2/27/2023 0 Comments Maya pen15![]() The first season contained the most immediate visceral pleasures and pains because it literally cherry-picked all the defining and most narratively rich aspects that make this time period and age so novel: the first day of middle school the first time drinking the first time discovering masturbation the first time logging onto AIM the first school dance. By season 2.5 (the second season was split in two, with the first episodes airing last fall), seventh grade has already been happening for a while, and the purgatory of middle school naturally becomes less predictable and far more unruly. Along the way, while Anna is consistently forced to grow up quick, Maya becomes distractingly bratty - a feature of her character that in these episodes becomes almost off-puttingly dialed-up.īut if the show is somewhat less consistent this time around, it also appropriately mirrors the reality of this particular period. Others, such as the episode that sees Maya’s cousin visiting or another focused on a relay-for-life cancer walk that Maya and Anna attend, feel incomplete in a way that is rare for a show whose episodes tended to each pack its own full, individual emotional arc. Some play out as stand-out detours: an episode dedicated entirely to Maya’s mom (Erskine’s real-life mother, Mutsuko Erskine, who has always been quietly remarkable on the show) and her former life is singular, particularly in its final moments. Yet, these new episodes contain some interesting turns down the road, to mixed results. You could say that it’s the weakest season, but that would be reductive, as it sticks the landing on closing out a show that remains entirely unlike anything else out there and once again features among the most underrated performances currently on television from its stars. This new half-season is arguably the least enjoyable, in part because it goes to the darkest places yet. The scene - one more in the show’s long line of instances that are revelatory and nuanced in exploring the ugly frictions of gender when it comes to growing up - occurs toward the end of these final batch of episodes that are among the most unwieldy of the show. Fearful of their parents’ rebuke, she then delivers one of the most heartbreaking lines of the show: “Let’s call Shuji.” Throughout the show, Shuji has always been, like most older brothers, the annoying antagonist of Maya’s teenage life - except for when he can suddenly become your protector, a familiar manifestation of home that takes you away from a dark, strange basement kitchen. Immediately afterward in the nearby kitchen, as Maya begins to process what just happened with Anna, she says she wants to go home. Yet part of the horror is that what Maya has gone through is in some ways unremarkable: for many young girls, an introduction to sexuality, even one that is welcomed, doesn’t happen entirely on one’s own terms - instead it is often an exercise in the unsentimental, unceremonious seizure of innocence. Maya isn’t exactly coerced, but she undergoes the experience in no way feeling as though this is something she wants to do or feels safe doing - nor does she even comprehend as a possibility the idea of telling Derek that this isn’t what she wants. ![]() Maya awkwardly complies and the next few minutes play out what is arguably the single most uncomfortable sequence of a show whose appeal and genius is almost entirely built on discomfort. A sexually innocent Maya is anticipating her first ever kiss, but Derek, she soon realizes, expects a blowjob. When Maya’s boyfriend, Derek, a pill-popping slacker-sleaze, leads her down the hallway to his bedroom, she sees him from afar, as if at the end of a dark tunnel - leading her to a point of no return. In the finale, they find themselves at Maya’s boyfriend’s house late at night after the girls have run away from home. ![]() ![]() In the new episodes of its second and final season, the show’s 13-year old protagonists Maya and Anna (played by the show’s adult creators, Maya Erskine and Anna Konkle) end up with high school boyfriends. ![]() Just when you think it can no longer paralyze with its startlingly visceral evocations of teenage trauma, PEN15 gives us yet another gut-punch in its final episode: Maya’s first blowjob. ![]()
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