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Young Sheldon is full of characters who just stop existing. One week they're sitting in the Cooper kitchen like they live there, [music] and then four seasons go by and nobody has said their name once. The girl who used to beat
Explores the fate of forgotten characters in Young Sheldon, revealing which ones vanished without explanation and which got subtle endings.
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Key Takeaways
- Many Young Sheldon characters disappear without narrative closure.
- Some characters have subtle or indirect endings revealed through dialogue or narration.
- The show contradicts The Big Bang Theory on who bullied Sheldon as a child.
- Not all character exits are addressed, leaving fans to speculate.
- Certain characters receive satisfying conclusions, showing varied storytelling approaches.
What the video covers
- Young Sheldon features many characters who disappear without explanation over multiple seasons.
- Some characters like Bobby Sparks, Libby, Erica Swanson, and Selena vanish after brief appearances with no closure.
- The show never clarifies why Bobby Sparks, who bullied young Sheldon, disappears despite her family remaining in the story.
- Other characters, such as Herschel Sparks and Nathan, receive indirect updates or clear endings through throwaway lines or narration.
- June remains part of the story until the end, showing some characters do get sustained arcs.
- Sam leaves the show with a positive ending, moving on to a summer program at Columbia.
- Pastor Rob's storyline ends ambiguously but shows his continued presence in the church community.
- The video highlights how the show handles character exits differently, sometimes with explicit closure and sometimes with silence.
- It also discusses the inconsistency between Young Sheldon and The Big Bang Theory regarding the identity of Sheldon's childhood bully.
- The video emphasizes that some characters’ disappearances remain unexplained, reflecting common TV writing practices.
Chapters
- 00:00Introduction to Forgotten Characters
- 01:11Bobby Sparks and the Bullying Mystery
- 02:17Libby and the End of a Brief Friendship
- 03:06Erica Swanson’s Single Appearance
- 03:59Unresolved Questions About Bobby and Family
- 05:00Herschel Sparks: Disappearance with Updates
- 06:08Nathan’s Clear Goodbye
- 07:02June’s Continued Presence
- 07:51Sam’s Positive Exit
- 08:55Pastor Rob and Ambiguous Ending
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
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Sheldon up is gone. Sheldon's actual best friend vanishes for two entire seasons before anybody thinks to bring him back. And most people watching just figure that's what happens on a show that runs this long, that the writers got busy and forgot about them. They
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didn't forget. I'm going through every forgotten Young Sheldon character. The ones the show quietly gave an ending to, the ones you probably missed, and the ones that just disappeared. And the last one on that list is the one nobody has
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ever gotten a straight answer about. There's a group of characters on this show that have absolutely nothing. No goodbye scene, no last conversation, no line three seasons later where somebody mentions them while doing the dishes.
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The show hands them a whole story for 20 minutes and then behaves like they were never there.
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Normally that's fine because every show has people like that. The kid with one line in the lunchroom or the guy working the register at the store. But one of the people in this group is not a background kid at all. She's part of a
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family that lives right next door to the Coopers and she does something to Sheldon that The Big Bang Theory spent 12 years blaming on somebody else.
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In season 1 episode 17, Sheldon gets bullied by Bobby Sparks. Bobby is Billy's little sister. She's Brenda and Herschel's daughter and she spends the whole episode physically pushing Sheldon around. He tries wrapping himself in bubble wrap to survive her and when that
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doesn't work, he tries learning jujitsu. Then the episode ends [music] and that's it. That is the complete record of Bobby Sparks.
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She never comes back. She never gets mentioned again and the show never explains where she went even though her mom and her brother stay in the story right up until the last season. Then there's Libby who shows up earlier in in
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same first season. Libby is a 17-year-old at Medford High [music] who actually likes hanging out with Sheldon and Tam, which basically never happens to either of them.
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She talks to Sheldon about geology, gets him excited about rocks, and takes both of them to the Natural Science Museum in Houston. And then Sheldon works out that she doesn't see him as a friend his own age at all.
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She sees him as a little kid she's being nice to. That realization ends the friendship inside the same episode, and Libby [music] never appears again.
