Paper Girls season 1, episode 5 recap: A New Period

When the fourth episode of Paper Girls ended, all of our heroes were piled into a giant robot and went running through a time portal back to 1988, narrowly escaping the Old Guard. Season 1 episode 5 starts on the other side of that time portal with the robot landing on the ground in a controlled crash, back in the time of the main four paper girls.

Of course, trouble is right behind them. Within minutes of everyone climbing out of the big robot, another time portal opens. An even bigger giant robot shows up, this one seemingly controlled by the Old Guard.

Paper Girls Season 1 Episode 5 recap – Giant Robot Fight!

The four paper girls hide along with Adult Erin, but Larry is quickly killed by the robot and its ability to shoot ray beams out of its hands. As the evil giant robot searches for any more survivors, Adult Erin sacrifices herself to save the four young girls.

She sneaks back to the cockpit of her own giant robot and powers it back to life. Within a few minutes of this episode kicking off, we have a mech robot slug fest as the two metal titans are duking it out in the show’s most comic book scene yet.

Unfortunately, Adult Erin is still new to the art of giant robot piloting given that she just found out about their existence a day ago. It seems that the Old Guard has the upper hand.

But Erin, in a final sacrificial move, self-destructs her own robot, taking out herself and the entire Old Guard robot with her. The four girls having lost all of their adult supervision in a matter of minutes are shocked.

More members of the Old Guard including Grand Father show up to clean the site of the battle. Tiff sneaks out of the hiding place to retrieve Larry’s backpack and more importantly his notebook with all of the time war information in it.

As she’s sneaking across the battlefield, she hears Grand Father saying that the Old Guard is about to finish cleaning the area and is about to wipe the memories of everyone who may possibly be in the vicinity. Tiff sneaks back and tells the other girls that they’re all about to lose the memories of everything that has happened to them.

Once again, the sky turns purple, and the girls watch the lights as they prepare to forget each other forever… But that doesn’t work.

For some reason that the girls can’t figure out, the mind wiping that the Old Guard used to keep their time war a secret doesn’t work on the four of them. Tiff thinks that there might be some answers in the notes left behind by Larry.

But before we can dig deeper into that mystery, a bigger issue arises when the girls spot a newspaper with the date on the front. They didn’t travel back to Halloween 1988 like they had planned, but instead are now stuck in 1999 on July 4th weekend.

Paper Girls Season 1 Episode 5 recap – Life in 1999…

All alone once again, the four girls decide to head to KJ’s house. After all, they can rest and stock up there because the house will be empty.

KJ tells the others that her family goes out of town every 4th of July. Or at least that was the case back in 1988.

Upon arriving at KJ’s home, instead of finding an empty house, they discover a full-blown 4th of July party. It seems that KJ’s family changed their traditions sometime in the past eleven years.

The girls sneak into the party looking for supplies. While Tiff finds a quiet place to study Larry’s notebook, Mac and Erin end up finding the guest’s coat pile and stealing money from all the wallets and purses they can find.

KJ meanwhile wanders around her childhood home and makes her way up to her bedroom only to run into Lauren, the roommate of her college-aged self. After talking to Lauren for a few minutes and finding out more about her life, KJ has to hide to avoid being seen by herself.

She sees the older version of herself kissing Lauren. The girls manage to escape the party undetected.

But KJ is obviously trying to sort out the complex feelings she’s been ignoring the whole series, that have now been pushed to the forefront by the action of college age KJ. She lashes out at the group and ends up punching Mac.

Tiff, trying to keep the group together, takes charge, and calls the older version of herself as the episode ends.

Resetting the show…

This episode feels like a little bit of a reboot for the season. We lose the adult characters in the opening minutes and are quickly back to an old formula.

We have four paper girls who have been thrown through time against their will and are trapped with nobody to help them just like the first episode. It’s a little early for a “back to the basics” episode, but that doesn’t mean that it’s not a welcome change of pace.

By this point in the series, it’s clear that a thread that will be running through the entire season will be the young girls finding and interacting with older versions of themselves. It would make sense that these critical moments in their future lives don’t all happen at the exact same time.

They would need to move around in the timeline in order to have each character run into themselves at the moment that has the most narrative drive. While the early episodes felt like the show was planning on Erin being the central character, as we move forward it’s becoming more of an ensemble piece, with each character getting a moment to shine.

However, the best moments in the show continue to be the ones where the four main girls simply spend time interacting with one another. There is an extended scene that doesn’t really drive the plot forward, (at least not the plot of this specific episode) where Erin is getting her period for the first time.

The four girls have to stop focusing on time travel and a war across time to try and figure out exactly how a tampon is supposed to work. The scene arguably adds nothing to move the plot forward but it, in many ways, carries the emotional weight of the episode.

It lets the characters evolve individually, but also as a group and helps to create characters that we really want to root for. There’s a reason that this seemingly small scene is the one that the episode is named after.

Let us know your thoughts of Paper Girls season 1 episode 5 in the comments below!

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