Extra! Extra! Read all about it! The season – and series? – finale of Amazon Prime’s Paper Girls is an action-packed, emotionally rich and frustrating send-off for the twisty-turny time travel show. For eight episodes, the girls have dodged time cops, future revolutionaries, and the concept of fate itself in their quest to get back home. For a show that’s largely been a meditative coming-of-age story, the Paper Girls finale is as exciting as it is tender, managing to balance the thrills and the tears into a mostly solid curtain call. The perfect time for everything to come together is right before it all comes crashing down.
Here’s five thoughts on the finale of Paper Girls, “It B Over.” Spoilers below.
There’s a brief moment of uplift to open the episode when Juniper and Tiff realize they can contact Heck and Naldo using Tiff’s walkie talkie, given that Heck and Naldo have the other one in 1988. (The logic of this doesn’t exactly make sense, but the episode is moving fast enough that you can’t really dwell on it). Unfortunately, that optimism is short lived: Juniper begins reading the coordinates for the next folding over the radio, and the girls recognize the numbers as the code they heard come over the walkie back in their own time. The girls are stuck in a time loop – their actions in the past after hearing the message led to them sending the message that sets the events of the series in motion.
Paper Girls is a time travel show that is ultimately less interested in the logistics of the time travel than it is in the philosophy of it; the plot often takes a back seat while the characters ponder the meaning of their lives and their potential to change their fates. That choice makes the show resonate in a way that other high concept series often falter, but it also makes this opening particularly tough to swallow. When Paper Girls wasn’t addressing the rules of time travel, it was easy enough to go along for the ride, but throwing in a time loop and questions about predestination this late in the game starts begging questions about the timeline that threaten to unravel the show’s logic.
Mac runs off, upset that their course seems to be set (and her death from cancer seems more inevitable). KJ consoles her, and the two share a charged moment that’s interrupted by Prioress (Adina Porter), the agent of the Old Watch that has been pursuing the girls through the timestream. Rather than killing the girls, it turns out Prioress only wants to send them back to their original time – and wipe their memories of the whole ordeal. She brings KJ and Mac to meet Grand Father (Jason Mantzoukas) – and his pterodactyl Tessa – who explains that the STF are the instigators of the war, and that the Old Watch is working to keep reality from imploding from all the STF’s changes. Tired of running and wanting to forget her impending doom, Mac is initially on board for the idea of getting an “extra deluxe” brain wiping, but KJ resists, arguing that Grand Father’s plans are conveniently in his own best interest, and that they should try to make things better rather than preserving the status quo.
It’s unsurprising that the conflict is more complicated than Larry and the STF had made it seem – it never really made sense that the Old Watch would want to kill the girls if their entire deal was keeping the timeline intact – but the scales don’t tip completely into the Old Watch’s favor here. They can calmly state their motivations because they aren’t sacrificing anything by keeping things as they are – and, as the powerful are wont to do, they of course immediately flip to violence to protect their own material interests.
The Old Watch proceeds to systematically take the adults off the board, taking away Juniper and Adult Tiff in ablution beams (though not before young Tiff gives her future self the time travel log with a note to help her remember after the timeline is reset). Larry manages to help Mac and KJ escape, declaring that “at least he did the right thing” just before Tessa devours him. The girls reunite and flee to the basement to figure out their next steps. Mac comes clean to Erin and Tiff, confessing that she learned from her brother that she would die in four years’ time. With their secrets and resentments out in the open and the stakes of their fight finally made clear, the girls resolve to face what comes next together. “We’re Paper Girls,” KJ says. “We stick together.”
After a season that mostly has figured out excuses to keep the girls apart, it’s satisfying to watch them find a moment of solidarity with one another. Although the show would often pair the girls off for show stretches, this is the first time all of them have been on the same page rather than going through their own individual struggles. It’s an important beat for them, one that I wish had more time to play out as a new status quo rather than immediately being upended. To analogize via a different nerdy franchise, it’s as if the Fellowship was broken just after leaving Rivendell. Without the context of them fighting their battles together as a unit, splitting them up can’t pack the same punch.
The Paper Girls turn themselves in, and the Old Watch brings them up to their mothership to take them back to their original time. Just when all hope is lost, salvation comes for the girls in the form of Prioress, who sets them free and schemes to send them into the future in the hopes of averting the war with the STF before it begins. Her change of heart is spurred by hearing Tiffany’s name: Prioress reveals that Tiffany and the Quilkin Institute are instrumental in instigating the war, implying that if future Tiff makes “a different choice,” all the needless death of the war can be avoided.
Of course, it can’t be that easy – just as the girls are about to escape, KJ hesitates to apologize to Prioress for killing her brother (way back in the pilot episode). That gives Old Watch soldiers an opening to intervene, and Prioress is shot in the process of helping them escape. Erin and Tiff run to heal her with some healing bugs Erin found in the escape pod, but the door to the escape pod shuts behind them. The girls are given just enough time to have a tearful, silent goodbye through the glass before the pod holding Mac and KJ drops away.
Maybe the moment would have landed stronger if we’d gotten to spend more time with the Paper Girls as a united front, but even as is it’s pretty darn effective. The girls have been through a lot both together and apart, and the prospect of them finally finding each other (emotionally speaking, anyways) just to be torn apart is gut-wrenching. Even more so with the knowledge that the show’s cancellation will leave their plight unresolved.
Prioress manages to send Tiff and Erin away in a second pod before Grand Father can intervene, leaving all the show’s main characters scattered on a cliffhanger. Mac and KJ have departed for parts unknown, somewhere in the future; Grand Father recalls the healing bugs from Prioress, spitefully telling her “It’s your time” as she bleeds out on the steps; and Tiff and Erin exit their pod to find that their friends are nowhere in sight, instead stumbling upon an old school drive-in theater, revealing that they’ve travelled back in time to the 70s.
It’s a bold decision – if also a wearisome one – to leave the show on this big of a tee-up for a second season that now seems unlikely to occur. “It B Over” finally crystalizes what the show is thematically about, bringing its questions about free will and fate up into the foreground, and it remarkably does so while selling most of its tricky sci-fi beats as well. Divorced from the knowledge that this is a series finale rather than just the end of the season, the episode would still be somewhat frustrating; there is no resolution to be found here in any form, emotionally or narratively. The subplots and conflicts were either cut off – Adult Tiff is taken away by an ablution beam before she and her younger self could hash out their problems, and KJ’s guilt about taking a life is not dealt with in any meaningful way before Prioress’s death – or left dangling.
Legendary TV is reportedly shopping the show around to other networks, and fingers crossed that someone picks it up. Paper Girls is occasionally frustrating, but this is a smart show with a lot to say about the current moment and that feels like it was just starting to sing.
Reid Carter is a freelance writer, screenwriter, video editor, and social media manager who knows too much about pop culture for his own good. You can find his ramblings about comics and movies at ReidCarterWrites.com and his day to day ramblings about everything else on Twitter @PalmReider.
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