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Warning: This article contains spoilers for the first season Paper girls.
By Brian K. Vaughan and Cliff Chiang, based on the Amazon comic book of the same name Paper girls It’s one of the best new shows of the year. It’s a big-time science fiction adventure told through a close-up lens stand by me-A coming of age story. The time traveling minions are brought to life by the perfectly matched cast of Camryn Jones, Riley Lai Nelet, Sofia Rosinsky and Fina Strazza. The series subverts familiar time travel narratives to explore the breadth of its characters and the touching friendships they share.
In stories about time travel, time travelers must avoid contact with their elders/youngers to prevent any drastic changes in the timeline. But inside Paper girls, that is the central dramatic engine. The characters have deep conversations with their larger selves. Erin has an existential crisis after realizing she can’t do anything on her own. Tiff is initially proud of herself for attending MIT, but is later disappointed to learn that she was kicked out of the school. Both Erin and Tiff judge their older selves for their choices and teach them how to do things differently, both missing the irony that they were the ones who were designed to make all those mistakes.
Mac learns from her brother – now a bully but a caring husband and father with a future medical degree – who is only a few years away from dying of brain cancer. She seizes the opportunity to meet an older version of him that she would otherwise never have met. At first, KJ is protective of her older sister, worried that she has become everything her mother wants her to be. She is thrilled when she meets her future roommate and learns that she will develop her passion for filmmaking and enroll in film school, but she sees her older self kissing this roommate and has to come to terms with her sexuality. Before she was ready.
When Erin enters her future self in her kitchen, she begins to demystify her personal information to ensure that she is a younger version of herself. This is a common trope in time travel stories. Since it’s almost unbelievable that anyone can claim to have traveled through time, fictional time travelers are often required to provide authentic information that they claim to be the only ones. Not only does this explain time travel; It’s also a neat way to wrap up the characters.
This trope comes up twice Paper girls“Season 1. When Tiff decides to ask her future self for help as a last resort, she calls from a pay phone and reveals many personal details – from her mother’s nickname to the location of her birthmark – to prove that she really is the younger version of herself. Mac’s brother, Dylan, is a child who looks like his long-dead younger sister. When he comes flooding in with personal information about their family, he thinks she’s the target of a dark prank.
Another common thing in time travel stories is that no one ends up where they were supposed to, either because the time machine is tiny or because it simply makes for a better story. A flash of lightning sends Doc Brown to the Old West. Phil Connors is doomed to relive that fateful day over and over again. In their quest to return to the ’80s, Paper Girls continue to be in the wrong decade. They spend the end of Season 1 stuck in the 90s, then the final cliffhanger ending with Tiff and Erin stuck in the 70s.
Stories about time travel are a fun way to explore alternate timelines. But these alternate timelines have global problems, such as a timeline in which Russia wins the space race or a timeline in which the Nazis rule Earth. in Paper girls, the alternate timelines are explored in ways that affect the characters personally. The central premise is that these girls have nothing in common except for their unique circumstances. They wouldn’t be friends if they weren’t alienated in the future. But after being forced to work together to get back to their own time, they become deeply emotional and eventually become best friends. In the alternate timeline, they never became friends. Adult Erin tells 12-year-old Erin that after one day in her timeline, she quit her paper route and never saw the other girls again.
Time travel narratives often question the battle between fate and free will. in the Terminal Films, Sarah Connor insists that the future is unwritten and that dire fates can be changed by decisive actions in the present. Paper girls He looks at this question in depth. After seeing how her own death would turn out, Erin asked, “What’s the point?” she wondered. Mac is resigned to the idea that she can’t enter a giant Voltron robot to prevent a premeditated death, but that she’s about to die of a terminal illness. KJ is able to use Mac’s knowledge of the cancer to catch it early and stop it from becoming deadly.
Paper girls It doesn’t just use well-worn tropes from existing time travel stories. He also introduces many of his own original concepts, such as time warps, beauty rays, changing timelines like recording on a mix tape, and an underground revolution fighting the bureaucratic overlords of the space-time continuum. Amazon has yet to renew the show for a second season, but hopefully, that renewal is coming. These concepts of time travel deserve to be explored, and this incredibly charming cast should be reunited.
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