Penelope is a rare independently financed series, which was created, written, and shot by Mel Eslyn and Mark Duplass, using the earnings Duplass made from his supporting role on The Morning Show (putting that Apple money to great use). In it, the cherubic Megan Stott — who looks like a cross between Reese Witherspoon and Mae Whitman — plays a 16-year-old who, almost on a whim, decides to run away from home and live in the Pacific Northwest woods.
Her reasons are unclear, and although the occasional flashback hints at an explanation, the specific reason doesn’t seem to matter. She wants to disconnect from the world, which becomes increasingly evident the longer she remains in the forest. She’s not running from her parents or friends; she’s fleeing the relentless conveyor belt of society that never pauses, never allows us to stop and appreciate life, existence, and the world beyond our bubbles.
The forest offers Penelope not just solitude but small, constant victories as she learns, over days, weeks, and months, to survive on her own. She builds a tent, starts a fire, forages for food, and constructs a shelter. It’s almost boring, like watching episodes of Alive, yet it provides a satisfying, hypnotic tedium.
Penelope does encounter others occasionally: an older hippie activist protecting trees from loggers, a musician trying to cultivate an audience the old-fashioned way (without Spotify or YouTube), and a group of boys similarly seeking spiritual self-discovery. But as viewers, we find ourselves longing for her solitude again.
The series’ tension, to the extent that it exists, centers on when — or if — Penelope will return home. She’s only 16 and can’t live in the woods forever, though the idea of spending many more months, or even years, there has clearly crossed her mind. However, there are real dangers, including wild animals, and the elements pose challenges, too.
It’s a quiet, beautifully spare series, not likely to appeal to everyone — perhaps even the young adults it targets. But I know plenty will find it a meditative balm, including my son, whom I almost don’t want to watch it for fear that it might give him ideas. (His idea of a perfect day involves seeing how far he can walk along railroad tracks through the forest before he calls me to pick him up before dark, 20 or 25 miles away from where he began.)
But then there’s the ending, and I still don’t know what to make of it. If this series sounds even slightly appealing, give it a try, if only to support this kind of independently financed project. Don’t read about the ending beforehand, although I will let you know that there’s no need to worry it ends like Into the Wild, which Penelope references to herself at one point.
Spoilers
I didn’t know how I expected it to end. I’m not even sure how I wanted it to end — or if I wanted it to end at all. Perhaps my ideal ending would have been a slow pullback shot, showing Penelope making stew over a fire outside her shelter as the credits roll, leaving her future ambiguous.
But I certainly didn’t expect it to end as it did, with a devastating cliffhanger. It begins when Penelope is attacked by a jaguar, which she manages to kill with her knife. This is far-fetched but conceivable. It’s also forgivable. But she’s injured and seemingly infected, prompting her to return to civilization for medicine. When she leaves her camp, however, it feels final.
Sick and feverish, she struggles to reach help, eventually collapsing and waking up in a hospital, having been discovered by passing hikers. Upon waking, she’s unusually concerned about the bill and speaks to a social worker who, for some reason, doesn’t connect her to what must be a missing person report. Penelope leaves the hospital without providing her ID and lingers around town, stacking wood for dinner and a couch for the night. (Penelope never seems to fear strangers throughout the series, which as a parent, I found unusually concerning.)
The next day, she lingers more until she walks into a library only minutes before it closes. Penelope quickly checks the news, breaking the seal on her isolation from civilization. Two minutes before the library closes, she quickly scans her social media feed, where she discovers that her parents died. Our first thought is that her parent’s death is the reason she ran away, that living in the forest is how she decided to escape, process, or repress her parents’ passing. Upon closer inspection, however, we learn that her parents died two weeks prior, while Penelope was living in the forest. She wasn’t there, and she emerged from her isolation only to discover that her parents are gone.
And then the credits roll.
I have no idea to make of it. It is defiantly incongruous with the rest of the series. And I’ve warned these Netflix series about ending on cliffhangers, given the streamers’ proclivity for canceling. If that’s where this series ends, I think it’s lousy unless the message Duplass is trying to send is, “Don’t run away and live in the woods because your parents will die!” It’s such a tragically horrific ending for a series that is very much the opposite of that. It almost feels like a trick. And that might be OK if Netflix renews it, and Duplass and Eslyn are given an opportunity to explain the ending or put it in context or provide us with the kind of hope that the series seems built on. Otherwise, it just feels mean, which I’m certain is the last thing they intended.