Paper Girls season 1, episode 4 recap: It Was Never About The Corn

The last episode of Paper Girls ended with a giant robot. Poor Adult Erin learns at the beginning of this episode that she’s going to have to be the one to pilot said giant robot.

The mysterious future device that she accidentally activated is needed in order to control the robot. Since it’s accidentally been paired with her, she is the only one who can pilot the giant robot through time.

With this appearing to be the only way to get the paper girls back to their own time, Adult Erin agrees, but before we can get to the giant robot action, some complications arise first.

Paper Girls Season 1 Episode 4 recap – Erin finally gets to see the adult version of her sister.

We meet Adult Missy, the sister of Adult Erin. It seems that in all of the time travel, meeting your past self and having a giant gundam hidden on a farm, that Adult Erin has been experiencing over the past two days, she has missed an appointment with a real estate agent to sell her mother’s house.

While we’ve gotten hints, this is the episode that really drives home the fact that while Erin and Missy may have been close in 1988, the present-day versions of the characters don’t seem to get along at all. Missy insists on checking in on Erin after she misses the appointment.

Adult Erin quickly hides away evidence of time travelers and has Larry pretend to be her boyfriend. A young Erin is getting eager for a chance to see the grown-up version of her sister.

She thinks that this is an opportunity for her adult counterpart to repair the relationship with Missy. Adult Erin doesn’t see it that way.

As young Erin watches from the shadows, Adult Erin and her sister get into a fight about how the two siblings handled their mother’s final day before she passed. From the conversation it’s clear that both sides hold a lot of resentment as to how everything was handled.

Missy leaves with the rift between the two of them just as deep and as painful as ever. However, according to Larry, there’s only going to be a small window to be able to successfully travel back to 1988.

The family issues have to be put on hold to make sure that everything is ready with the giant robot.

Paper Girls Season 1 Episode 4 recap – Mac meets her future nieces.

While everyone is preparing for the big moment of time travel, KJ seems to think that she’s the only one of the group who remembers that Mac is still a part of this TV show. She takes a bike to track down Mac and get her to come back to the farmhouse with the rest of the girls so they can return to their rightful place in 1988.

Using the information that she found on the internet, KJ is able to find the home address of Mac’s adult brother, Dylan. She tries to find her there, only to find that neither Mac nor her brother is home.

She does meet the wife of Mac’s brother who invites KJ in for a glass of water to wait for the rest of the family to get back. It seems that Mac had spent most of the day bonding with her brother, from shooting off fireworks, to hanging out in an abandoned construction site eating gas station food.

It’s a sweet time, with Mac getting the brother that she always wanted, and Dylan gets his sister back. However, the feeling of the day takes an awkward turn when it’s time to pick up Dylan’s two daughters.

Dylan reverts back into “dad mode” causing a rift between him and his twelve-year old sister. Meanwhile, back at the Dylan residence, KJ’s talk with Dylan’s wife is interrupted when the leader of the Old Guard shows up at the door.

They tracked down Mac through the half completed social services form from the previous episode. Pretending to be a new neighbor, the Old Guard tries to get the location of Mac out of Dylan’s wife.

The act is dropped when she spots KJ fleeing the scene on her moped. KJ gets to Mac in just enough time and convinces her to head back to the farm, with the Old Guard right behind.

The two of them make it back just as the rift in time is starting to open. The paper girls and Adult Erin all climb into the giant robot as it roars to life, tearing itself from inside the silo, and heading into the time rift that is located in the corn field.

Before the Old Guard can stop them, the entire sixty-foot robot disappears in front of her, presumably headed back to 1988. It seems that the leader of the Old Guard has failed, but what’s more than that, it seems that she isn’t actually the leader.

Sometime later, she’s standing in the field with Grand Father, the true leader of the Old Guard who, in reference to her letting the time travelers escape, tells her that he’s not mad, just disappointed.

Relationships get complicated…

The bulk of this episode was about the characters on the farm, learning to trust one another and work together. A lot of people have to step up in this episode and do something they might not be entirely comfortable with.

This includes Adult Erin having to pilot a giant robot, or Larry having to alter his plans to try and bring the paper girls back to their rightful place in time. There’s a lot happening and being balanced as these stories unfold.

But the real heart of the show belongs to the story between Mac and Dylan. The age clash of the show has for the most part centered around Erin and Adult Erin up to this point.

Erin reckoning with how her life turned out, and Adult Erin having to try and explain complicated adult things to her younger, more optimistic self has been one of the character driving forces for the show so far. In this episode we really get to see a different character pairing put in a similar, but still unique situation.

Dylan, a fully adult man, is confronted with meeting the twelve-year-old version of his sister. They don’t have a caretaker relationship, but a sibling relationship isn’t quite right either.

It’s a weird mix of the two, and the two actors play it brilliantly. Dylan sees Mac as his sister, but also as a twelve-year-old girl that he needs to protect.

Those two relationships naturally conflict with each other. To even further complicate things, Dylan is a father to two young girls around Mac’s age.

Watching him switch back into “dad mode” when picking up the girls from school, and how that immediately has an impact on his relationship with Mac is a fantastic bit of acting. It helps that the show acknowledges in the dialogue how bizarre the situation is.

The relationship that these two characters are trying to have is one that manages to work, despite everything that’s going against it. It’s a shame that the main characters had to flee through the time rift at the end of the episode.

Dylan’s scenes with Mac were some of the best character work so far in the series and it would be interesting where the show took the two of them from this point.

Who is Grand Father? Will the paper girls find themselves back in 1988?

Let us know your thoughts of Paper Girls season 1 episode 4 in the comments below!

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