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Nothing about where she went to school, nothing about who she became. Selena gets a version of this, too.
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She's Pastor Jeff's first wife. She moves to Medford after they get married, and she hates it there.
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She can't really talk to anyone in town. The marriage is clearly in trouble from the first time we meet her. And then in season 2, she leaves him by writing a note.
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Jeff finds the note, and that's the last we ever see of her. The show later treats them as divorced, and eventually marries Jeff off to Robin. But where Selena actually went is never answered.
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And then Erica Swanson, who might be the strangest one because she's tied directly to a character the show cares about a lot.
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Erica is Paige's [music] older sister. She comes to the Cooper house one time, sits down with Georgie and Missy, and the three of them bond over the fact that they all live with a younger sibling who's smarter than everybody
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else in the room. It's a great scene. [music] It's also the only time Erica is ever physically in an episode.
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[music] Everything you learn about her after that comes secondhand through her family falling apart around her. Bobby, Libby, and Erica are all officially one episode characters, and Selena only ever turns up in two, which sounds like it settles
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the whole thing. Except one of them leaves behind a problem the show never actually fixes.
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Here's the Bobby issue. On The Big Bang Theory, adult Sheldon talks about Billy Sparks like Billy was the bully of his childhood.
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But when young Sheldon actually shows us the Sparks kids, Billy is mostly harmless, and it's Bobby doing the shoving.
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Fans have been pointing at this for years, and the usual explanation is that adult Sheldon just remembered it wrong and blamed the brother he saw more often. That's a fair read, but it is a read. The show never sits anybody down
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and settles it, so anyone telling you it's confirmed is guessing. And that's the honest limit on all four of these people. Bobby didn't move away, she didn't switch schools, she didn't go live with a relative, because none of
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that is anywhere in the show. She just isn't in it anymore, and the same goes for the other three. An empty file is an empty file.
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But, at least none of them ever acted like they were coming back. The characters with nothing are actually the easy part of this list, because there's a whole other group where the show absolutely did tell you what happened,
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and most of you sat through those episodes without catching it. Some of these people got a real ending. The show just didn't put it anywhere you'd expect to find it. Instead of a goodbye scene, you get one throwaway line years later,
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dropped into the middle of a completely different story. And if you were up getting a snack, you missed it.
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The best example of this is a guy who stopped showing up in season 2 and was still getting updates in the final season of the show.
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That's Herschel Sparks. Herschel is Brenda's husband, Billy and Bobby's dad, and he runs a garage in Medford. In season 2 [music] episode 8, he gives Georgie a job there after noticing the kid is genuinely good with tires. That's
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a much bigger deal than it looks, because Georgie ends up building his entire adult life on tires. The man who spotted that talent first was a neighbor who's about to disappear.
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And Herschel does disappear, at [music] least on screen. He stops turning up partway through season 2, but the show keeps feeding you information about him anyway. By season 4, it's clear the marriage to Brenda is over. In season
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Herschel moved out. In five, Billy mentions there's another woman in his dad's life. And then at George's funeral in the final season, Billy casually drops that Herschel is living in New Jersey now. So, a guy nobody has seen in 5 years gets a
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current address near the very end of the series. Nathan gets something even cleaner. Nathan is the comic book and science fiction kid Sheldon hangs around with in Medford across a bunch of seasons. And when Sheldon is about to
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leave for California, he tells Nathan he's moving. Then adult Sheldon says outright that he never saw Nathan again.
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That's more closure than almost anybody on this show gets. It isn't a happy ending or a sad one, it's just the truth said out [music] loud. June is somebody people swear vanished and she didn't.
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She meets Meemaw back in season 3, becomes her friend, wins $11,000 off a machine and turns into her partner in the gambling room. Then she's around less and less and you stop thinking about her.
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But when George dies, June is right there at Mary's door with a casserole. She's in that family's life until the end of the show.
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[music] Sam gets an ending, too, and hers is the simplest one on this entire list.
