Paper Girls season 1, episode 3 recap: Blue Tongues Don’t Lie

The third episode of Paper Girls opens with a new set of characters that we haven’t seen before. There’s Larry, who in 1988 makes a tape recorder telling himself who he is, in case the mysterious soldiers in white erase his memory.

Then in the present day, Larry tries to get in contact with Juniper, a fellow time-traveling agent. But Juniper’s memories have clearly been erased and Larry is unable to convince her of who she is.

He leaves her in despair but notices that the “device” has been activated. What device do you ask?

Let’s change perspective to see…

Paper Girls Season 1 Episode 3 recap – Questions start getting answers…

We see Adult Erin with the mysterious device that she managed to activate at the end of the second episode. With the strange display screen now taking up her field of vision, she tracks down the paper girls, and gets them to come back with her.

But before they can go back home, they need to get Mac back who abandoned the group at the end of the last episode. They head to the hospital where they know her brother is supposed to work.

Adult Erin heads in to get Mac, but before she can get inside, Larry from the cold open ambushes and kidnaps her, driving away. The paper girls take chase with Tiff once again taking the wheel even though none of the girls can really drive.

They follow Larry to his hideaway where he sets off a trap to pop their tires. He then pulls out a gun, holding the three girls and Adult Erin at gunpoint.

He accuses the girls of working with the enemy while they accuse him of kidnapping Adult Erin. It’s a classic narrative of people talking past each other with very little willingness to understand what the other side is saying.

Add to it, not trusting the parts that they do hear. In this case, the fight ends with Larry locking everybody in his basement until the morning.

The next morning, he lets the girls out of the basement and the five of them start to talk. The conversation is still tense, but they’re finally able to get somewhat on the same page about how they all managed to get into this situation.

They find out that the two mysterious strangers that brought the paper girls to the present were friends of Larry. They’ve been caught up in an interdimensional time war.

Now knowing that the paper girls aren’t working for the “enemy” Larry offers a huge info dump as to what’s been going on. It seems that the soldiers in white are a group called the Old Guard.

They are from a time in the future where they’re in control and have outlawed time travel to ensure that nothing can happen in the past to change that fact. Larry (Juniper and the two people from the first episode) are part of a resistance force who are trying to change key moments in the past to try and push humanity towards a better future.

He explains that because the girls have time traveled, they are now being hunted. It doesn’t matter if it happened against their will.

Any unauthorized time travel will be punished. Larry also mentions that the Old Guard likes to feed their enemies to dinosaurs, so fingers crossed that we get to see a dinosaur before the end of the season.

But, while three of the four paper girls are learning about interdimensional time wars, Mac is on her way to locate her family in the present day.

Paper Girls Season 1 Episode 3 recap – Mac’s solo adventure…

Mac, after abandoning the other paper girls, has located the adult version of her older brother, Dylan, who is now a doctor. She reaches out to him at the hospital where he works.

Dylan, upon seeing the twelve-year-old version of his younger sister, looks like he’s seen a ghost. That reaction would be understandable for anybody who sees someone looking exactly like a child version of their sibling.

But it becomes clear that the reaction is even more appropriate for Dylan when we learn that Mac apparently got very sick and died/will die when she was seventeen, over twenty-five years ago from his perspective. He thinks that this must be some kind of horrible, insensitive joke, and calls child services on Mac.

But when she leaves behind Dylan’s walkman that she took from the eighties, he has to reckon with the fact that she might be telling the truth. The walkman has his name written on it in his handwriting.

The cassette in the player is a mix tape that he remembers putting together and drawing the art on the tape. Dylan takes a cup that Mac touched for a DNA test and confirms that she is telling the truth.

She is in fact the twelve-year-old version of his sister pulled from the past and thrust into the present. In an effort to sweep everything under the rug, Dylan tells the social worker that Mac is his daughter and has DNA to confirm it.

He asks her to delete the file on Mac so that he can handle the whole thing quietly. The social worker agrees but before she gets around to removing any trace of Mac from the system…

Dylan, meanwhile, brings his sister to his house, telling his wife that she’s the daughter of a very distant relative. He is taking her in for a little bit so the pretend distant relative can clean up their life.

His wife agrees and Mac spends the night. The next morning Mac and Dylan do a little bit more catching up as he tells her about what changed in the three decades that she’s missed.

He promises to take her around town, but first they need to stop by the hospital to take a sample of her blood. He is going to keep her from getting sick and prevent her from dying this time around.

There may be a good reason why time travel is outlawed…

Since the first episode of Paper Girls, the show has operated like a standard mystery box show. Who are the mysterious people in white?

Why did the sky turn purple? How did the four main girls travel to the present?

Who is after them? What do they want?

Almost all of that changed in this episode with Larry’s extended scene setting up exactly what the stakes of the show are. In one scene they’ve laid out who the bad guys are, what they want, and who’s trying to stop them.

The only question now is how? This episode really feels like the one where the show is switching gears.

We’ve gotten the main introductions out of the way and now we’re about to get into the meat of the show. Sure, there is still a lot left to uncover, but we now have a setup that the audience can grasp all the basic concepts of.

It might seem unusual to give so much information at once, especially when the first two episodes were so slow to reveal anything close to an answer to the show’s many questions. But in many ways, a lot of the information that was given in the episode was information that most people could have guessed or at least gotten close to guessing correctly.

While it may not have seemed like it at the time, enough information was given out over the beginning of the season, that it only took a single scene to give us enough information for everyone to be on board. Had this been handled a different way, it may have been a much more complicated scene and still had less results.

The show has done a good job of laying out all the puzzle pieces over the first two episodes that allowed a scene that should have been clunky, flow a lot smoother than you would have expected.

Will Dylan’s decision to save his sister create further consequences? Can Larry help the paper girls return home?

Let us know your thoughts of Paper Girls season 1 episode 3 in the comments below!

You can watch Paper Girls season 1, only on Amazon Prime Video!