Is Larry Dead or Alive in Paper Girls? [Spoiler]

Amazon Prime’s ‘Paper Girls’ is a time travel show that opens a set of new possibilities when it comes to the genre. Based on the comic book series of the same name, it introduces a lot of new things that further convolute the nature of time travel. There are different versions of every character which leads to numerous directions in which their story can go. Every action and every choice becomes important, because the past, the present, and the future are so tangled that it becomes impossible to separate them and create a single chronological course of events. One of the characters to have this messed-up sense of sequence is Larry. His character arc puts a question mark on a lot of things. His death, especially, raises a number of questions. If you’re wondering about his fate, here’s what you need to know. SPOILERS AHEAD

Is Larry Dead?

Death generally means the end of the journey of a character, but in time travel, the rules are not so rigid. For a person who dies in the present, there is still the past to stay alive. A lot of things can happen there, and they can change the course of one’s life drastically, maybe even averting death in the future. No one knows that better than Larry.

He first came across paper girls in 2019, but he’d already been a part of STF for a very long time. He knew all about the foldings that allowed people to travel in time, and he’d already gone through a few ablutions to learn how to get his memories back. He knew much more than he was telling the girls and eventually dies with those secrets in 1999. He was supposed to take the girls back to 1988, but he lies and takes to them to a timeline that he’d always wanted to go to. Here, he is killed by a robot that follows them from the folding.

While the Larry from 2019 dies, the one from 1999 is still alive. While cracking the codes in his diary, Tiffany realizes that she can ask for his help. When 1999 Larry discovers that he’d duped four girls and landed them in a lot of trouble in the future, he decides to do better when he still has the opportunity. He promises he won’t lie to them in the future, and he makes up for it in the present by helping them as much as possible. When the Old Watch comes to take away the girls, he intervenes and tries to save them. But then, he’s eaten by the Grandfather’s pet dinosaur.

Interestingly, this is the second time Larry has died, which poses a great question. If he died in 1999, how come he was still alive in 2019? This might mean that the dinosaur didn’t actually eat Larry. Maybe it just swallowed him and then spit him out later, while he was still alive. But that feels a little far-fetched. You don’t go into the mouth of a dinosaur and come out alive. So, the 1999 Larry is most probably dead. That still leaves the question of the events that happened in 2019, because they don’t simply get erased when his younger version dies. This opens up a grandfather paradox.

All of it means that 2019 Larry is probably from a different timeline, which means he isn’t really dead. Not in the traditional sense of the term. For him to be alive in the future when he is already dead in the past, he must have traveled from somewhere else. Or, it could be that he is actually from the future (perhaps a doppelganger), brought back in 2019 to work for STF underground. The possibilities are endless right now because the show is still just figuring out the direction it’ll take the story in. Perhaps, like ‘Dark’, it will explore parallel universes, and that might explain how Larry can die twice in one life.

Read More: What is the Meaning of Blue Tongues Don’t Lie in Paper Girls?