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She's the physics student at East Texas Tech who befriends Mary, shows her around campus, and calls Sheldon out for acting spoiled about his private dorm room. Her last appearance is her getting into a summer program at Columbia, the
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kind of thing that's supposed to set you up for grad school down the line.
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She isn't lost, she's the one person on this whole list who disappears because things went right. And then there's Pastor Rob who gets an ending that isn't quite an ending.
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Rob is the youth pastor the church hires in season 5. He's the one who speaks up when Jeff pushes Mary out over the whole Georgie and Mandy situation. And in season 6, he tells Mary that a church in
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Little Rock has offered him a job. Now, look at what that scene actually gives you.
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[music] He says he's thinking about it. He never says he took it. So, when you see somebody online say Pastor Rob moved to Arkansas, that person is filling in a blank the show left empty on purpose.
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Herschel is the one who proves the real point though. Leaving the screen [music] and leaving the story are two completely different things and this show knows the difference.
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It can finish somebody off camera whenever it feels like it. One line at a funeral, one line about a job offer, one narrator saying he never saw the guy again and the job is done.
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Which is what makes it so strange when it doesn't bother because every single person in that group is a neighbor, a co-worker or a friend of the family.
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Nobody's heart was on the line with any of them. The next group is completely different and the way the show handles those people is a lot harder to defend.
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Every Cooper kid gets a first real relationship on this show and every single person on the other side of those relationships disappears the second it's over. It doesn't happen slowly and they don't hang around in the background afterward either. The relationship ends
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and the character is finished and the biggest one of them never even got to be a relationship in the first place.
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Veronica Duncan shows up in season 2 episode 6 as a kid Sheldon is tutoring and she is not doing great. She smokes, she drinks, she's failing [music] and then the church puts on a hell house that scares her badly enough that she
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goes to Mary and commits to being a Christian. From there she becomes a real part of that world. Georgie is completely gone for her and the show milks that for about a season and a half. He finds out she has a boyfriend
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and takes it hard. Later her home life gets bad enough that the Coopers take [music] her in and the way Georgie treats her during that stretch is honestly the first time he acts like a decent person. Then in season 3 he runs
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into her while he's out with his new girlfriend and it's written all over his face that he isn't over it. That's the last time Veronica ever appears in a new story. Nine episodes and after that the only thing you get is the finale where
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Sheldon tells Mandy who who was and mentions that Georgie had been in love with her for years.
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And I can tell he was madly in love with her for years. End of discussion.
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Janna Boggs is the girlfriend he ran into her with. Janna is a cheerleader at Medford High.
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They [music] date through a big chunk of season 3 and season 4. They go through a pregnancy scare that forces both of them to actually look at what their lives would become, and then she breaks up with him because he drops out of school.
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Early in season 5, he asks her to take him back, and she turns him down. That's the end of Janna. She never shows up again.
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[music] Marcus Larson goes out the same way with Missy. He's the baseball kid she likes, and it takes her most of season 3 to get anywhere with him.
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First, she finds out he likes somebody else. Then, she gets Georgie to help her talk to him at the mall, and she even joins baseball partly to be near him.
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Eventually, he asks her to be his girlfriend, and it works for a while. Then, in season 4, Missy sees him holding hands with another girl, and that's her first real heartbreak.
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[music] It's also the last anybody hears about Marcus. Even Ira Rosenbloom fits the pattern, and he isn't a teenager. Ira is the furniture store owner who teaches Sheldon about being Jewish, and then starts seeing Meemaw.
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For most of season 1, he's a genuine option for her, sending furniture over, competing with Sturgis without totally realizing he's competing. Then, Meemaw picks Sturgis. The two men sort things out between themselves, and Ira quietly stops being part of the story.
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The pattern here is that all of these people exist to change a Cooper. Veronica is there to make Georgie capable of caring about somebody who isn't himself, and Janna is there to make him feel exactly what dropping out
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cost him. So, I'm dating a dropout? No, you're dating a guy with a full-time job.
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Marcus gives Missy the first bruise she can't shake off in an afternoon, and Ira is around so that Meemaw choosing Sturgis actually means something.
