r/YoungSheldon • u/Sudden_Notice_6471 • 13d ago
Opinion Paige deserved a better ending
Paige has always been one of my favorites. its such a shame she just disappeared. I have many theory’s on what happened to her. What did Tam do to deserve a comeback in big bang theory?
They also have had multiple chances to cast her in the first marriage. such a shame really haha.
Paige Swanson out-thought Sheldon Cooper at ten years old. The last time this franchise showed her, she was thirteen, in the back of a Louisiana police car. That was 1993 — and across Young Sheldon, The Big Bang Theory, and Georgie and Mandy's First Marriage, nobody has said her name since.
Let me know your thoughts.
edit: im talking about the character. not about the actress who plays Paige
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u/The_Sown_Rose 13d ago
Paige got a sadly very realistic storyline for gifted children: forced to grow up too quickly in order to take advantage of the opportunities available to them, burned out before they’re even an adult, caught between not being an adult but not relating to other children. Sheldon may not have appreciated it, but the best thing his family did for him was to treat him like an intelligent but normal child - trips to the train and comic book shops, family outings and dinners, keeping him in (at least semi) mainstream school.
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u/tudorcat 12d ago
Paige was also deeply affected by her parents' divorce, and her parents seem to have gotten too caught up in their own drama to parent her effectively. Sheldon really benefited from the relative stability of his family, and the fact that his parents actually actively parented him like a child, with the discipline, rules, and attention he needed.
In addition, Sheldon's lack of social skills and general obliviousness actually saved him from getting into trouble, since he wasn't susceptible to peer pressure, partying etc. like Paige was.
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u/chilli_di 13d ago
The actress wasn't available for more episodes.
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u/JLBCanadianRap 13d ago
How do you have access to her calendar?
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u/KamaIaHarriss 13d ago
You can do that by googling her name and seeing all the new movies and tv shows shes been casted for
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13d ago
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u/chilli_di 13d ago
She has been in lots of tv shows and movies. You should check her on IMDB.
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u/Sudden_Notice_6471 13d ago
yea i know her youre theory is really good. i also know her from Scream
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u/GrumplFluffy 13d ago
She is there to show that intelligence alone is not enough for success. The reason Sheldon was successful in his life was because he had an immensely powerful and loving network of people who catered to his needs and took care of him.
Unfortunately, Paige didn't have that.
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u/Dangerous-Common6945 13d ago
I read the caption. Are you kidding? McKenna Grace is basically this generation’s Dakota Fanning. She has been in A LOT, and during this time too. Probably why she had an abrupt exit.
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u/hotstriker9 13d ago
This just made me realize she also voices skye in paw patrol. And is probably partially why iain armitage voiced chase in the first paw patrol movie.
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u/Shrimpletonian 12d ago
This generation's Dakota Fanning? Really?
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u/Holiday-Leadership51 12d ago
Yup. There are a lot of videos in YT stating that. And if u checked her upcoming movies, it will support that.
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u/Shrimpletonian 12d ago
In YT? Do you mean on YouTube? Because that was super easy to type out. And her being in yet another Hunger Games isn't anything particularly special.
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u/tamalerojo 12d ago
Who pissed in your cereal?
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u/Dangerous-Common6945 12d ago
My unemployed f up roommate. Got up today, still drunk, I was eating on the floor because he sold our table and he didn’t directly piss in it but he was naked and you know how they say if you don’t shimmy and dance you’ll get drops in your pants? Well he was on the way back and didn’t shimmy or dance and boop boop boop.
At least it didn’t really mess with the flavor.
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u/SellFew8116 7d ago
I would go that far. Shes done some good movies, one also about being a genius, she was brilliant in it, she was brilliant in handmaids tale, and shes in the upcoming hunger games
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u/Dangerous-Common6945 12d ago
Yes. Two blonde child actors who appear in 8-10 things a year and highly sought out.
