required to go back home, but it was because Sheldon annoyed her so much she threw her spying integrity out the window.
His First Time With Penny
The most recent nonsensical thing to happen to Leonard was mentioned in the current season. Leonard very happily told Raj the first time he and Penny had gotten together had been awesome and he sometimes thought of it to remember that happy feeling.
However, that’s just not true because we saw what happened after their first time in the Season 3 premiere. The whole episode had been based on how neither of them liked the experience and Leonard openly told his friends it wasn’t like how he had imagined it to be. But the way he was so enthusiastic about that memory now suggests a clear case of a plot hole.
His Encounters With Bill Gates
Again, Leonard showed his inconsistent memory in Season 12 when he met Bill Gates, and broke down crying. In Leonard’s defense, he was too emotional to meet one of his childhood heroes and this being the first time he came across Gates made it too much for him.
That would be understandable, but it just couldn’t be the first time Leonard saw Bill Gates up close as he told Priya in Season 4 that he had personally witnessed Bill Gates punching Sheldon for the latter’s criticism of Windows Vista. So if he had seen something so memorable that up close, why was Leonard pretending he never saw Gates before years later?
Penny Isn’t Really Out Of His League
This happens a to be one of Leonard’s biggest flaws and something that makes no sense over a decade of character development later. In the first seasons, Leonard was too madly in love with getting together with Penny that he let her boss him around and was happy to admit she was way out of his league.
However, it’s gotten to very unhealthy levels by 2018 as Penny completely speaks for him and puts him down constantly. From openly admitting she’s not fond of Leonard’s antics to telling people he’s not that great at being intimate, Leonard lets Penny rip into him and still pretends he married up. In actuality, Leonard is more of a catch.
Sheldon’s Father Was His Bully
This wasn’t so much an in-universe problem as it was from a production standpoint considering no one could have foreseen the actor playing Leonard’s former bully in Season 5 would then play Sheldon’s father around 5-6 years later. However, with the recent episode in Season 12 showing a clip of Sheldon’s father, this is a full-on plothole.
How can it be that the guy who bullied Leonard in his teen days looks exactly like his best friend in present days? Leonard most likely did get a glimpse of how Sheldon’s dad looked, so it never struck him that the resemblance was uncanny?
Not Knowing Dumbledore’s Fate
Leonard has been to countless comic cons, been best friends with people obsessed with Harry Potter and been around many outlets that would have revealed Dumbledore perished. However, he was angry at Sheldon for spoiling it for him when it was Leonard’s fault for being so ignorant for all those years.
If nothing else, it seems remarkable that Leonard went from 2010 to 2011 without ever coming across a Deathly Hallows film trailer, something that would have shown him Dumbledore’s demise. Considering the number of films the boys tend to watch in the cinema, it’s impossible not one show had a trailer for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.
He Actually Can Control Sheldon
Leonard bought thousands of containers from Schezwan palace before they went out of business to pretend to Sheldon they were still active. He has put up with a lot Sheldon’s antics over the years, but it’s a lie if he says he has no measure of power.
In the first episode itself, we saw Leonard exercise his influence over Sheldon when he made the latter give up his spot for Penny, a move which seems impossible. Leonard can also make Sheldon leave him simply by telling him to ‘go away’. He regularly breaks the roommate agreement too. So it’s not all bad as he claims it to be.
Leonard doesn’t know Penny’s last name
We’ve never found out what Penny’s maiden name was supposed to be. Right from the start, she and her family members have only been referred to with their first names and no family name has been identified.
At no point has any other character mentioned her last name either and it doesn’t seem anyone is even aware of what it might be. It also seems Leonard is clueless in this regard too as when he and Penny got married; he automatically assumed she was now Penny Hofstader. Penny too didn’t seem to mind the abrupt name change either. Looks like Leonard got married to a girl with no name.
He was swayed by Penny’s attractiveness
Despite whatever Leonard might tell anyone over why he fell for Penny, the truth is his original interest stemmed purely from an attraction point of view. He became obsessed with Penny’s beauty, something that drove him to be infatuated with her for the first two seasons.
Raj and Howard were right when they joked that Leonard gave Penny leeway because of how she dressed or how she looked. We saw him pay for her rent, pay for her food, buy her a car, and do pretty much just about anything for her because Penny batted her eyes and wore short shorts. At the end of the day, Leonard’s just like any other guy.
He was too pushy in his first relationship with Penny
We’ve always been forced to fixate on Penny’s flaws in her relationship with Leonard that a lot of the things Leonard does wrong are ignored. Most of the problems the couple faces are linked to Penny but that doesn’t mean Leonard has always been right. In Season 3, the two break up because Penny isn’t ready to tell him that she loves him.
However, she wasn’t really the bad guy here. What gives Leonard the right to force an admission of love from her? After Penny admitted she wasn’t ready, Leonard acted very mean to her for the rest of the episode, pressurizing and belittling her. He was the one wrong here.
He thinks Penny isn’t smart
The times Leonard really messes up with Penny are usually inadvertent on his part. Being a genius, he doesn’t realize normal people function at different rates and have different thought processes. So poor Leonard has accidentally called Penny dumb, such as when he did her college assignment rather than having faith in Penny to do it right.
Still, there’s no denying he does think she’s at least slightly unintelligent. This was evident when they weren’t in a relationship and he wasn’t holding anything back. In Season 5, they got into an argument and Leonard called her out for thinking that the cold war was in winter, and then challenged her to spell asthma.
He keeps letting Penny decide for them
If The Big Bang Theory world was real, then Leonard and Penny would definitely have been headed for a divorce in the future. This isn’t us being harsh; it’s just that the nature of their relationship is too dominant in Penny’s favor.
She makes all the major decisions for the two of them while Leonard never has a say, or if he does, she overrides his point of view as if it was something dumb. In Season 12, she took this to the extreme by making the decision for the two of them that they wouldn’t be having any children. Penny never told him before marriage and now the poor guy just had to accept it.
He has trust issues
What with all the talk about Penny being out of Leonard’s league, it would only be a while before this paranoia caught up with him. Unfortunately, though, Leonard’s jealousy is astronomical. He can’t be in even a moment’s of peace when faced with the tiniest possibility that Penny is attracted to another man.
He went all out when Penny had a study session with a British student at her place; he had an intense fight with her when a former boyfriend crashed at her couch for a couple of days. Then there was the already mentioned jealousy of Stuart when he dated Penny, along with the super attractive physicist in Season 1.
Is there anything else wrong with Leonard from The Big Bang Theory? Let us know in the comments!