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Once the change lands in the Cooper kid, the writers have no use for the other person, so the other person goes away.
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Also, since somebody always brings it up, there's a story floating around that Veronica was originally supposed to be the one who got pregnant and ended up married to Georgie. And that she got written out because of the actress.
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There's nothing backing that up. It's fan theory. People repeat it with total confidence, and it isn't verified anywhere. What is worth noticing is how Veronica's exit is different from the other three. Jana got a scene where somebody said out loud that it was over,
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and Marcus got one, too, even if Missy delivered it secondhand. Veronica just walks past Georgie in a restaurant, and the show never comes back to her.
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Every one of those endings still handed you something. A breakup, a rejection, a door closing while you watched it happen.
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But there's one friendship on this show that refused to finish on screen at all, and to get an answer about him, you have to leave Young Sheldon completely and go watch a different show.
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Tam Nguyen is the one people get genuinely angry about. And he's also the only person on this entire list whose adult life you actually get to see. Both of those things are true at the same time, which makes him the weirdest case
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here. Because the answer exists, it's just delivered in a way that's honestly worse than getting no answer at all.
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Sheldon meets Tam in season 1 episode 2, when he's specifically trying to make a friend and mostly failing at it.
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Tam is the one who sticks. He becomes Sheldon's lunch buddy, [music] his partner for basically everything at Medford High, and the only person the show ever calls Sheldon's childhood best friend.
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And Sheldon being Sheldon, he isn't exactly grateful about it. At one point, he sums the whole friendship up by saying, "I'm all he's got, and even I avoid him half the time." Then Sheldon leaves Medford High for college, and Tam starts fading out.
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He's around a little in season 4, including one visit where he helps Sheldon get his hands on a bootleg game, and then [music] he's gone.
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Tam showed up with the bootleg copy of Railroad Kingdom. I wore my mittens so as not to leave fingerprints in case it was ever used as evidence against me.
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Not for a few episodes, but for two full seasons. Season 5 and season 6 both go by with Sheldon's supposed best friend nowhere in the show at all. He comes back in season 7 for one last lunch, right
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before Sheldon moves to California. And the way that scene plays out, Tam is trying to tell Sheldon about his own life, what he's been doing since high school, and where he's headed next, while Sheldon keeps dragging the conversation back to California. That's
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my read on it, but it's hard to watch it any other way. The last real conversation these two ever have is one of them talking and the other one waiting for his turn.
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Then, 20 years later on The Big Bang Theory, Tam walks into Caltech with his teenage son.
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[music] In season 12, episode 4, you find out that Sheldon has been quietly furious at him this entire time for staying in Texas instead of following him to California.
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Tam's explanation is that he stayed because he met Beth and fell in love with her. They talk it out, they make up, [music] and that's your answer.
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So, Tam isn't unresolved. If anything, he's the opposite. You know he stayed in Texas, you know he married Beth, you know he has kids, and you know exactly how the friendship died, and exactly how it got patched back together.
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That's more than almost anybody else here gets, and a lot more than the person we're ending on. The problem is what that answer does to the lunch scene. Watch that season 7 episode fresh, and it looks like two old friends
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catching up before one of them moves away. Once you know about the other show, that same scene becomes the last conversation of a 20-year grudge that only one guy in the room knew was happening.
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Tam walked out of that lunch thinking he'd see his friend again, while Sheldon was already writing the story where Tam abandoned him.
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There's a fair argument that Tam shouldn't even be on this list, and plenty of fans make it. Their point is that a forgotten character is somebody you never hear about again, and Tam got an entire episode of another show
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dedicated to explaining him. Like lunch with my old friend, Tam. Why are we here?
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This is where we always eat. That's true. The only things you never really find out or whether he ever went to college and what he ends up doing for a living, which are pretty small holes in an otherwise finished story.
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So, Tam gets his answer. It takes two shows and more than 20 years, but it exists and somebody came back for him.
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Which is exactly what makes the last one on this list so much harder to sit with.
