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Penelope – connected

Vaseline 1 month ago

Review of TV series

Hello parents, are you ready for an anxiety attack?

Imagine: you are camping in the woods with your family and friends. Everyone seems to be having a good time. The children enjoy a silent rave. There’s quite a campfire going on. At the end of the night everyone is safely put in their cage.

The next morning, your teenage daughter Penelope wakes up before you and goes for “a little solo walk in nature.” You text her when you wake up and she promises she’ll be back in about 15 minutes.

Well, that time comes and goes. So give her a little more time. After all, she may have lost track of time or even taken a wrong turn. But there are clearly marked trails. She’ll find her way back eventually, right?

You text her again, wondering where she could be. Then you’ll get a notification that someone has charged $500 to Penelope’s Apple Pay account. After that, her phone stops sharing her location.

Right now you can probably imagine about 47 different horror scenarios. Maybe Penelope is lost. Maybe she tripped and hurt herself. Maybe she was robbed. Maybe she was taken. Maybe… maybe… maybe.

Or…maybe Penelope suddenly felt the urge to spend $500 on camping equipment, hop on a train, and leave without saying a word to anyone. Because that’s what happens.

‘It’s not you. I’m not running away,” her voice messages say.

Um, Pen, can I call you? Pen? – It kind of feels like it is precisely what you do. And I get it, you’re on some kind of pseudo-spiritual nature journey à la Reese Witherspoon Wild. You feel like you need this for some reason.

But as an outside observer, can I just say that this is about the worst idea possible ever?

I just feel like you need to hear someone say that. Okay, boo?

Stupid teenagers making stupid decisions

If I were a teenage girl feeling insecure about myself and my place in the world, I would probably feel inspired by Netflix’s Penelope. For Pen, every obstacle is a challenge to solve. She is persistent and smart. And I give the girl this: she has moxie.

If Penelope was Real smart, instead of wandering into the woods on a whim, maybe she could have done a little more research on how to survive in the wild. Instead, she’s just lucky. She happens on a wilderness survival guide before her first night in the woods. Kind strangers offer to help her along the way. And somehow, none of the adults she encounters bother to ask questions about her parents or why she’s alone in the woods or why she doesn’t seem to know how to do anything.

But again, this is all happiness.

Penelope makes a lot of, shall we say, unwise decisions. Decisions like jumping on the back of a train like an old-fashioned hobo; trying to befriend a bear; and flirting with a random guy, then following him back to his van at the end of the night – which he lives out. Fortunately, nothing bad happens to her. But it could have ended a lot otherwise.

Penelope really leans into the feeling that nature is somehow calling her to go on this journey, asking trees to protect her and even embrace them. A woman describes trees as ‘social creatures’. She claims that the government is wrongly trying to uproot protected trees. And she shares her own views on nature and origins that conflict with a biblical worldview.

Those weird spiritual tendencies, the danger of wandering off into the woods alone, and the occasional foul language (the f-word pops up every now and then) are all things parents should keep in mind when determining whether these show is worth watching with their parents. families.

(Editor’s note: Connected can rarely watch every episode of a given series for review. Therefore, there is always a chance that you will encounter a problem that we have not seen. If you come across content that you believe should be included in our review, please email us at (email protected)or contact us via Facebook or Instagram, and let us know the episode number, title and season so we can check it out.)