Few characters on Cruel Summer are as outwardly bad as assistant principal Martin Harris, who groomed his student Kate Wallis before kidnapping her and locking her in his basement for months on end. While there's zero doubt in anyone's mind that Martin is the show's villain, fans now have a reason to suspect that he may be something else: a time traveler from the future.

OK, not really. But there's an actual reason for this, other than just simple fan speculation. Fans on Reddit noticed something quite intriguing about the books on Martin's shelf. You can make out the titles clearly in the third episode of the series, when Jeanette Turner breaks into Martin's house on the Fourth of July to steal his yearbook. The issue with the books? Well, none of them were published until after 1993 — aka, well after the events of the show.

There's Nora Roberts' The Last Boyfriend, which didn't hit shelves until 2012. Then there's Tess Gerristen's The Surgeon, which debuted in 2001. Anthony Horowitz's Evil Star didn't drop until 2006. Time Flies, by David Ives, wasn't published until 2001.

Now, is it possible that this was a mistake of the prop department, despite the fact that they've been pretty meticulous about giving the show a very '90s aesthetic? Totally. After all, you probably wouldn't notice this bookshelf situation unless you were really, really looking for clues. Maybe these books were simply all that was available in the prop closet at the moment.