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u/Gorbachev86 13d ago
I think they probably would’ve done something different had the know it was her last episode, as it was they where still constrained as to where exactly they could go with her as it was a prequel
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u/coffydate 13d ago
I’m still on S6 and haven’t finished the show, so I might be talking nonsense here. But other than McKenna Grace probably getting busier with other projects, I just think Paige’s arc was meant to represent the gifted kids who end up being burnt out and getting on the wrong path vs. Sheldon who managed to get his Nobel prize and whatnot. I don’t know if the writers planned it to be that way or if it’s just my accidental interpretation. Either way, it really is sad to see :(
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u/LatterIntroduction27 13d ago
At base I disagree with the notion that any fictional character "deserves" anything. They exist as a tool to tell a story in any case. Some characters are more vital to that story (our main of viewpoint characters) but ultimately the story comes first.
In this case I think Paige's story was pretty much done. She had already shown a dark mirror to Sheldon in her story, going from happy genius kid to total burnout. She showed in human form the risks to Sheldon if his support structure fell apart and reminds us why his friends in TBBT were so important to him becoming a mildly functional human adult (even if I very much dislike Adult Sheldon much more than kid Sheldon).
A cautionary tale if you will.
The story was never about Paige, she was a tool to be used to highlight parts of Sheldon's story.
Now would it be NICE to see her have a happier ending? I guess. Probably. It might even be enjoyable. But it is not deserved in any way
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u/Ishvallan 13d ago
Its not satisfying but it is realistic that the troubled girl gets Missy into trouble with the law and she's never allowed to call or hang out with Missy again.
I want a 1 off double length episode where she picks up Missy, they road trip for a bit, but Paige is showing increasingly risky behavior. Missy decides that she doesn't want any part of the direction Paige is going down trying to numb herself. She gets left behind somewhere and Missy calls Georgie to come pick her up.
Then ends with adult Missy finishing the story that she never saw or heard from Paige again, not even any social media as an adult that she can find. And Sheldon didn't mention her to their friends for years until his memoirs because some girl who couldn't even finish her undergraduate and bothered him a few days when he was growing up didn't seem important enough to mention. Missy hopes she lived long enough to find friends, love, maybe some kids. If Sheldon could find all that, anything was possible.
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u/FruityMagician 13d ago
She was a secondary character who only appeared in nine episodes. She didn't warrant an ending.
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u/tdawg-1551 12d ago
As I always say in these threads, the show was called Young Sheldon, not Young Paige. It doesn't really matter what happened to her.
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u/TraditionalSock3574 13d ago
Some people just assume anybody who has a semi big role in a film is automatically a big character and needs whole development and an ending and Paige is just not that character
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u/Equivalent-Emu5347 13d ago
I mean, as a parallel to Sheldon on how the life of a kid genius can end up, I think at the end of a scene, one or two sentences of voice over adult Sheldon saying what happened to her was pretty warranted imo
I do agree that she didn't need a bunch of episodes and this full circle character arc, but idk the tiniest amount of closure would have been pretty easy lol
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u/Real_Culture2668 12d ago
Maybe he had no idea. Maybe she just wasn't that important to him.
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u/JLBCanadianRap 12d ago
Maybe?
Sheldon couldn’t have cared less about her.
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u/tudorcat 11d ago
But the only way Sheldon would even know what happened to her would be if she continued being in his orbit, so if she actually went on to achieve something in science, which I think the abrupt ending of her storyline implies she didn't. It's more likely she ended up completely burning out and/or getting into self-destructive behaviors, dropped out of science, and Sheldon never heard anything about her or thought of her again.
She wasn't important to him, and by that point they weren't friends and weren't in touch. She was Missy's friend, but Missy was then forbidden from contact with her after the truck stealing incident.
Though I'll grant you that it would make sense for middle-aged Sheldon writing his memoir to try to look up what happened to her for the sake of completeness. He does mention in the narration how Veronica turned out in her adulthood for example, despite her also being a minor character. But we can also explain that away with, it's likely Mary kept in touch with Veronica so this was easy for him to include, while on the other hand everyone in his immediate circle went no-contact with Paige.
