I Loved This Character in Young Sheldon, and It’s a Shame He Never Made it to TBBT

Launched a decade after The Big Bang Theory, its prequel Young Sheldon always aimed at a more detailed view of Sheldon Cooper’s life story primarily addressing his childhood and his early days in Texas alongside all his family.

After the original series’ brief introduction of the other Coopers, Young Sheldon finally gave them a much bigger role proving that every single one of them had some impact on the way Sheldon eventually turned out to be.

However, it was pretty much disappointing for me and, I’m more than sure, many other fans to realize that The Big Bang Theory actually never gave enough credit to Young Sheldon’s major characters that weren’t part of the Cooper family — in fact, the original series didn’t give them any credit at all, even though it had a chance to do so.

There’s surely a whole list of those characters that deserved a mention, but I’m still mad at The Big Bang Theory for completely ignoring only one of them.

Apart from Sheldon’s family members, many other people in his close surroundings had a huge influence on him while he was still growing up, and Dr. Sturgis is surely one of those. He’s introduced in season 1 when Sheldon starts attending his Physics class despite being much younger than all other students.

John Sturgis quickly becomes Sheldon’s mentor and even close friend, yet his role grows bigger when the professor falls for Meemaw and they eventually start dating, an event that receives Sheldon’s instant approval.

Even when Dr. Sturgis and Meemaw decide to call it quits after the former suddenly has a change of heart during his stay in a mental hospital, neither of those seemingly disheartening plot twists forces Sheldon to grow apart from his favorite professor.

Quite the contrary, Dr. Sturgis remains Sheldon’s hero who probably gave his young student an even bigger incentive to strive for a Nobel Prize.

Young Sheldon made it pretty clear that Dr. Sturgis played a crucial role in Sheldon’s life during the latter’s childhood and teenage years, yet The Big Bang Theory never even implied so in the first place.

The original show had in fact a great opportunity to make it up to the forgotten character since it once featured Iain Armitage’s Sheldon in its final season 12. To make it worse, even Sheldon’s emotional speech while receiving his Nobel Prize didn’t have a single mention of Dr. Sturgis and his impact on Sheldon’s life and career pursuits.

Considering that the quirky professor’s life example has always been some kind of extra motivation for Sheldon to keep going no matter what, I just can’t think otherwise – snubbing Dr. Sturgis in such a brutal way was yet another crime The Big Bang Theory committed towards its universe’s side characters.