The OA (Netflix, Season 1)
Jan. 20th, 2017 05:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chuckroA mysterious woman with mysterious superpowers (…maybe) returns from a seven-year disappearance, and recruits a bunch of troubled teenagers (and one burnt-out teacher) for a spiritual journey.
Turns out that absurd wish-fulfillment pseudo-spiritual wanking isn’t limited to male director/writer/actors. One review I read suggested the creators watched Lost while heavily stoned at a party, then wrote down everything they could remember while working at a new age bookstore, and then turned that into this series. Which is not to say that couldn’t work—it’s not like other things aren’t more absurd—but this pushed suspension of disbelief well beyond the breaking point. Especially the magical angry aerobics.
SPOILERS
To catch everyone up: The OA (the title character, played by the series co-creator) reappears after seven years and jumps off a bridge. She’d been blind when she vanished, but now she can see and spins a wild tale to her gathered followers about being held captive for years by a man named “Hap.” He was trying to learn what happened after death, so he found people who had near-death experiences, locked them in his basement, and killed them over and over. Eventually, they start coming back from these experiences with the five “movements,” a set of weird-ass Tai Chi that can apparently heal the incurable or enable travel through alternate dimensions. When the last movement is discovered, Hap abandons her in the wilderness and apparently disappears with the rest of his test subjects. The OA’s goal all along has been to teach the followers the movements so they can send her into another dimension after them.
Then, in the last episode, the followers discover a set of books that imply The OA was going all The Usual Suspects on them the whole time. Despite this, when a school shooter (whose face, curiously, we never see) comes onto the campus, they all do the movements at him while everyone else cowers. Either by divine intervention (or because he’s stupefied by this turn of events), he pauses long enough for a cafeteria worker to tackle and disarm him. Of course, The OA has wandered to the school just in time to witness this and get shot in the heart. She believes she’s travelling to another dimension, thanks to them. It’s just as likely that everyone is nuts.
There are really two big ways to interpret this: The “most things are true and it’s magic” way, or the “most things are made up and The OA is nuts” way. The latter is actually better-supported by the narrative, explaining the bizarre details of The OA’s captivity and experiences, the bad science, the fact that internet searches couldn’t turn up any of the people she spoke of, and the parts of her stories that she wasn’t present for and couldn’t possibly know about. Collecting a bunch of emotionally-disturbed followers is entirely realistic for a charismatic crazy person. And it’s possible that she really was kidnapped (though not in the manner described) and was suffering from PTSD, or that her delusions went back much further (we know she was medicated as a child) and the “real father” she spoke of was never real.
The science plays fast-and-loose, as one might expect, but particularly glosses over a bunch of things with wider implications: I mean, I’d accept the whole “Hap is killing people and reviving them repeatedly to test NDEs” thing if he wasn’t somehow doing it via drowning. That’s a messy way to die and a hard one to recover long-term from. For that matter, the “devil’s breath” gas—which the teenagers confirm is a thing people have heard of, though it might be an urban legend—which apparently makes people totally compliant but then forget everything since they’ve been gassed. (And can be used extensively without apparent ill effects.) Something like that could change society massively! It could replace anesthesia, it could replace tear gas, it could be used in prisons…and that’s just the uses likely to be legal!
All that said, the “it’s real and she’s right” story could be true, specifically hinging on the repeated references to multiple-worlds theory: If The OA isn’t in the world she was held captive in, if she traveled through dimensions every time she had an NDE, then a lot of the discrepancies go away. Her sight returned because she woke up in a timeline where she wasn’t blind. Jumping off the bridge put her into a world where Hap and the other subjects didn’t exist.
There’s at least one in-between theory regarding the books: That the FBI agent, who for some reason was at the OA’s house, planted them there. The OA learned to read English when she was blind (and therefor only learned braille), and was blind at least until she was 20-ish. That’s some heavy reading for someone who was unfamiliar with written letters until adulthood. Why the FBI would do this hints at a much bigger conspiracy…or there are an assortment of mundane explanations for the books.