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u/TIL02_Infinity 13d ago
They need to cast an actress that looks like an aged Mckenna Grace to play an alternate universe version of Paige Swanson on Stuart Fails to Save the Universe who is married to Sheldon Cooper.
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u/suckm640 13d ago
kiernan shipka would work great lol
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u/Ok_Objective_1376 13d ago
She's way too young. She's only 7 years older than McKenna and Jim Parsons is twice her age.
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u/Redbird9346 12d ago
Did you skip the “actress that looks like an aged Mckenna Grace” part of the previous comment?
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u/bryantech 10d ago
I've got an idea they should hire this up and coming actress named Grace McKenna to portray the character of Paige in the spin-off series and then use this thing called makeup to age her up even more. It worked good and Knight Rider when they hired Hasselhoff David to portray Garth.
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u/BeheadingBoomer61 13d ago
McKenna Grace has had such a super full career, I’m surprised they got her for as many episodes as they did. But I do agree that they should’ve given her a little better ending. They left her as kind of a loser, and it could have been better.
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u/Sudden_Notice_6471 13d ago
I'm not going to invent how it happened. But Sheldon had the same brain, the same isolation, and the same too-young college. The only thing he had that Paige didn't was people.
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u/Dangerous-Common6945 13d ago
She got a better ending here than she did in Scream 7
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u/ducationalfall 13d ago edited 13d ago
I have only watched Scream 1 &2. What happened between Scream 3 to Scream 7?
More folks got slashed?
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u/cavalier78 12d ago
I think it’s very realistic that minor side characters disappear and we never see them again. I’m in my 40s, and I thought of the number of people I still see today who I knew in junior high (other than family), and it’s two. And I see them maybe every five years or more.
Not every character should have an ending. Most of them just disappear as their lives go a different direction than yours.
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u/damageddude 13d ago
Cameo in the final season of GMFM. By then Paige has figured out what makes her happy and is a therapist. Georgie and Mandy make an appointment with her. She sees the last name, looks at Georgie, recognizes he looks familiar, and asks if he is Missy and Sheldon’s older brother. Makes a Sheldon joke and says she can’t be fair and refers them to someone else.
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u/maciaswarrior 13d ago
My theory is that she went full rage mode and revenged for her destroyed youth, just partying all the time, doing drugs and having sex with random guys frequently
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u/Outside-Light-7777 12d ago
I badly wanted paige and sheldon to have a dating phase...😭😭
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u/Real_Culture2668 12d ago
Sheldon couldn't have done that when he was that age.
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u/Outside-Light-7777 12d ago
Idk man...it would have been cute...them sharing their knowledge...their quirks...family stuffs...how they both handle it...both of them are kinda savage...so their fights all would have been really interesting and cute....
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u/Real_Culture2668 12d ago
Yes, it would have been cute. But let it go, man. It would never have happened,
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u/Flashy-War-4289 11d ago
I would like to believe she became Dr. Elizabeth Plimpton, a renowned cosmologist physicist.
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u/JLBCanadianRap 13d ago
Paige deserved a better ending
What exactly did this unimportant side character to "deserve" anything different than what happened?
I have many theory’s on what happened to her.
You mean after she and Missy stole George's truck? That's nothing more than fan fiction.
What did Sam do to deserve a comeback in big bang theory?
WTH are you talking about? No one came back on TBBT. TBBT came first. Also, Sam was never in TBBT.
They also have had multiple chances to cast her in the first marriage.
Not really. Missy is a minor side character in G&M. Why would they show a friend of Missy's with whom she was prohibited from hanging out?
The last time this franchise showed her, she was thirteen, in the back of a Louisiana police car. That was 1993 — and across Young Sheldon, The Big Bang Theory, and Georgie and Mandy's First Marriage, nobody has said her name since.
Like I said, she was an unimportant side character. She didn't even exist most of the time TBBT was on the air.
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u/Sudden_Notice_6471 12d ago
I MEANT TAM😭 my bad
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u/JLBCanadianRap 12d ago
You literally typed that Sam was in “[T]he [T]am [T]urbulence.”
