![impulse season 1 full season impulse season 1 full season](https://static3.srcdn.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/Callum-Keith-Rennie-in-Impulse-YouTube-Premium.jpg)
The low points are devastating, with Anna dissociating on a dance floor and having a panic attack. Meanwhile, Anna’s put in a position of peacemaker between her parents - and no decision is ever right. When Ume and Maya eventually break down and embrace each other, the viewer gets the benefits of subtitles as Ume explains how much she hated being touched, objectified, and crowded in on.
![impulse season 1 full season impulse season 1 full season](https://yugenmangas.com/wp-content/uploads/WP-manga/data/manga_61a97d78d792b/6e9e1ca2ff26808867ce06a5d3e0e58c/0.jpg)
Instead, it mines humor from a rite of passage for a mixed race kid who never learned to speak their mother tongue, yet tried her hardest. Yet the show manages to never punch down on foreign language speaking. Her attempts, some of which are just random mouth sounds, mostly confuse Ume. She decides to be Ume’s translator - but subtitles reveal she only actually knows a few Japanese words. Maya is too young to differentiate between objectification and adoration. Through the episode, miscommunication abounds. 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?” Maya takes Ume to school expecting her to be bullied - instead the class obsessed over her, touching her hair, grabbing her Tamagotchi. The two struggle since neither can speak the others’ language. In the episode, a younger Japanese family friend of Maya’s, Ume, comes to visit. 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. 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. It’s funny because it’s an unexpected reaction, in the moment of release. In season one, Maya learned about racism, and ended up trauma vomiting. 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. 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. Together, they navigate dance floors, bad teachers, a funeral, and awful high school boyfriends. At the same time, Maya receives an unexpected diagnosis which explains her outbursts and emotional dysregulation, but she struggles with adjusting medication. She becomes increasingly anxious, which is only compounded by family tragedy. 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. Each of these new experiences leaves a mark on their friendship, challenging their easy intimacy, teaching them new ways to support each other. (So it’s hugely disappointing that the show won’t have a third season.) In its final episodes, 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.Īt the heart of the show, of course, is Maya and Anna’s friendship, and their reliance on one another. 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. It’s clear the pair have sharpened their talent for using these stressful middle school scenarios to tell moving, relevant stories. But in the hands of Pen15 creators and lead actresses Maya Erskine and Anna Konkle, these become tools that help an audience understand the genuine emotional tumult of the tween years, and how these challenges intersect with race and gender. And cringe television has always been challenging for me, since dramatic irony is often at the expense of marginalized characters. 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.