Maya's classmates bully her with racist jokes and label her as the Ugliest Girl in School, making her obsess that she's not enough of anything – not wealthy enough, cool enough or white enough.Īnna's unflagging support and compliments push back against the shame this produces, but this best friend is only one girl standing against imposing mean girl cliques and a mom, Yuki (Mutosuko Erskine, the star's real mother) she's convinced doesn't get her. These closing chapters dive deeper into the loneliness and secret anguish under the show's skin, especially as that pain is experienced by Maya, whose childlike gawkiness is in an unspoken tug-of-war with her sprouting sexuality and a worsening case of attention deficit disorder.
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Functionally the pause helps to mark a personality shift in the series between the overtly comedic first season and the sweet and painful opening episodes of the second. The second half of the comedy's second season arrives a year after the first, another pandemic-interrupted production. "PEN15" lures us back on that hike and drops us into the wilds without warning, naked and afraid, while reassuring us that everything is going to be alright. Those movies are a window into our worst nightmares of navigating teen girldom. And that's where "PEN15" serves us in a way films like "Thirteen" strove to, but couldn't quite. This genius move let the audience in on the joke of adolescence with all its hormonal explosions and betrayals, and subsequent discoveries about the body's mysteries, from the safe remove of adulthood. They made us feel seen and, weirdly, exposed. Seeing this for the first time – and second, and third – provoked a bizarre somatic reaction landing somewhere between absolute hilarity and horror. In the first season they stepped into the skins of their 13-year-old selves as 31-year-old women, playing their alter egos Anna Kone and Maya Ishii-Peters beside actual 13-year-old seventh graders. Such sapience only fully blossoms with maturity and hindsight, which "PEN15" creators and stars Anna Konkle and Maya Erskine fully capitalize upon in the final descent of their series' arc. Much later we realize that everyone's a mess of confusion and hormones, even the kids who are playing it cool.
Related: "Melodramatic representations of teenagers always bother me"Īll we want to do it is fit in and stand out for the right reasons, convinced everyone else is living a more glamorous life than we are. For them, and most of us, 13 is mainly synonymous with awkwardness, insecurity and yearning. Some of Reed's fellow teens resented its hysterical portraiture of adolescence as some dangerous slide into disaster. girls spinning out of control as they leap into a world of sex and drugs. Hardwicke collaborated on her script with her 15-year-old co-star Nikki Reed, whose input legitimized its raw and terrifying portrayal of L.A. But both invite us to tag along with pairs of seventh grade girls careening into the wilderness of adolescence in stories set in the early '00s.Įach was also written by the women who lived them. Despite the obvious parallels, the series and film couldn't be more unalike. Fortunately, none of us actually have to return to junior high ever again.Digesting the final seven episodes of " PEN15" inspired a bracing chaser of a rewatch: "Thirteen," Catherine Hardwicke's 2003 directorial debut. Pen15, which Hulu perfectly calls a “traumedy,” returns on December 3. Minus the part where a dog eats a hamster. So it will be a lot like actually being in middle school. This trailer promises that, like with the first part of the season, we’ll be crying a lot during episodes. That will lead Maya to also start seeing someone who should not be dating a junior high student either in a season that will once again mix real emotional stakes with absolutely absurd comedy. It’s causing friction between the best friends as Maya feels more and more like a third wheel. The next live-action episode will be episode 10.) Anna and the (way-too-old-for-her) high school boyfriend she met while doing tech for the drama club are getting serious. (Hulu labels the show’s recent animated special as season two, episode nine. Pen15 will pick up right where episode eight of the show left off. But this isn’t season three of the series rather, it’s the second part of season two. Everyone’s favorite adults playing 13-year-old versions of themselves, Maya Erskine and Anna Konkle, are heading back to the year 2000.
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