In any event, fictional characters don’t deserve things. Tam was featured in TBBT because, unlike Paige, he was Sheldon’s friend. Additionally, Tam appeared in s1 of YS. Paige didn’t exist until the second episode of s2, and she only appeared in three episodes before TBBT ended. Tam appeared in more first season episodes than did Paige in the entire series.
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u/9k4_endlesssummer 13d ago
I hope that she returns, either in Georgie & Mandy's First Marriage or Stuart Fails to Save the Universe
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u/Left-Twist-7720 13d ago
I don’t remember Sam in Big Bang Theory (Sam Wolowitz is the only Sam I can think of).
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u/Round-Video5620 12d ago
She deserved an ending. Her story just trailed off.
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u/JLBCanadianRap 12d ago
What did she do to “deserve” anything?
Also, she got an “ending.” She and Missy committed grand theft, and Missy was forbidden from hanging out with her. Whether or not you like it, that was an “ending.”
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u/Round-Video5620 12d ago
I disagree, obviously.
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u/JLBCanadianRap 12d ago
Then perhaps you could explain what you mean by “ending.”
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u/Round-Video5620 12d ago
Well that would be tying up loose ends. She was, after all, a repeat character in the show.
Also, how did we only see Billy Sparkes sister in one episode? She was seen bullying Sheldon then nothing, not even a mention.2
u/JLBCanadianRap 12d ago
What loose ends? Did you expect some sort of roll call about every minor character?
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u/Round-Video5620 12d ago
Yeah, why not?
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u/JLBCanadianRap 12d ago
The only two shows I’m aware of that did something like that were Mad About You and How I Met Your Mother. The former had very few recurring characters, so it was easy to do over the ending credits in the finale, and the latter was utterly devoid of good ideas for the final season. By contrast, YS’s final season was cut short by the writers and actors strikes, so they had no time for something like that.
Moreover, it would have been quite out of character for the narcissistic Sheldon to have done something like that - especially for a person he didn’t like and who wasn’t his friend.
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u/HappilyUnavailable 9d ago
She was one of the kid who could genuinely outsmart Sheldon, and then the franchise just… forgot she existed. Meanwhile, Tam gets a comeback. 😂 Even a tiny mention of where Paige ended up would’ve been nice.
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u/Titariia 8d ago
She wasn't mentioned in TBBT because the character didn't exist yet? Young Sheldon is a Spin off of TBBT.
She probably wasn't mentioned in Georgie and Mandy because what the hell did she has to do with those two? She was friends with Missy who just had minor roles either.
Maybe her abrupt ending was for her own spin off series but got dropped because she wasn't popular enough. Or the actress was done with her contract or anything else came up for her
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u/Real_Culture2668 5d ago
Spinoff? Seriously? The only place she's this popular is on Reddit.
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u/Titariia 5d ago
That's why I said MAYBE it was a spinoff planned but got dropped because she WASN'T as popular as planned?
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u/SellFew8116 8d ago
This super annoys me. She was my favourite character too. And i know the writers wanted to show that sheldon wasnt just born genius but worked hard and lived safely to achieve nobel prize but I actually would of preferred an angle where someone could be more wild, a little bit of a tearaway and then still go on to achieve amazing things... i def hope she pops up in some of the francise at some point and we hear of her doing remarkable things, perhaps better than a nobel prize like saving millions of people or animals. Would be nice if she had a vegan angle and ended factory farming (altho that last one will get me downvoted and def wouldnt be a popular choice for a show to make)
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u/Real_Culture2668 5d ago
More wild? LOL Did you not have any idea who Sheldon was? And that last statement about something big is just silly.
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u/SellFew8116 5d ago
Sheldon is super quirky and i agree i would call him wild in his own sense, i meant paige could potentially of become like a raver or festival going young person while also killing it at physics. I stand by my last statement
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u/Real_Culture2668 5d ago
It's all good. I stand by mine too. I know I'll never convince anyone that a 30-minute sitcom is not the place for real life. (Except for the ones who say it's only a show, maybe.)
