Opening Doors and Pulling Some Strings
PAPER GIRLS – Season 1 Episodes 6-8 – SPOILERS
Erin (Riley Lai Nelet)
On her birthday, Mac (Sofia Rosinsky) tells KJ (Fina Strazza) about her fatal illness, and the two of them decide to visit Mac’s grave. The gravestone has only the years of Mac’s birth and death (1976-1992), without specific dates for either. While they are there, Mac’s stepmom Alice (Rebecca Spence) puts red roses on Mac’s grave. The girls hide, but Alice eventually gets a very good look at her deceased stepdaughter. What effect this might have on the rest of things remains uncertain. KJ has not yet told any of the other girls that she is a lesbian, but her friendship with Mac which began 27 years after Mac’s scheduled demise might be affecting the timeline, perhaps making Mac’s death in 1992 no longer inevitable. What if her grave marker originally had specific dates inscribed. but is slowly losing detail and is in the process of vanishing?
After putting flowers on Mac’s grave, Alice (Rebecca Spence) is startled to see her deceased stepdaughter run in front of her car — Spence is also Karen Adso in Alex Thompson‘s hospital horror film ROUNDING.
Tiffany (Camryn Jones) gets to know her older self (Sekai Abeni), who is a social media influencer and sometimes DJ. The 1999 version of Tiff is an MIT dropout, which ’88 Tiff finds disappointing, but both Tiffs find time travel fascinating. Unable to figure out the coded notebook in which Larry (Nate Coddry) recorded two decades worth of time foldings, they head out to his farm and talk him into giving them the cipher, which they then use to calculate that the next natural time folding won’t happen until 25 July 2006. It seems they are stuck where they are for seven years until Larry shows up with Erin’s bike and tells them about what he calls a “burping trash hole” that is depositing objects belonging to the girls in a circular patch in his field.
Sekai Abeni makes her TV debut as the ’99 version of Tiffany, seen here being tolerant of her younger self.
Some of the things that fall from the clouds into 1999 along with Erin’s bicycle are: one of Tiff’s walkie-talkies, a full-size Hershey Bar (probably from Erin’s house in ’88), lamps, chairs, a laundry basket, one Dukakis campaign sign, undelivered newspapers, and a plastic pumpkin. Why these particular objects follow the Paper Girls through time is a mystery. Larry phones his STF contact Juniper Plimpton (Celeste Arias), and in their conversation, Juniper refers to the crosstime trash as “detritus from another timeline“.
The girls come to believe they are trapped in a time loop, but subsequent events reveal that they are not. Grand Father (Jason Mantzoukas) and The Prioress (Adina Porter) show up at Larry’s farm and offer to erase the Paper Girls’ memories and send them home to 1988, but, after some thought, the girls decide they don’t want to forget each other and decline Grand Father’s offer. 1999 Tiffany is drawn upward into the Old Watch’s time ship presumably for the purpose of wiping her memories, so 1988 Tiffany leaves her a note about time travel.
STF Level 8 Emergency Contact Juniper Plimpton (Celeste Arias) has her wedding gown fitting interrupted by Larry
Larry threatens Grand Father with a gun and gets eaten by a pterodactyl for his trouble, so he dies twice in the same week. (2019 Larry was killed by the Old Watch days earlier when he first arrived in 1999.) One wonders if some of the writing vanished from the 2019 edition of Larry’s notebook after he died for the second time, because he had not yet written most of it. Pterodactyls died out about 140 million years ago, and the fact that the Old Watch has one implies that they have (at one time or another) traveled that far back in time.
The Paper Girls are somehow transported to the time ship. Addressing all four of them, The Prioress reveals some interesting things: “I was your age, maybe younger, when I joined the watch. The STF terrorists invaded on the Fourth of July. To them we were all guilty. Guilty of creating the godforsaken future they came from. A new kind of war made singularly possible by the discoveries of a team led by Dr. Joan Braunstein. A team of which you will be part.”
KJ (Fina Strazza) and her future self (Delia Cunningham)
The date the STF “invaded” was the Fourth of July (year unspecified), and everyone we meet in both factions seems to be American, so one begins to wonder if this time war is restricted to the United States. The Prioress says that the war was made “singularly possible” by Braunstein’s discoveries and that could indicate that that the time ship uses a singularity to create time foldings. (We have not yet met Dr. Braunstein.) The fact that the Old Watch refers to that ship as “The Cathedral” points to a religious connection, as does use of the word “godforsaken” and the title “Prioress”.
Just before The Prioress launches the Paper Girls into time, she tells Tiff: “This is our last best chance to make sure this never happens. Tell Dr. Quilkin what you have seen.”
KJ and Mac at Mac’s gravesite in 1999. Director Mairzee Almas gives us a view from the perspective of the grave itself.
For reasons too complex to go into here, the Paper Girls get separated when leaving The Cathedral. KJ and Mac leave first and we are not told where they ended up. Erin and Tiff land in a cornfield next to a drive-in movie, probably outside of Stony Stream. (On arrival, the first thing Erin says is: “Looks the same.“) Golden Years by David Bowie is heard in the background, and Robert Aldrich’s film THE LONGEST YARD is playing at the drive-in, so the year must be 1975 or later, and, judging from the vehicles visible, it is not too much later. It may or may not be significant that all of the Paper Girls were born in 1976.