Just when you think it can no longer paralyze with its startlingly visceral evocations of teenage trauma, PEN15 gives us yet another gut-punch in its final episode: Maya’s first blowjob. In the new episodes of its second and final season, the show’s 13-year old protagonists Maya and Anna (played by the show’s adult creators, Maya Erskine and Anna Konkle) end up with high school boyfriends. In the finale, they find themselves at Maya’s boyfriend’s house late at night after the girls have run away from home.
When Maya’s boyfriend, Derek, a pill-popping slacker-sleaze, leads her down the hallway to his bedroom, she sees him from afar, as if at the end of a dark tunnel — leading her to a point of no return. A sexually innocent Maya is anticipating her first ever kiss, but Derek, she soon realizes, expects a blowjob. Maya awkwardly complies and the next few minutes play out what is arguably the single most uncomfortable sequence of a show whose appeal and genius is almost entirely built on discomfort.
