Young Sheldon boss Steve Holland would like to use this opportunity to address the fate of Paige Swanson (and debunk all of your tragic theories about her absence in The Big Bang Theory).
Mckenna Grace’s character, a fellow child prodigy, was introduced early in Season 2 of the prequel series and served as Sheldon’s chief rival at East Texas Tech. Aside from Tam, who crossed over to Big Bang, she was the closest thing that Sheldon had to a friend, and remained an acquaintance for many years, eventually befriending Sheldon’s twin sister Missy.
But Paige was neither seen nor heard from during Young Sheldon’s farewell season, and she was never mentioned on Big Bang despite being introduced while the mothership was still up and running.
“People ask about Paige all the time, and she was only in [nine] episodes of Young Sheldon,” executive producer Steve Holland points out to TVLine. What’s more, only three of those episodes overlapped with Big Bang Season 12. By the time her role was expanded, “Big Bang was done, and there was no way to go, ‘Can we go back and retrofit [her] into Big Bang Theory?’
“People online respond to Paige and I think that’s because Mckenna is incredible,” Holland posits. “The downside of Mckenna being incredible is that Mckenna is a movie star” — most recently seen in Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire — “and that makes Mckenna very difficult to get.”
But even if they had gotten Grace back for a final season encore, he’s not so sure that there would have been a definitive answer about her Big Bang future. She was last seen midway through Season 6, when she and Missy ran away from home.
“When we got into this season, especially with it being a shortened season, we never thought that [Paige’s storyline] was an arc that needed more closing than it got,” Holland says. “There was a parallel; she was a bit of a mirror image of Sheldon — a different way that Sheldon could have turned out — and I think we saw that play out.
“I know there are some dark theories about what happened to Paige and why Sheldon doesn’t mention her [on Big Bang],” he acknowledges. “I don’t think she’s not mentioned because she went down a dark path and is dead in Big Bang Theory. For us, it was just an interesting way to explore another kid who had a similar thing to Sheldon and the different roads that they could take. [By Season 6] she is not a huge part of Sheldon’s life; she’s more of Missy’s friend in the show than she is Sheldon’s friend. That said, it would have been great to have Mckenna back because she’s incredible, always.”
Another fan-favorite character who is never acknowledged on Big Bang is Sheldon’s childhood mentor, Dr. John Sturgis (played by Wallace Shawn). For a year, both Sheldon and Paige audited Sturgis’ physics class. Sturgis even dated Meemaw for year. Alas, “we didn’t realize how big a part of this show Sturgis was going to be,” Holland concedes. “That’s the honest answer. The in-universe answer is that Sheldon is still a little hyper-focused. It’s not that Dr. Sturgis isn’t a big part of his life, but it was three years of his life, and he has gone on to work with Stephen Hawking and other big people… but I do think Dr. Sturgis is an important [figure] in his life.”
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