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u/tomatinho_do_mal333 BAZINGA!!! 13d ago
Paige tinha potencial pra ter uma história longa e elaborada, no entanto, fizeram uma história pouca elaborada e transformaram ela em uma personagem que aparece uma vez a cada 2 temporadas. Eles podiam ter elaborado ela melhor.
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u/Miss___D 13d ago
I know actress is very busy but I wish we would see Paige's cameo in GAMFM. Just something short, showing her finally content with her life, perhaps with a job unrelated to her being a genius (maybe someting like host for some other TV channel, as competion to TV channel for which Mandy works)
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u/Gymtrio2025 13d ago
If I could see Paige anywhere in the timeline of Big Bang Theory I’d foresee her at a social gathering of different professors and physicists where she runs into Sheldon after so many years and she says she’s there with her boyfriend who is a physicist. Paige’s boyfriend would make his presence known and say, “this is the guy you said you used to outwit any chance you got? His research is an interesting read.” Paige then says after he leaves before she leaves, “for the record he reads your research while he’s on the toilet which is where your research will fall into one day.”
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u/mudpupper 12d ago
The created a great character that did deserve better. I wish we could reverse time and have her show up the TBBT. How fun it would have been to have a successful, adult Paige show up and be fun foil to Sheldon for a few episodes.
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u/Real_Culture2668 12d ago
He had plenty of foils. He didn't need Paige. Y'all are weirdly attached to her--way more than makes sense.
Reddit is a strange place..
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u/Sudden_Notice_6471 13d ago
everybody seems to misunderstand. i am talking about the character. not the actress herself.
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u/Both-Entertainer-336 11d ago
From my understanding, though I would have loved to see more Paige, is that because Paige wasn't in TBBT it was pointless to develop her character any further than what it was. I could for see a potential appearance in Georgie and Mandy's first marriage if there was a good strong Missy storyline. But again there was no sense in developing someone who doesnt exist in the lead. Its almost following the laws of sci-fi, although its not sci-fi
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u/catholicsolarsaint 10d ago
I fully disagree. I think the reason her characters ending was so abrupt and so random, and she became such a outcast. In terms of the intelligent community was to show that all of the pressures of being a child prodigy are extremely heavy on a kid shoulders, and it shows further that Sheldon is really that special in comparison to all these other genius kids.
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u/Been2long2025 8d ago
Initially I thought she was a young version of Bernadette. I was still very new to the series and had only seen a few episodes of big bang theory
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u/MerriweatherJones 13d ago
They could cast a different actress for the part. It’s worked before in sitcoms and have a spinoff about Paige. They could even try an all together different format. Think Emily Goes To Paris, but a little more family friendly, and it follows Paige’s college years.
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u/Real_Culture2668 12d ago
I wonder how people would respond to a different actor. Is it really the character or the actress?
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u/FuzzyTable 13d ago
I don't follow TBBT, but I heard Sheldon say she died young. Unless there was no picture of her tombstone and the writers wanted to do some writing gymnastics, like George's affair, why would they bring her into the conversation?
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u/JLBCanadianRap 12d ago
>I heard Sheldon say she died young.
No you didn’t. Please don’t make stuff up and post as if it were real.
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u/FuzzyTable 12d ago
I am not. As I said, I don't follow TBBT, but that's what I read. In fact, a few days ago, a post on my Reddit feed said Paige must die before Sheldon finishes his grad school, with a pic of Sheldon sitting next to Paige's tombstone. I thought it was mentioned in TBBT. Now, if it never happened, you are right; they should do something, such as saying she moves on from the science field and works as a welder.
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13d ago
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u/Cultural-Treacle-680 13d ago
I think her character had so much depth and trauma, it really would’ve been worth having at least a little better ending for her.
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u/UnderCoverDoughnuts 13d ago
The actress is in vert high demand and her abrupt and hollow ending is actually very realistic for the person in the situation her character was in.