Fans who love watching both “The Big Bang Theory” and “Young Sheldon” have a tendency to note discrepancies — some of them huge, some of them small — between what we’re told by an older Sheldon Cooper (Jim Parsons, whose return in the “Young Sheldon” series finale required a major change) and what his younger self (Iain Armitage) experiences. While “Young Sheldon” has retroactively managed to fix a whole lot of these plot holes over time, there are a few major ones that still manage to stick out. To wit: what happened to the Cooper family’s pets?
During “The Big Bang Theory,” Sheldon’s visiting relatives mention that they had a noisy dog on multiple occasions — presumably a small dog, since Sheldon is terrified of large ones. But forget about the family’s dogs — what happened to their cats?
Sheldon himself admits to having owned at least one cat in his youth — Lucky, who was run over by a Montgomery Ward Delivery Van — during “The Griffin Equivalency.” His propensity for the animals becomes a pretty big plot point during the midpoint of the series too.
That opens up a huge plot hole, as The Coopers don’t own a single pet during “Young Sheldon.” So what happened to all of those animals? Might it be another case of Sheldon acting as an unreliable narrator, which managed to fix even more continuity errors that have haunted “Young Sheldon” and “The Big Bang Theory”? Or is there something more simple going on?
Fans have theories as to what might have happened to those pets
Some fans posting to the “Young Sheldon” subreddit have a few theories on what might have happened to the Cooper clan’s missing pets. “Sheldon remembers everything… this event may have been before YS,” suggested u/Aust1mh. u/MinimumTeacher8996 notes that the dog incident took place when Sheldon was 2 years old and the cat incident when he was 9 — both of which were before the events of “Young Sheldon.”
Other fans are much more willing to point out Sheldon’s constant unreliability as a narrator. “Perhaps Sheldon is using artistic [license] in telling the story to us, or he is [omitting] parts that he doesn’t feel are pertinent to the story he is telling,” said u/MichaelScottsHair. A few fans are even willing to rely on Sheldon’s favorite subject — quantum mechanics — and believe that it’s quite possible that the shows are happening on parallel time streams. Now that’s out of this world — but it doesn’t quite explain those missing pets! Perhaps they’ll surface again someday in another spin-off. “Even Younger Sheldon,” anyone?