Stuart Fails to Save the Universe Episode 3
With four episodes under its belt, Stuart Bloom has finally become a committed patient. “Committed to the bit” doesn’t even begin to cover it, although that too, in all seriousness and legitimacy, is now a fact about Stuart in his multiverse reality. If you thought there could be no greater chaos in the multiverse reality for HBO Max’s wonderfully unhinged spin-off of The Big Bang Theory, “Spoiler: Stuart Makes a Wallet” has come to show that the most frightening world is, in fact, a brightly lit, therapy group, and psychiatrist who oddly resembles Amy Farrah Fowler.
That’s right, Mayim Bialik has returned. No, this is not a clip show, a fantasy sequence that you will have forgotten by the next commercial break. This is Mayim Bialik in the role of Stuart’s psychiatrist within this universe, and believe me, it’s one of the best stunt casts that this show has made yet.
Now let’s break down what happened, since this episode did a whole lot of work underneath a hospital gown.
Stuart Wakes Up Somewhere Worse Than Space
There is no flash of the wand, no burst of the wormhole, but the beeping of monitors at the beginning of the episode. It turns out that Stuart is now a patient of the asylum, and it is the first time in the season when the TV show makes us and him face a scary possibility: what if it was all a big dream and none of it happened? What if the whole series of events is not the story of reluctant heroes moving from universe to universe but rather the breakdown of Stuart’s psyche following one really bad day at the comic book store?
The twist is smart and unexpected. After all the magical action, wizards, and the chip with which the other versions of Pasadena were created, now we get stripped down to the core of the show, its darker side, much scarier than any monsters or evil wizards.
Now comes Amy Farrah Fowler, identical name but radically different CV, sitting before Stuart explaining how she’s been hopping around parallel universes spending time with alternate versions of Penny and avoiding neck-chips implanted in their minds for the purpose of mind control. Bialik, who was trained to play a real-life neuroscientist with a real PhD from a real university, happens to be one of the only actresses in the world who could hear this premise and not burst into laughter. It’s a casting choice that makes no sense at all except that it makes so much sense.
The Hallucination Tour, Featuring a Sherpa Named Mamie Eisenhower
In case you thought this mental hospital location would be a much more slow-paced episode, fasten your seatbelts, as “Spoiler: Stuart Makes a Wallet” quickly dismisses any such hope. As soon as he is medicated, Stuart’s time at this location becomes one of the most bizarre hallucination scenes in this series. First up: Jon Cryer in his role of a Sherpa, who calls himself Mamie Eisenhower, taking Stuart across a snow-covered mountain and telling him that he became a Sherpa after getting rejected by a girl he met on the internet.
And then Stuart “wakes up,” only to see a fellow patient playing the accordion across the hall from him. The patient is “Weird Al” Yankovic. Stuart turns around, and suddenly, he finds himself in the hallway with Bert, who tells him that he didn’t escape his room at all, and that he is extremely high. And just to make the point even clearer, “Weird Al”‘s room transforms into a black-and-white cartoon with Porky Pig in it, of course. And guards finally catch him. Stuart does indeed escape his room. But not much else.
In this case, “Stuart Fails to Save the Universe” has certainly made its name as a show which is prepared to throw just about anything against the wall, secure in the knowledge that it is going to stick on the strength of the effort alone. And yet, amazingly, it succeeds. This scene feels more like a twisted reflection of Stuart’s mind than padding, a bizarre world where it seems perfectly natural for ex-sitcom actors, dead first ladies, and novelty accordion players to all exist together.
The “Perfect Life,” and Suddenly It’s Not Funny Anymore
As the episode seems poised to take the plunge into farce, it deftly delivers a genuine gut punch. Denise comes to visit Stuart in the hospital, and in the midst of his insistence on needing to get out of there, she bluntly tells him he doesn’t need to get out of there because it’s not about escaping anymore. It’s a little scene, but it works, as the episode actually asks what is at stake for the people who care about Stuart in his insistence that reality is messed up.
But then the episode takes it further by doing something trickier. Eventually, Stuart ends up in a life that would seem perfect on paper: him and Denise living with their two children, Jaden and Talia, with Barry Kripke as the neighbor next door who is married to Gary of all people. It’s nice, it’s settled, it’s got a distinctly nostalgic feel, and for a while, Stuart seriously considers accepting it.
