Young Sheldon viewers were shocked when they watched the fourth episode of the seventh and final season. One of the most traumatic events in the life of Sheldon Cooper, the character played by Jim Parsons in The Big Bang Theory, was rewritten and sweetened with respect to what the scientist had told Penny (Kaley Cuoco). And, while there are die-hard fans of the physical sitcom who say they feel disappointed, the creative decision is open to interpretation: a gift or a betrayal?
In the tenth season of the original series, Sheldon explained to Penny why he always knocked on the door three times, that habit that bothered his neighbor and friend so much. “I was 13 years old, my mother was in her Bible classes, I entered the house expecting to find it empty and I heard a noise coming from my parents’ room: when I opened the door, I saw my father having sex with another woman,” he revealed. .
This was one of the biographical details of Sheldon Cooper that the public could expect to see in Young Sheldon, taking into account that he was entering this tortuous stage of his life in this final broadcast season. Furthermore, Chuck Lorre and Steven Molaro, the creators of the prequel, had on some occasion anticipated this possibility: George (Lance Barber) was capable of flirting with women who were not Mary (Zoe Perry), his wife, indicating that one day he would arrive infidelity.
In the end, however, history was rewritten. As? Redefining Sheldon’s experience as a misunderstanding. It turns out that Sheldon came home and saw his father making out with a blonde woman. The stranger, however, was his mother, who had dressed in a German Oktoberfest costume to liven up the couple’s sexual life.
“I never talked to my father about what I saw that day but since then I added more knocks when knocking on doors so that people can pull up their pants,” explained Jim Parsons as narrator of the prequel. He always thought that his father had cheated on his mother, and instead, what he had witnessed was a spicy dynamic between George and Mary.
Chuck Lorre and Steven Molaro’s decision to create a prequel to The Big Bang Theory was risky precisely for this reason. The sitcom starring Jim Parsons, Johnny Galecki and Kaley Cuoco was synonymous with good vibes, with one joke after another always designed for laughter, but the physicist Sheldon Cooper always hinted at a sad past.
His father had been unfaithful and died when he was 14 (an event that remains to be seen if it happens in Young Sheldon before its end), his mother was excessively religious and anti-scientific, and he did not get along with his brothers either. He was the odd one out in a family that, given his version of events, was somewhat dim-witted, except for his grandmother, played by Annie Potts in the prequel.
Lorre and Molaro, however, chose to counteract this vision of Sheldon Cooper with a good-hearted family comedy, where the love between the Coopers overcomes their differences, and where the conflict is often found in the eyes of the young prodigy, who does not understand or share the point of view of those around him.
Does this mean that, now that a spin-off with Georgie (Montana Jordan) and Mandy (Emily Osment) is underway, Lorre and Molaro could take liberties regarding the couple’s future? And, let’s remember, in The Big Bang Theory it was explained that not only was Georgie a ghost in the future but that at least he had had two wives, leaving his current relationship with Mandy in a bad place, which the scriptwriters consider to be worthy of a series. .