Overall: This show clearly intends from the start to be a mindscrew, but I think it tries too hard in some places and just plain falls flat in others. Fun to theorize about because it’s filled with “clues”, but ultimately not nearly as deep as it wants to be.
Turns out that absurd wish-fulfillment pseudo-spiritual wanking isn’t limited to male director/writer/actors. One review I read suggested the creators watched Lost while heavily stoned at a party, then wrote down everything they could remember while working at a new age bookstore, and then turned that into this series. Which is not to say that couldn’t work—it’s not like other things aren’t more absurd—but this pushed suspension of disbelief well beyond the breaking point. Especially the magical angry aerobics.
SPOILERS
To catch everyone up: The OA (the title character, played by the series co-creator) reappears after seven years and jumps off a bridge. She’d been blind when she vanished, but now she can see and spins a wild tale to her gathered followers about being held captive for years by a man named “Hap.” He was trying to learn what happened after death, so he found people who had near-death experiences, locked them in his basement, and killed them over and over. Eventually, they start coming back from these experiences with the five “movements,” a set of weird-ass Tai Chi that can apparently heal the incurable or enable travel through alternate dimensions. When the last movement is discovered, Hap abandons her in the wilderness and apparently disappears with the rest of his test subjects. The OA’s goal all along has been to teach the followers the movements so they can send her into another dimension after them.
Then, in the last episode, the followers discover a set of books that imply The OA was going all The Usual Suspects on them the whole time. Despite this, when a school shooter (whose face, curiously, we never see) comes onto the campus, they all do the movements at him while everyone else cowers. Either by divine intervention (or because he’s stupefied by this turn of events), he pauses long enough for a cafeteria worker to tackle and disarm him. Of course, The OA has wandered to the school just in time to witness this and get shot in the heart. She believes she’s travelling to another dimension, thanks to them. It’s just as likely that everyone is nuts.
There are really two big ways to interpret this: The “most things are true and it’s magic” way, or the “most things are made up and The OA is nuts” way. The latter is actually better-supported by the narrative, explaining the bizarre details of The OA’s captivity and experiences, the bad science, the fact that internet searches couldn’t turn up any of the people she spoke of, and the parts of her stories that she wasn’t present for and couldn’t possibly know about. Collecting a bunch of emotionally-disturbed followers is entirely realistic for a charismatic crazy person. And it’s possible that she really was kidnapped (though not in the manner described) and was suffering from PTSD, or that her delusions went back much further (we know she was medicated as a child) and the “real father” she spoke of was never real.
The science plays fast-and-loose, as one might expect, but particularly glosses over a bunch of things with wider implications: I mean, I’d accept the whole “Hap is killing people and reviving them repeatedly to test NDEs” thing if he wasn’t somehow doing it via drowning. That’s a messy way to die and a hard one to recover long-term from. For that matter, the “devil’s breath” gas—which the teenagers confirm is a thing people have heard of, though it might be an urban legend—which apparently makes people totally compliant but then forget everything since they’ve been gassed. (And can be used extensively without apparent ill effects.) Something like that could change society massively! It could replace anesthesia, it could replace tear gas, it could be used in prisons…and that’s just the uses likely to be legal!
All that said, the “it’s real and she’s right” story could be true, specifically hinging on the repeated references to multiple-worlds theory: If The OA isn’t in the world she was held captive in, if she traveled through dimensions every time she had an NDE, then a lot of the discrepancies go away. Her sight returned because she woke up in a timeline where she wasn’t blind. Jumping off the bridge put her into a world where Hap and the other subjects didn’t exist.
There’s at least one in-between theory regarding the books: That the FBI agent, who for some reason was at the OA’s house, planted them there. The OA learned to read English when she was blind (and therefor only learned braille), and was blind at least until she was 20-ish. That’s some heavy reading for someone who was unfamiliar with written letters until adulthood. Why the FBI would do this hints at a much bigger conspiracy…or there are an assortment of mundane explanations for the books.
Overall: This show clearly intends from the start to be a mindscrew, but I think it tries too hard in some places and just plain falls flat in others. Fun to theorize about because it’s filled with “clues”, but ultimately not nearly as deep as it wants to be.
