Young Sheldon’s antepenultimate episode featured a surplus of callbacks and Big Bang Theory Easter eggs — from Sheldon beginning his ritual of knocking three times before he enters a room, to Missy alluding to Sheldon finding a “smart, weird girlfriend” out in California, to which Sheldon scoffed, “I have a girlfriend and her name is Science.”
There was also a plethora of returning characters, including King Kong Comics patron Nate (played by theme song composer/performer Steve Burns), Medford High faculty members Mr. Givens (Brian Stepanek) and Ms. Hitchens (Sarah Baker) and — last but not least — Sheldon’s childhood bestie Tam (Ryan Phuong), who was last seen midway through Season 4.
Tam was the first character created for Young Sheldon to cross over to Big Bang. His adult counterpart (played by Survivor’s Remorse actor Robert Wu) made an appearance in a Season 12 episode of the mothership that revealed why Tam eventually earned himself a spot on Sheldon’s infamous enemies list:
“When I got accepted to grad school at Caltech, I was afraid to move so far away from home, so Tam said he’d move out here with me and be my roommate,” Sheldon explained to Amy. “Then over the summer, he got a girlfriend… even after reading all the pamphlets I gave him about social diseases. Anyway, Tam stayed with her in Texas and I had to move out here all by myself. It was [scary]. I was lonely. I thought I’d never make a friend again — and for a long time, I didn’t.” (Per Big Bang lore, Sheldon moves to Pasadena in 1994 and doesn’t befriend Leonard Hofstadter until 2003.)
When Young Sheldon co-showrunner Steve Holland previously told TVLine that Tam would be back, he also implied that there would be “a nod” to what we learned on Big Bang. But in Season 7, Episode 12, Tam only made mention of his girlfriend. “I think I’m going to marry her,” he told Sheldon. However, there was no talk of Tam moving to California with his little buddy.
Speaking to TVLine earlier this week, Holland confirmed that, “at one point, we maybe had a little more dialogue in there about [Sheldon] saying, ‘come with me,’ and it just felt a little too heavy handed.
“For me, Sheldon just assumed, ‘Tam’s my best friend. He’s going to come with me [to California],’ and that was never a thing,” the EP explained. “I think Sheldon carried that because he see things, especially when he’s younger, specifically through his own lens… his own sort of selfish worldview. And maybe that was never actually a thing that was discussed, or that Tam ever thought was real.”
Ultimately, Tam’s return was fun way “to acknowledge some of the things that we said on Big Bang and retrofit them to close these loops as we get to the end of this show.”