It is at this point that the cracks begin to appear. Literally, cracks that begin to appear on his doorstep. His doormat says “WAKE UP.” There appears to be a car following him. When he finally makes his way back to his own comic book store, there he sees “a comic book entitled, with maximum ‘on-the-nose’ clarity, ‘Stuart Fails to Save the Universe’, apparently dropped off by another version of Stuart himself, who has come from ‘the original universe’ to ensure that Stuart has indeed received the message.” In a show where it’s not going to leave either Stuart or the viewer out of the woods, it’s pretty clear what it is telling us about all of this.
The Comic Book That Explains Basically Everything
The comic, which Stuart stumbles upon in the perfect alternate comic book store, is the main revelation in this episode. It had been placed there by the original timeline character known as “Stuart Prime.” This marks his first appearance on the show since its first episode, and Stuart Prime followed his alternate counterpart to this timeline in order to ensure that he would find it.
The title of the comic book is very appropriately named “Stuart Fails to Save the Universe” and describes in detail what led up to all of this multiverse madness. In the end, it turns out that our beloved Stuart stopped at Caltech with his own personal update on how his colonoscopy went well and ended up being a bit too excited about it, knocking over the vari-state quantum entanglement device that Leonard, Sheldon, and Howard were building. One simple elbow and one broken piece of physics machinery later, and multiverses begin to unravel.
There is no doubt that this has to be among the most deliciously anticlimactic origin stories in recent television memory. Somewhere, Sheldon Cooper is apoplectic that the entire existence of infinite possibilities depends on Stuart’s digestion, and frankly, this makes sense.
Importantly, the comic does not just give us some history here but actually gives Stuart an avenue for the future, giving him steps for acquiring another version of this device. By the way, that is the “wallet” of the episode’s title; it turns out that Stuart constructs his escape device in the form of, that’s right, a wallet.
Escape, a Matrix Detour, and a Cliffhanger in the Wilderness
With the comic’s guidelines, Stuart seizes on Denise and turns on the device, thus bringing the three together for the first time during the entire episode: Denise, Bert, and Kripke. Their escape leads them right into a world that is clearly “Matrix” coded because they come out bald and covered in goo, looking just like something out of the 1999 movie. But as usual, Bert is not happy because, according to him, this is no evidence that they managed to escape; they are simply manipulated into thinking that.
Stuart sees that there is some blood leaking through what seems like an actual tear in the fabric of the universe, he goes ahead and opens it and they all find themselves falling into their next location, which is a thick prehistoric forest, and there they are immediately surrounded by some people who clearly think that these four individuals are crazy.
It is a typical “Stuart Fails to Save the Universe” type of cliffhanger; the group barely gets away from one horror when another is presented by the multiverse. Episode 5 certainly has its hands full.
Someone’s Watching Stuart, and It’s Getting Less Subtle
The biggest mystery this week is not Bialik’s cameo nor the wildness cliffhanger; it is the slowly unfolding story the series has been setting up throughout. In Episode 3’s wizarding world, Stuart and Kripke were passing a newspaper whose front page is directed right at him: “Hey, Stuart Bloom!” This week, while he was living a highly suspiciously normal fake family life, his own doormat starts telling him to wake up.
One eerie object in a TV series can be seen as a coincidence. Two objects start forming a pattern, which this particular series seems to be asking for viewers to do: to freeze frame every tiny detail they could find in the backgrounds, which conspiracy theorists usually do with films and books. It looks like someone, somewhere, possibly Stuart Bloom from a parallel world himself tries to get to him somehow.
Big Bang Theory Nostalgia, Now with Extra Layers
And here comes another guest spot on yet another victory lap in this series, as another one of its former stars returns to this series, Bialik. She portrayed the role of Amy Farrah Fowler from Season 4 up until the final episode of this main show and went on to voice this character in a couple of episodes of the spinoff show called Young Sheldon, where she appeared live once more along with Jim Parsons in the 2024 finale of the spinoff series. Seeing her back on this series as an alternate universe version of Dr. Amy Farrah Fowler, a psychiatrist rather than a neurobiologist, can be considered stunt casting.
Final Verdict
By episode four, “Stuart Fails to Save the Universe” is well into its groove, dropping Stuart into an askew version of the original universe and seeing how much longer it will be until the universe comes up with a fresh way of making Stuart’s life even more hellish. While Episode 4 follows the established pattern, it makes some important strides in terms of advancing the broader mystery, utilizing the most subtle episode yet in order to do so.
Does Stuart have issues? Is he being followed? Is the entire multiverse dependent on the person who was once too excited about having his colon checked? Good questions all, but you won’t be getting any answers until Episode 5 comes out, so mark your welcome mat down.
Stuart Fails to Save the Universe Episode 5 is released on Thursday, August 20 on HBO Max.
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