Pen15’s final season is a punch to the throat

Pen15 makes me sweaty. Much of the show’s comedy relies on dramatic irony, which — especially against the backdrop of middle school, a time most of us would rather forget — can make it incredibly difficult to watch. Cringe TV has been a challenge for me since I find it difficult to watch, as dramatic irony often comes at the expense marginalized characters. In the hands Pen15Maya Erskine (creator) and Anna Konkle (lead actresses), these are tools that allow an audience to see the real emotional turmoil and intersections of race and gender in the tween years.

It’s clear the pair have sharpened their talent for using these stressful middle school scenarios to tell moving, relevant stories. The second half of the show’s second season, released several months after episodes 1-8, is as daring as ever in its exploration of tween girlhood. (So it’s hugely disappointing that the show won’t have a third season.) Its last episodes were Pen15 continues to have high highs and low lows, where the comedy is acidly funny, and the heartbreak is incredibly affecting — building on the excellent groundwork laid by the first season, and tackling serious subject matter.

At the heart of the show, of course, is Maya and Anna’s friendship, and their reliance on one another. Every new experience has a profound impact on their friendship. It challenges their intimacy and teaches them how to better support one another. Anna is juggling the emotional lives of her parents — and she takes on adult tasks like unpacking, as her parents divorce and each tries to convince her to live with them full-time. Anxiety increases, and is made worse by the family tragedy. Maya also receives an unexpected diagnosis, which helps explain her anxiety and affects her ability to adjust medication. They navigate bad teachers, funerals, dance floors and terrible high school boyfriends together.

Image: Hulu

The show has always felt so much like a personal attack, because it deftly captures how Maya and Anna’s fairly different, highly specific experiences nonetheless hold kernels of universal truth. This is especially true in the way the show handles Maya’s Asian American identity, in these episodes, adding nuance to the subtext laid in season one. Season one saw Maya learn about racism and end up trauma vomiting. It’s funny because it’s an unexpected reaction, in the moment of release. But it’s also painful and exhausting as it took me down that pathway, leaving me in a state that felt a lot like vomiting.

This second season’s episode “Shadow” demonstrates the way race can subsume a person’s identity — rendering someone exotified or ostracized, never accepted as whole or individual. In the episode, a younger Japanese family friend of Maya’s, Ume, comes to visit. The two struggle since neither can speak the others’ language. Maya takes Ume to school expecting her to be bullied — instead the class obsessed over her, touching her hair, grabbing her Tamagotchi. But Maya doesn’t understand Ume is being objectified, and instead becomes furiously jealous, screaming: “Why is being Japanese special on her and not on me?”

Miscommunications are a common theme throughout the episode. Maya, who is still too young to distinguish between objectification from adoration, has difficulty understanding the difference. She decides to be Ume’s translator — but subtitles reveal she only actually knows a few Japanese words. Ume gets confused mostly by her efforts, some of them just random mouth sounds. Yet, the show doesn’t seem to be able to ignore foreign language proficiency. It instead uses humor as a way to celebrate a mixed-race child who tried her best but never learns their native language. The subtitles are helpful as Ume, Maya, and Maya finally break down, and they embrace one another. Ume then explains to the viewers how she hated being touched and objectified and crowd in.

Image: Hulu

Meanwhile, Anna’s put in a position of peacemaker between her parents — and no decision is ever right. Anna’s low moments are heartbreaking, as she dissociates on the dance floor from her parents and has panic attacks. However, the show delivers hyperbolic cringe humor. Anna becomes increasingly obsessed with her heroism, and even has existential crisis about God’s existence during an historical lesson on the Holocaust. In a classically underbaked school assignment where the kids present what “one item” they’d bring if they were “taken by the Nazis,” Anna brings a bullet casing and says she’d use it “to kill Hitler.”

Where so much of comedy’s relationship with discomfort is centered around an idea of being “transgressive” or “edgy,” Pen15’s discomfort mostly forces a viewer to confront social expectations and gendered standards. Even though these scenes may be traumatically humorous, they are grounded in their honesty. Seeing Maya caught masturbating on the bathroom floor with her “stash” might make you want to crawl out of your skin. But comedic shows and films have also made uncomfortable jack-off jokes about boys for years — which are jolting, and exploitative. And it’s worth noting Erskine and Konkle are both in their 30s, playing teenaged versions of themselves, and not putting actual young-aged actors in harmful scenarios.

Both have spoken in interviews about how certain uncomfortable bits are based on real experiences they had at that age: Erskine has mentioned masturbating through her middle school years; Konkle described her first kiss as an “alien drilling my throat.” In Pen15The sexual impulses of young men are often a comedy, but it’s not about the characters. Instead, they’re a commentary on that phase of life where every new impulse is loud and discombobulating. Whether it’s a first period or first kiss, Pen15This film normalizes intimate moments by displaying them on screen. It also reaffirms female friendship’s benefits as Maya feels hushed solidarity to her best friend.

The final episode of the series focuses on the much more serious topic of coercion. It also examines the differences in the power and status between middle-school girls and high-school boys. Maya’s “boyfriend” asks her to do a physical act she’s uncomfortable with; not wanting to seem “uncool,” she complies. These scenes aren’t cut through with humor, and they are the most challenging to watch. It’s made choppier by the fact that these traumatic moments don’t get the kind of unpacking or denouement that they really deserve. The limited amount of space allowed for ideas and coverage feels overwhelming. The season’s more jovial wrap-up feels very abrupt, in this context, especially when earlier episodes dedicated so much space to one-off comedic bits — like slow-dancing wedged between your crush and your best friend, or stealing back an expensive Bat Mitzvah gift from the wealthy girl who was unimpressed by it.

Image: Hulu

These episodes are still very important. Pen15’s commitment to the importance of the inner lives of young girls — digging into the difficult truths of adolescence, rather than portraying young girls as flat concepts. Capturing tweenhood on screen is no easy feat, not least of all because that phase of life exists in a developmental grey area, where many of us didn’t know how to make good decisions. These are Erskine and Konkle’s stories, told honestly and directly, and there’s a degree to which casting aspersions can also feel like casting judgment. Asking for a clear resolution might be enforcing closure on a phase of life where that just doesn’t exist — and, as a whole, the show’s frank exploration of girlhood is incredibly valuable.

Between the ages 13 and 12, we made mistakes. We were also disempowered and often taken advantage of, and it wasn’t our fault. It’s cringe to watch, but we deserve to have our experiences legitimized, rather than made small and shameful. Pen15This is a sad, but funny, reminder.