Penelope , the new YA Netflix series from Mel Eslyn and Mark Duplass, operates with the slight unreality of a fable. It follows a 16-year-old girl played by Little Fires Everywhere ’s Megan Stott as she abruptly breaks from society and disappears into the gorgeous Pacific Northwest wilderness. We watch as Penelope grows into capability: She starts out barely knowing how to tie a knot but soon figures out how to last a night, then a week, then an uncertain amount of time.
It’s never clear why she does this; the series only gestures at a feeling. The first episode opens with her at a silent dance party in what appears to be a summer camp. She’s in her own world, headphones on, surrounded by other kids constantly on their phones — until she spots a wolf, which sparks something in her.
As the teenager persists in the woods, Penelope periodically returns to hints of her inner life, but never with specificity. “I’m worried there’s a piece deep inside of me that’s broken,” she says later, while spending time with an older environmental activist protecting a tree. “That there’s this massive hole I’m never going to fill.
” At one point, she wonders aloud: Was she ever a happy kid? 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. Working.
