Young Sheldon Finale Never Made Things Right For TBBT Snubbed Character
Ironically, she deserved it more than anyone else.
Young Sheldon ’s ending had everyone in tears of nostalgia when it hit CBS a couple of weeks ago, and though the show itself was dwelling on Sheldon Cooper’s earlier years in Texas, the finale still gave a little sneak peek into how the things are for The Big Bang Theory ’s lead characters some time after the original series’ end.
Reuniting young and adult versions of Sheldon, portrayed by Iain Armitage and Jim Parsons, the prequel indeed had a unique opportunity to right the biggest wrong about one of the original characters, but actually made it all even worse.
In Young Sheldon’s finale, Jim Parsons’ Sheldon appears alongside his wife Amy Farrah Fowler, played by Mayim Bialik, as the show sees them discussing their family matters. Finishing his work on his own memoir, Sheldon replies to Amy that back in the day they shouldn’t have allowed Penny, his friend and Leonard’s wife, to babysit their unnamed daughter when Amy mentions their child’s interest in taking up acting classes.
The whole sequence makes it quite clear that Penny eventually never made her biggest dream come true and left her desire to have a successful acting career behind as soon as she married Leonard.
It’s fair to say that The Big Bang Theory’s whole universe has always downplayed Penny’s ambitious nature, and not only Young Sheldon’s final scene here is to blame.
Throughout the original show, Penny has been more than persistent in achieving her biggest goal as she initially moved from Nebraska to Los Angeles to get into Hollywood’s inner circles and later on seized every tiny opportunity to appear on the screen, even if it was just a cheap commercial that we talk about.
By the end of The Big Bang Theory’s run, Penny seems to have totally lost all the hope she ever had to become a prominent actress. The show wraps her story up not in a very bad way proving that she switched careers and started a new job as a sales rep in a pharmaceutical company, something that eventually let her make more money than her husband Leonard.
However, many long-standing fans still cherished a hope that, after the series’ finale, Penny would go back to her dream and give it another shot, especially given that the character repeatedly confessed that her brand new job didn’t really interest her.
The Big Bang Theory may have given zero chance to Penny’s dream, but Young Sheldon had all the opportunities to finally make it up to the character who was always deprived of the career she wanted.
Instead, the prequel still treated Penny in the same way, letting Sheldon stress that his friend never tried to revive her biggest dream ever since the original show ended.
Though The Big Bang Theory’s franchise seems to be going strong with another spinoff in the works, there’s a very low chance for its fans to see Penny in the place she’s always strived for.