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Because that's a character the show followed for five straight seasons, kept checking back in on, kept showing you slowly coming apart, and then simply stopped filming. And the moment the writers picked to leave her on is the reason people are still arguing about
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this one today. Paige Swanson is the only person on this list where the show did all of the work and then walked away from it. Everybody else either got an ending or never had enough story to need one.
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Paige had five seasons of story. She had a real arc with a beginning and a middle and a very clear direction, and then the writers just put the pen down.
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And the strangest part about it is that none of it starts out sad. In season 2 episode 2, Paige walks into Sturgis's class and instantly ruins Sheldon's whole life. Because she's a kid genius, too, and she is not impressed by him
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even a little. [music] She's confident, she's funny about it, and she makes Sheldon feel replaceable for the first time [music] ever.
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The two families meet. Erica bonds with Georgie and Missy, and the whole thing plays like the setup for a rivalry the show is going to have fun with for years. [music] Then her parents start falling apart.
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You can see it early, back around the museum lecture episode, where the problems [music] between her mom and dad start showing through.
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My parents had a bad marriage. Honestly, he was hard to be around. The divorce goes through, and the next time Paige turns up at the Cooper house, her grades have fallen off a cliff, and she's shoplifting. She's still a little
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kid at this point. From there, the show just keeps going with it. She comes back with a whole new attitude and rejects the entire child genius thing everybody built around her. She tours East Texas Tech and makes it clear she doesn't want
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to go, that she'd rather have Columbia or Harvard. And more than that, she doesn't want other people picking her life for her.
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She ends up at college in Austin anyway, and when Sheldon sees her there, she tells him she feels like she doesn't fit in with anybody. That's the one that should have set off every alarm in the building, because that's a kid saying
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the thing everybody promised would fix her did not fix her. [music] By season 6, she's dropped out, and she's taking Sheldon to a frat party, hanging around with college students who are years older than she is. And then in
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season 6, episode 16, Missy takes George's truck, and the two of them drive off together.
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The police pick them up in Louisiana. [music] That's the last time you ever see her.
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She isn't in season 7 at all. She doesn't appear on The Big Bang Theory.
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She doesn't get name-dropped on The Big Bang Theory. She doesn't exist over there in any form. There are three things going on with this one, and the order matters.
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[music] The first is why it hits so much harder than everybody else on this list. The show kept making promises about Paige.
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Every single time she came back, it went out of its way to show you she was doing worse than the last time you saw her.
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[music] And that's something people decided on purpose, in a room, over and over again across five seasons. You don't accidentally write a kid coming apart that carefully.
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[music] And then the payoff for all of it is a road trip bit that ends with a police stop, played mostly for laughs.
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The second is the argument on the other side, and it's a real argument. Plenty of fans think the truck episode is a perfectly fine ending. Their point is that people leave your life exactly like that when you're a kid. The friend you
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had for 3 years moves away and you never hear from them again [music] and nobody hands you a final scene to wrap it up.
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Paige was Sheldon's rival and sometimes his friend and then she wasn't around anymore, which is just how it actually works.
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There's a note. The third is the part that matters most and it's the reason this video exists.
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Everything you've been told about what happened to Paige afterward is made up. She didn't get sent away somewhere, she didn't end up in jail and she never cleaned herself up and landed at some great school. There's no secret adult
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version of her who runs into Sheldon later either. All of that gets posted with total confidence and none of it isn't either show.
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Even her being missing from The Big Bang Theory isn't a clue. That show was almost completely written before Paige was ever invented. She isn't absent from Sheldon's adult life because something terrible happened to her.
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She's absent because she didn't exist yet when they wrote it. So the honest answer to what happened to Paige Swanson is that the writers built a girl who was Sheldon's equal in every way that counted.
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Spent five seasons showing you exactly what that kind of childhood costs a kid, walked her all the way down to the back of a police car in Louisiana while she was still a kid herself and then never went back for her.
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If you want more Young Sheldon breakdowns like this one, I've got another one on screen right now. Check it out.
Topics:Young Sheldonforgotten characterscharacter exitsTV show analysisThe Big Bang TheorySheldon Coopercharacter closureHerschel SparksBobby SparksTV continuity
