The Magic of Missy Made Sheldon Cooper

Adult Missy was played by Courtney Henggeler and young Missy was played by Raegan Revord

Young Sheldon, the (in my view) much more interesting spin-off to The Big Bang Theory has finished, after seven seasons.

The show took the scholastically precocious but perennially emotionally bemused Sheldon Cooper to the age of 14, when he moved from East Texas to California for graduate school.

The Sheldon we met at the start of The Big Bang Theory was the 'quirky' sidekick of fellow physicist Leonard, who was meant to be the star. After a peculiar early character shift, the story began to revolve around Sheldon and his insufferable arrogance, social ignorance, obsessiveness and narcissism.

In Young Sheldon, the title character was brilliantly portrayed by Iain Armitage (an incredible feat to play an often baffling child genius) but other characters also shone through and gained more of our sympathy. These include the three M’s of his life: Missy, Meemaw (he and Missy’s razor sharp grandmother) and Mary (their mum).

Young Sheldon was narrated by adult Sheldon, played by Jim Parsons, and to those of us who watched Big Bang, it’s apparent that Sheldon is an unreliable narrator.

As in Big Bang when he’s talking about his family members, Sheldon almost always characterises them as dim, backwards and out-of-touch. In reality it’s almost always Sheldon who doesn’t have much of a grasp of what’s going on.

Sheldon, in both The Big Bang Theory and Young Sheldon, is especially bad at anything requiring emotional intelligence (which, let’s face it, is most of life). In a brilliant and revealing pair of early episodes in Young Sheldon, we see how his twin Missy outperforms him in anything requiring insight into human beings, in an academic study of twins.

While the psychologists were assessing Missy, she was assessing them — and ended up playing matchmaker!

Meanwhile Sheldon was enraged because he assumed the study was to show how clever he is. The episodes also revealed how alone Missy felt in a family preoccupied with Sheldon’s ‘specialness’.

Missy Cooper, assessing her psychologist

Despite Sheldon’s insistence, both then and everafter, that Missy is inferior to him in every way (in The Big Bang Theory he refers to himself as "a superior genetic mutation" and Missy as "existing mediocre stock”), Missy is often several steps ahead in understanding life around them.

Their strained relationship also laid the foundations for Sheldon to turn into an adult who managed to sustain some relationships and (as a result), won a Nobel Prize (with his partner Amy — a 'mere biologist’).

Missy being Sheldon’s often exasperated but at times protective twin was, I’d argue, the blueprint for Sheldon’s eventual friendship with Penny in The Big Bang Theory. Penny, a young, outgoing, aspiring actress / waitress maintaining a friendship with the arrogant, volatile, pendantic and obnoxious Sheldon not only made for brilliant 'odd couple' comedy but enabled everything that unfolded to happen.

Missy with Penny, whose relationship with Shedon mirrors dynamics observed with Missy in Young Sheldon

The instant alliance that happened between Penny and Missy, when she visited her indifferent and rude brother, highlighted Missy and Penny’s similarities and dynamics that raised Sheldon above being an unlikeable solitary oddball. Without Missy in the formative years and later Penny, it’s hard to imagine Sheldon achieving what he did.

Missy laid the foundations for and created a bridge that helped Sheldon build relationships with not just Penny but also other women around him, who frequently found him exasperating.

This small but valuable willingness by Sheldon to listen to other people’s perspectives and try to fathom their feelings enabled a small community to grow that ultimately led to strong bonds, marriages, children and the Nobel Prize.

Without Missy laying the foundations and later Penny taking over the role of Sheldon’s insightful and often denigrated emotional guilde, the relationships between both Sheldon and Amy and Howard and Bernadette might never have happened.

Penny was key to so much of what happened in The Big Bang Theory and without her early life predecessor, Missy, the foundations that enabled those stories to unfold would not have existed.

It is worth noting that adult Missy (played by Courtney Henggeler) sadly only appeared in three episodes of 12 seasons of The Big Bang Theory. Young Missy, played by Raegan Revord (who has also become an author), appeared in every episode of Young Sheldon.

The moral of the story, we might not always appreciate those who helped make us us!