Rajesh Koothrappali's inclusion in People magazine's annual "30 Under 30 to Watch in Science" was, in Sheldon's estimation, a statistical anomaly fueled by photogenic appeal and JPL's aggressive PR department. The article itself was a puff piece, but its effect on Raj was transformative and catastrophic.
He became insufferable.
He took to wearing sunglasses indoors. He began referring to himself in the third person. "Rajesh Koothrappali doesn't wait for lattes," he'd announce at the café, to the bewilderment of the barista. He tried to get a table at The Cheesecake Factory by murmuring, "Don't you know who I am?" to the teenage hostess, who genuinely did not.
His friends, the logical first victims, fled. Leonard cited a sudden, pressing need to calibrate lab equipment. Howard claimed a prior engagement involving his mother and a particularly stubborn drain. They abandoned him.
The People magazine reception, a glitzy event at a hotel in Beverly Hills, loomed. Raj, faced with attending alone—a social death for a newly-minted "celebrity"—panicked. In a moment of sheer, uncharacteristic boldness born of desperation, he invited both Sheldon and Penny.
Sheldon accepted for observational purposes. "A study of sudden, media-induced ego inflation and its behavioral distortions in a social habitat will be fascinating."
Penny agreed out of sheer, morbid curiosity, and a soft spot for the often-silent astronomer now drowning in his own hubris.
Raj, however, wildly misinterpreted. He saw Penny's acquiescence as validation of his new, glamorous status. He arrived at her door in a white suit, hair slicked back, bearing a corsage so large it resembled a tropical bird attacking her wrist.
"For my date," he said, with a smoldering look he'd likely practiced in the mirror.
Penny, in a simple black dress she'd worn to three weddings, stared. "I'm… not your date, Raj. I'm your… plus-one. For moral support."
"Of course," he said, winking. "The 'moral' is implied."
Sheldon arrived precisely on time, wearing his usual shirt and tie, looking as if he were attending a lecture on tax law. "The event starts at 7 PM. Traffic on the 110 suggests a 38-minute commute. We should depart."
The reception was a temple of soft lighting, champagne flutes, and low-grade celebrity. Raj swanned in, expecting a red carpet. He got a bored woman with a clipboard who checked his name off a list.
"You may want to note," Raj told her, "that Rajesh Koothrappali has arrived."
"Great," she said, already looking past him. "Bar's to the left."
Undeterred, Raj plunged into the crowd. He tried to chat up a CNN correspondent by explaining the cosmic significance of his own profile. He attempted to "network" with a tech billionaire by sketching the Drake equation on a cocktail napkin. He was met with polite, rapid disengagement.
Sheldon observed, narrating quietly to Penny. "Fascinating. He's employing a courtship display meant for a different ecosystem entirely. His verbal plumage is attracting no mates, only predators looking for weaker herd members to exclude."
Penny watched Raj flail, her initial amusement turning to pity. "He's just so… lost."
"He's been infected by a narrative of significance that the host environment does not recognize. He is an antibody attacking healthy cells."
Meanwhile, Raj, feeling his star failing to rise, latched onto Penny with renewed, desperate vigor. He brought her tiny, unidentifiable canapés. He introduced her to a minor pop star as "my companion, Penny." He tried to guide her onto the dance floor with a hand placed possessively on the small of her back.
Penny stiffened. "Raj, I said I wasn't your date."
"In these settings," he whispered, "everything is fluid. Like spacetime."
She pulled away, seeking refuge beside Sheldon, who was interrogating a microbiologist about the bacterial load on the communal cheese knife.
Raj, rebuffed and publicly humiliated, finally deflated. The obnoxious bravado leaked out of him, leaving a shell of the insecure man he'd always been, now magnified by failure. He spent the last hour of the reception slumped in a chair near a potted fern, staring into a flat ginger ale.
On the ride home, the white suit seemed to hang off him. The silence in Sheldon's Honda was heavy.
Sheldon broke it, his eyes on the road. "Your behavior tonight was a textbook case of acquired situational narcissism. You attempted to graft a media-generated persona onto your existing personality, causing severe social rejection. The persona has been forcibly sloughed off. You are now experiencing the psychological equivalent of donor organ rejection."
Raj said nothing.
Penny, from the backseat, added gently, "You were a way better friend when you were just Raj. The guy who gets nervous. Not the guy in the stupid white suit."
They dropped him off at his apartment. He walked inside without a word, a figure of profound dejection.
Two days later, a subdued Raj appeared at Sheldon and Leonard's door. He was back in his usual cardigan. He held a box of donuts.
"I brought these," he mumbled. "To… apologize. For being a… what did you call it, Sheldon?"
"A narcissistic vector."
"Yeah. That." He looked at Penny, who was having coffee with Sheldon. "And I'm sorry, Penny. For being a creep. You were just being nice."
Penny smiled. "It's okay, Rajesh. Just maybe… lay off the white suits."
He nodded vigorously. "They're very hard to clean."
Sheldon took a donut, inspecting its jelly content. "The return to baseline social parameters is welcome. The donut is a questionable peace offering, but the apology is for Penny, so her word is final. You may re-enter the social circle, provided you adhere to previous, less-annoying protocols."
As Raj sat, quietly sharing the donuts, the atmosphere settled back into its familiar, comfortable rhythm. The star had flared, burned brightly and obnoxiously, and then fizzled back into its stable, slightly-nebulous state. Sheldon reaffirmed his belief: Media-induced ego inflation is a self-correcting condition, given sufficient exposure to reality and a firm, logical intervention from a friend with a car. He considered it a successful, if noisy, bit of social physics.