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Penelope’s Cliffhanger Undermines Its Quiet Ambitions
This rare piece of indie television says so much with so little — until its final moment.
The largely unexplained nature of Penelope’s emotional engine is magnetic and, for the most part, feels like an expression of truth: The anxiety and heaviness of being a teenager is often difficult to articulate, exponentially more so in the era of extreme digital ubiquity. But unless you can successfully stretch so far as to interpret the entire series as taking place under a week — and you truly can’t — then the sequencing of their deaths during her time in the wild means this Penelope becomes the story of a young girl who suffers an immeasurable loss during a period of radical self-discovery. Efforts to ban smartphone use in schools are driving political and parental debates, while Instagram, a dominant force in young lives, conceded last month to safety concerns and made teenagers’ accounts private by default.
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