The Complex Characters of Young Sheldon
I love the characters in Young Sheldon because they’re richly developed, three dimensional and well crafted. We understand a lot about each character as we watch them all grow through the seven seasons of the sitcom. What I really like about them is how realistic and relatable they are, so it’s easy to engage with them.
ALERT: There will be spoilers in this article.
Missy Cooper
As we watch her grow from being a young girl to a moody teenager, we see lots of problems coming into her life and we witness how she reacts to them. She was often quite rude to her family members and we see her shouting at them in anger or frustration many times. But she doesn’t want to be rude to them and regrets it afterwards. She just has too many things going on in her life to handle, and because she’s probably the Cooper who gets the least screen time, we often don’t realise how difficult her life was, and all the problems that she faced, such as:
Feeling inadequate compared to Sheldon
Putting aside his annoying quirks and habits, Sheldon has always been quite extraordinary, from going to college when he was 11 to having the same IQs as the smartest people in the world. Missy, on the other hand, is his twin and is just a regular person. Whilst she’s happy with herself, sometimes she feels like she’s not enough because she’s not as good as Sheldon — like when Sheldon starts college and she’s going to middle school.
Peer pressure and fitting in with people around her
Sheldon was always socially awkward but Missy was the complete opposite. She was just a normal girl who did what girls her age did.
We might not see a lot of what goes on at Missy’s school, but we can probably guess. In Season 5, she wants to get better clothes to wear to school. This is probably because all her friends are doing it and she wants to match up to them to stay popular. In the same episode, people at school make a comment about how hairy Missy’s legs are, and she tries to shave them.
In Season 6, when Sheldon searches for Paige he actually finds Missy at a party for much older people. This suggests that she does lots of things that the “cool” and “popular” people do to fit in with her classmates.
From Season 3, we see Missy developing crushes, like the one she had on Marcus. At the end of Season 4, Missy experiences her first heart break, which triggers chaos in the Cooper family. She runs away, because she feels like she always gets the blame and her parents side with Sheldon. She feels this way after an incident where Sheldon said some insensitive things about her behaviour and her “boy problems” and she ripped up his Professor Proton poster and got into trouble for it.
She runs away again in Season 6 after she was left behind when Mandy was giving birth. When her parents are taking her back home, they are angry at her and punish her.
They do understand that Missy was feeling left out, but they wanted to show her the consequences of doing something immature. That exacerbated her problems. Later in Season 6, she starts drinking and smoking because she doesn’t know any other way to handle her feelings.
Missy believes that running away from her problems, or turning to drinking and smoking, is the best way to handle them.
Boy Problems
Again in Season 7, Missy has a boyfriend and she gets broken up with. It’s a predictable situation: she has a crush on a boy, she goes after him, they get together, she gets broken up with. Like a lot of girls her age, she thinks that she needs to get a “boyfriend” because everyone at her school is doing it to be popular and “happening”.
Her father’s demise
Missy was never very close to any of her parents because they were often paying more attention to Sheldon, and if it wasn’t him, then it was Georgie. But throughout the series we see Missy develop a bond with George and there were definitely some cute daddy-daughter moments that we all loved, from when they went to Red Lobster together to when Missy asked him to help her throw a baseball to impress Marcus.
When she got the news that George had a heart attack, the first thing that she said was, “But he’s okay, right?”.
George’s demise had a huge effect on the whole family, but for Missy, it just added to her already long list of problems in her life. His passing also meant that she’d have to live with her mother, whilst Georgie moved out with Mandy and Sheldon went to Caltech.
In one of the earliest episodes, Missy and Mary are eating dinner together and we can see how awkward they are.
She did face some other problems too, but they weren’t as significant and weren’t highlighted much in the sitcom:
Issues at school
Feeling like no one understands her
Feeling like everybody forgets that she’s in the family
Family problems like Mandy’s pregnancy and Mary and George’s arguments and the marriage issues that emerge later on
Overall, Young Sheldon probably ends on a sad note for Missy, but we do see in The Big Bang Theory that she’s bright and lively as an adult, which shows that she did eventually get over her father’s death and dealt with her problems.
Paige Swanson
Paige Swanson is similar to Missy, and that’s probably why both of them were good friends, and also ran away together.
She also had a lot of problems in her life and decided not to handle them but to turn away, like when she started drinking or when she ran away.
Being smart
Paige and Sheldon are both young prodigies, except one key different between them is that Sheldon would never change himself whereas after her parents’ divorce which she thought was her fault, she wished that she wasn’t smart.
In Season 5 when Paige and Sheldon meet at a university lecture, we learn a lot more about her life. Sheldon, surprisingly, has managed to make a couple of friends in college, but Paige has not, and has a “Mona” to take care of her. She was hoping that Sheldon would understand how she felt but when she realised that his life was going much better than hers, she didn’t know what to do, since Sheldon was the only person that she could turn to.
Her intellect causing issues in her family
Linda and Barry Swanson had a hard time raising Paige because she wasn’t like the other children. They had different opinions on how to raise her, which contributed to the growing tension between them and eventually led to their separation.
In addition to this, Paige’s sister, Erica was always left out of the family because her parents were paying more attention to Paige, very similar to the situation with Missy and Georgie.
The impact of her parents’ divorce
Paige blamed her parents’ divorce on herself and hated that she was so smart. The separation had a huge impact on her and we can see the different after-effects of it:
She changed significantly, and started to do lots of bad things and things that were considered “cool” because she thought that it was the right way to go.
In a Season 3 episode, we see that Paige dyed her hair. Sheldon asks her why she did it and Linda says, “Well she just really wanted to and I thought under the circumstances, why not?”
In that one episode, we see how much the divorce changed Paige. She took advantage of Mary’s sympathy for her and used this to get her to drive everyone to the mall. When they’re there, she lies to Mary that they are going to Hello Kitty when they go to a different shop, and convinces Missy and Sheldon to steal from it.
In Season 6 when Missy and Paige ran away, she convinced her to steal from a diner at breakfast and persuaded her to tell the cop a fake story. In the same episode, Missy, Paige and the cop play a game where they figure out how fast the cars are driving, and Missy accidentally mentions how smart Paige is. Paige reluctantly explains the formula to figuring out the speed of the cars. In the same Season, we see her at a party, drinking.
All these examples show that she wanted to change herself and hide how smart she was.
Unlike Missy, Paige isn’t a character in The Big Bang Theory, so we don’t know how she turned out as an adult, and we don’t see enough of her in Young Sheldon to be able to predict how she would turn out.
Overall, I really enjoyed writing this article; I’d like to explore some more characters, so expect a Part 2 coming!