Young Sheldon Season 7: The Tragic George Funeral Twist, Explained
"Young Sheldon" Season 7, Episode 13 lives up to its promise to be the saddest episode of the entire series. "Funeral" is just one big emotional tribute to Lance Barber's character George, who dies at the end of Episode 12, "A New Home and a Traditional Texas Torture." In the penultimate episode of the sitcom, viewers are plunged into the aftermath of that tragic event where they get to witness how each character deals with their grief.
Titular genius Sheldon (Iain Armitage) looks to his favorite franchise "Star Trek" to help heal his heartbreak, but he only ends up replaying his last moments with his dad over and over again in his head wondering what he could have done differently. Viewers actually get to see into Sheldon's imagination a few times in the episode, including at George's funeral, when he appears to deliver the perfect eulogy.
Sheldon delivers a heartfelt speech where he tells everyone in the church how much he loves his dad. Only, the speech didn't happen exactly like that — there's a twist that nobody saw coming. It was all inside Sheldon's head. "I wish I could tell you I said all those things, but I didn't," Sheldon (Jim Parsons) admits in a voiceover after the speech. But what he says next is him paying tribute to his dad in his own way, just decades later. "For a long time, I focused on my father's shortcomings. Now that I'm his age and have kids of my own, I realize he was just a person doing the best he could, and he did a lot. I didn't say it at his funeral, but I can say it now. I loved my father. I will miss him forever," he says.
Sheldon acknowledges his dad was not the man he describes in The Big Bang Theory
"Young Sheldon" throws an emotional wrench at viewers when it's revealed that Sheldon only delivers his heartfelt eulogy in his head. Speaking to Entertainment Weekly, executive producer Steve Holland explained why the show's bosses decided to take this direction with the funeral scene. "We still had to give him some room to grow to get to the end of Big Bang, 12 seasons later, where he gets to stand up at the Nobel Prize ceremony and give an emotional speech thanking his friends. So we felt like he couldn't quite get that far yet. It just felt real to the character that there's things he wanted to say that he didn't," he explained.
Having been through that growth in "The Big Bang Theory," adult Sheldon is more capable of expressing his emotions, though. And, what he does say in his voiceover at the end of the episode actually solves a huge "Big Bang Theory" plot hole — it explains why the Sheldon's descriptions of George are so different to Lance Barber's character in "Young Sheldon."
As viewers of the original sitcom will know, George is described as an extremely gruff man who is not a particularly good father or husband. But after seven seasons, "Young Sheldon" fans know this is far from the truth. So, Sheldon acknowledging that his father was indeed a good person and that he loves and misses him officially rectifies this. It then becomes clear that he only ever focuses on his dad's faults when telling stories about him because he hadn't truly been able to process his grief at the time of his death.