The following contains spoilers for Paper Girls Season 1 on Prime Video.
The new Prime Video series Paper Girls is a delightful sci-fi adventure sending kids from the 1980s to the future. Stories with time travel are always tricky, but Paper Girls navigates those waters using perspective and point-of-view to freshen the concept.
The show is based on the Image comic series of the same name by Brian K. Vaughn and Cliff Chang. As comics adaptations go, this show is much like The Sandman on Netflix, a faithful adaptation with certain ‘comic book’ elements changed or eliminated for the series. Thankfully, the charm in the original story remains, as does the big emotional hook of the show. The idea of meeting a younger version of oneself is fascinating, and Paper Girls executes the premise flawlessly. The older versions explaining themselves to their younger counterparts is humbling. The adult versions of these characters are thrown into almost existential crises on coming face-to-face with their younger selves.
The most heartbreaking of these clashes of perspective came from Riley Lai Nelet and Ali Wong’s Erin Tieng. Nelet plays the young Erin, while Wong plays Erin in (very early!) middle age. From young Erin’s perspective, however, “Old Erin” is positively ancient. It’s clear that life has been difficult for Erin, and Wong deftly portrays a woman trying to become strong in broken places. The interactions between the kids and their older selves, or older family members, are fascinating enough on their own to sustain the series. How Erin sees herself, both older and younger, changes them in profound ways. With only eight episodes, Paper Girls Season 1 didn’t spend enough time traveling between these different character perspectives.
Time Travel Rules in Paper Girls
The rules of time travel in the universe of Paper Girls are intentionally mysterious. Changes in the timeline don’t immediately affect the future. Otherwise, when the four main characters leave 1988, they’d arrive to a future that thought them all missing for 31 years. Meeting their adult selves would be impossible. Yet, it also doesn’t seem to be the “many worlds” version of time travel, whereby each change creates a brand-new branch of reality, like in Loki.
Though there is an element of time travel here that Paper Girls seems to share with the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The Hulk explained that if a time traveler goes to the past, that “past” becomes their “future.” Paper Girls almost reverse the concept, because time travelers from a far-flung future changed the past by bringing the girls with them. It’s all the “past” from the perspective of the travelers, which is why the adult versions were there when their younger selves left in 1988.
However, some things the kids do while in the future do affect the timeline. Camryn Jones and Sekai Abeni play young and adult versions of Tiffany Quilkin, a kid with a genius intellect. They figure out time travel, however, adult Tiffany has her mind erased by the Old Watch. Still, young Tiffany writes in old Tiffany’s journal: “You invent time-travel.” Then, in the next episode, Adina Porter’s Prioress tells young Tiffany that as an adult she is instrumental in inventing it. Her plan to end the time war hinges on the hope young Tiffany’s perspective of traveling through time will convince her older self not to do it. This would, from the Prioress’s point of view, result in the time war never starting, though how this change would be different from the others is unclear.
Picking Sides in Paper Girls‘ Time-War
The two factions of the time war are different than in the comics. In the comics, the factions are the “Old Timers” and the “Teenagers.” In Paper Girls on Prime Video, the two factions are the Old Watch and the STF Underground. The acronym is never defined. However, their missions are generally the same. The Old Watch believes that the timeline should remain unchanged and that making changes damages the fabric of reality. The STF Underground comes from the Old Watch’s future, where there is an undefined dystopia. The STF want to make changes and better the future, while the Old Watch goes through time killing them and “fixing” things as they were. Of course, time travel is always messy.
What’s interesting is that there is no clear answer in Paper Girls as to which faction is right. The solution the Prioress proposed in Season 1, Episode 8 “It B Over” made a simplistic sense. Stop the invention of time travel and stop the war and all its fallout. It also seems like the Old Watch could change the present in their time to try to fix things the long way around. If time travel does exist, stopping the near-extinction of the human race in the future seems like a prime reason for it. If Paper Girls gets a Season 2, interrogating the reasons the Old Watch doesn’t want to change their presence could help the kids finally pick a side.
At the end of the finale, Erin and Tiffany arrive in the 1970s, the first time they are in their own past. In fact, the film on the drive-in screen appears to be 1974’s The Longest Yard, so they are likely in a time before they were born. In the Paper Girls comic books, the kids travel way back into the past and into the far future. Given that the Old Watch keeps dinosaurs as pets, it seems that there isn’t much of a limit on how far back into the past they can go. Still, any series can have dinosaurs and Revolutionary War romps, but Paper Girls cast shines when they pair their characters with different versions of themselves. Seeing Finna Strazza’s KJ Brandman meeting her older self would be even more exciting than T-Rex set loose at the mall.
Paper Girls is full of sci-fi action and adventure, but the relationships between the kids are the heart of the series. Yet, when they encounter the older versions of themselves or their families, viewers get to see what makes this show truly one-of-a-kind.
All eight episodes of Season 1 of Paper Girls are available on Prime Video.
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