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Penelope season one ending

Penelope, more reacting to the reactions and reviewing the reviewers, so there’s gonna be ending talk here, talking about the last couple of minutes of the season:

I can’t believe people are saying that “It looks like she already knew and that’s why she left”. She looks obviously surprised! Her jaw drops, she blinks a bunch of times in a row. It’s a natural, real-looking take as something like that sinks in. What world of over-ham takes are these so-called reviewers living in!?

Now, the idea that “this is why she left”, well, I can see why people are looking for a reason for her leaving. That’s the one part of this insane interpretation that does make some sense except it doesn’t because all of those other flashbacks, and her conversations with the other characters have hinted that there’s something else. She wouldn’t‘ve needed a fake name, for example.

And the whole “yeah yeah she was texting with her mom but nothing is as it seems in this multilayered show”. Dear reviewers: LSD is not a toy!

In one sense, we’ve got two options:

This is a show about a girl who faces some changes in her life by heading out to the woods. The show never ever talks about those changes so the whole “spiritual journey to face this past” becomes everything but. And for the sake of just being twisty for twists sake, unreliable narrator for the hell of it without any clues and hindsight “oh of course!” moments, that thing she was running from (as much as the show kept hammering over and over again that she wasn’t running from anything) gets revealed at the show’s very end.

Or, this is a show where someone who left home thinking it was temporarily, in a fit of dramatic irony worthy of Aristophanes, found out that sometimes there is no going back.

Not only does option B make total sense and is awesome from an existentialist narrative perspective horror perspective, Camus and Sartre can’t touch this, and option A would be cheap and chintzy, the one thing that would make even less sense than option A would be to deliberately make it ambiguous which of the two options there is.

If it had been option A, there could’ve easily been more explicit signs that she actually knew. Like, it could’ve been revealed through something she was carrying. Or she could’ve had an info dump convo with someone.

Instead, there are so many signs that it’s option B. Not only did she look surprised—again, if the reviewers are looking for ham, why wouldn’t they ask for an overly “oh yes I knew” take?—there was also how she tried to call them, she was looking for emails, anything.

Now, there is gonna be season 2 probably so we’ll see then.

Reviewers push these wild theories for clicks and water cooler talk, I guess. Literature is dead in the age of controversy. And in this case it worked because here I am, talking about it. I got provoked into talking about this wacko fan theory. It must suck to make TV shows if even when you tell them clearly and straight-forwardly, the press gets it 100% backwards.