Penny is introduced in the last episode of the second season of Lost as the long-lost lover of Desmond Hume as well as the daughter of British tycoon and antagonist Charles Widmore.

In spite of being only a recurring character, she made notable appearances in three season finales of the show: "Live Together, Die Alone",[1] "Through the Looking Glass",[2] and "There's No Place Like Home".

[4] She first met Desmond (Henry Ian Cusick) sometime in 1994 at a monastery in Scotland and asked him to help her deliver wine to Carlisle, to which he gladly agreed.

Even though both were happy together, their relationship appeared to be unstable due to the disparity between the wealth of the two characters; Penny was an heiress while Desmond merely worked at a theatre company.

Months after Desmond had begun his training for the race, they meet in Los Angeles, she assumed that he had read her letter but was startled when he asked her when she was going to be married.

[7] Penny and Desmond would later be united at last when her boat, Searcher, was able to rescue him, along with the members of the Oceanic 6, Jack Shephard (Matthew Fox), Kate Austen (Evangeline Lilly), Hugo "Hurley" Reyes (Jorge Garcia), Sayid Jarrah (Naveen Andrews), Sun-Hwa Kwon (Yunjin Kim), and Aaron Littleton, along with Frank Lapidus (Jeff Fahey).

[8] In 2007, Penny would face her father's nemesis, Benjamin Linus (Michael Emerson), who threatened to kill her as a result of the murder of Alex by Widmore's men.

[10] In the finale episode of the series, the alternate timeline is revealed to be a purgatorial meeting place prior to the afterlife, after Penny's death sometime in her future.

The creators managed to build momentum with smart narrative, by using the romance card to develop such a complicated topic as time traveling.

[12] Verne Gay of Newsday called it an emotional release, "I actually cried when Penny and Desmond finally... connected" and "there wasn't one, single, solitary false note".

[17] Ben Rawson-Jones of Digital Spy wrote that "a refreshing shift in Lost's tone enabled loyal viewers to have their hearts warmed by the long distance smoochfest between Desmond and his beloved Penny".