The second episode opens with Penelope (Megan Stott) being startled awake by the hooting of a distant owl. She tries to hastily assemble her tent but this goes so poorly that she abandons the project altogether, for the moment. She’ll continue to hear twigs and branches snapping in the distance and becomes so alarmed at one point that she’ll pray for protection. She doesn’t really specify to who or what she is praying but claims that it was ‘his’ friends who drew her out here in this first place so protection should be a package deal.
Penelope spends a few minutes showing her gratitude the next morning when she wakes to what appears to be a beautiful day. She’ll take the time to enjoy it after a quick consultation of her map confirms that she needs to head east to reach a water source. The only problem is, she leaves her water bottle behind and by the time she realizes this, it’s far too late to backtrack.
Her luck changes when she meets an older man and woman at the end of the trail. Their campsite is nearby and she’ll spend what appears to be at least several hours with the couple. Although their entire encounter is silent except for the brief introduction, it’s clear they give her a spare water bottle and fire starter. Not long after saying goodbye, she’ll cross the small lake. She eventually comes to another water source that appears far swampier. Filling her water bottle will confirm the suspicion and reveal the need to purify the water.
Not long after collecting the swampy water, Penelope sets out to build a fire. For all intents and purposes, she’ll practically do everything right but is unable to get the fire starter to catch. She ultimately ends up having to use her lighter but still feels the need to celebrate the win when it catches. Unfortunately, those celebrations are proven a bit premature, given that she now needs to build a rack of sorts to hold the bout over the fire. This task proves no less difficult but it only takes a bit of patience and ingenuity for her to overcome the challenge.
It isn’t until she attempts to retackle she becomes frustrated and takes a brief rest to enjoy a meal. It’ll be dark by the time she gets the tent built but apparently now feels so adept that she burns the instructions. The episode ends with Penelope briefly thanking whoever she was praying to earlier.
Penelope Review
I was actually surprised at how decent and introspective the episode was. Despite being basically silent, it was decent. I enjoyed the brief encounter with the older couple but it did make things feel almost too easy. From personal experience, I can say that assembling a tent without any experience, instructions or not can be difficult. This is especially true for the type of tent Penelope has. It was nice to see her overcome the challenge. For this and the shorter runtime, I’d have to give the episode a 5.4 out of 10.
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