After the premiere of Mrs. Wolowitz's touching tribute in last week's episode of "The Big Bang Theory," Howard will say his final goodbye to his mother while Sheldon and Penny will try out a love experiment.

In Thursday's upcoming episode, entitled "The Intimacy Acceleration," Sheldon and Penny will test out an experiment that supposed to make people fall in love. In the meantime, Bernadette and Howard will take a flight to attend Mrs. Wolowitz's funeral. However, a preview video reveals that Howard will become furious when the airport loses his mother's ashes.

According to Carter Matt, the synopsis reads as follows:

"As a joke, Sheldon and Penny try an experiment designed to make participants fall in love. Also, Leonard, Amy, Raj and Emily spend the evening trying to escape a room with a 'zombie.' And, after returning from Mrs. Wolowitz' funeral, Bernadette and Howard run into trouble at the airport."

Viewers can also look forward to seeing a variety of guest stars, including the return of Laura Spencer as Emily and "Glee" and "Switched at Birth" actor Max Adler playing a zombie.

Last week's episode, "The Comic Book Store Regeneration," paid tribute to the tragic loss of actress Carol Anne Susi, who played the voice role of Howard Wolowitz's nagging mother. The 62-year-old actress died from cancer last November.

During the episode, Howard struggled to cope with the shocking news that his mother passed away in her sleep while on vacation in Florida.

In a recent interview with The Hollywood Reporter, executive producer Steve Molaro revealed that Susi's death hit the show's producers like a ton of bricks since they had no plan to take her character off the show and they were in full production mode at the time of her death.

"[After she died], the first thing we talked about was how sad we were that our friend was no longer with us," Molaro said. "It took a while for that devastation to calm down before we could even think about [translating her death into the sitcom]. We couldn't bring ourselves to start to think about it. Eventually the needs of the show [forced the issue] and we had to come up with a plan, and I don't think we could bring ourselves to replace the actor. The thought of it felt awful to us. That left us with two options: We send the character away -- which seemed false and fake -- or we go right into it and write it into the show, so that's what we chose to do."

The EP teased that "there will not be a funeral episode" since they want to maintain the show's lighthearted and upbeat tone.

"The way we handled it enabled us to deal with it and also jump over a funeral-type episode. But we will certainly continue to deal with -- Wolowitz and Bernadette in particular -- with the fallout of her passing away for a number of episodes down the line," Molaro added.

Meanwhile, Howard will try to cope with the loss of his mother.

"At first, he's just stunned. We're going to work our way through it with the characters and ourselves," said Molaro.

However, the death will bring Howard and Stuart closer.

"It makes everybody realize everything else they were fighting about seem a lot more trivial than it did five minutes earlier," he continued.

Season 8, Episode 16 of "The Big Bang Theory," "The Intimacy Acceleration," will air on Thursday, Feb. 26 on CBS.

Watch a preview below.

Related