The Big Picture

• The OA is a unique and unforgettable media project that goes beyond a simple story about regaining sight.
• The show offers an interactive experience where the audience decides whether to believe Prairie's account.
• The OA is a low-budget sci-fi series that resonates with middle-class America and explores second chances and acceptance.

Once in a while, there comes a media project so unique that it stays with you long after its intended or, in this case, unintended end. When the first trailer for Netflix’s The OA was released, a seemingly simple story was teased, featuring Brit Marling’s Prairie, a blind woman who, after going missing for seven years, returns being able to see. After the series premiered, we’d come to realize The OA was so much more than just learning how she regained her sight. Prairie tells her story – which involves Russian oligarchs, human experimenting, near-death experiences, and interdimensional traveling – not to her family or the FBI, but to a group of people with nothing in common except the need of listening to her. The series offers a rare experience to the audience, where we are also moved to suspend disbelief and feel part of OA’s tribe.

Conceived by Marling herself and Zal Batmanglij, The OA is divided into two parts – intended to be more had it not been canceled. Part I deals with Prairie’s backstory, how she meets the people that define her life journey, and the way she’s given a gift by a mystic figure to be able to build a puzzle and move into another dimension. Part II amplifies the scope by incorporating another reality, different ways of traveling, and a mind-blowing cliffhanger ending. The OA took its time to establish its mythos and was set to expand as its last season showed us, but perhaps that’s what ended up playing against it into not getting renewed by Netflix.

‘The OA’ Part I Keeps You Doubting If Prairie’s Story Is Real

Prairie’s tribe includes high schoolers Steve (Patrick Gibson), French (Brandon Perea), Buck (Ian Alexander), and Jesse (Brendan Meyer), plus one of their teachers, BBA (Phyllis Smith). As she relays her story to them – about how she escaped Russia, was sold to her adoptive parents, then kidnapped by Hap (Jason Isaacs) the “angel hunter”, killed and revived for years, in the meantime learning movements that could take her to another dimension – we get to see flashbacks to support her narrative. Still, there’s a part that asks if she's making it all up. This ethereal being now calling herself OA, the Original Angel, can’t be lying, right? It’s a genius interactive experience in which you decide when to believe Prairie’s account, and eventually, you do, even if it’s at the last moment.

The OA strongly states how Hap’s unethical testing can lead to the greatest revelation for humanity. He compares it to Galileo’s discovery that Earth is not the center of the universe, whereas life is not the center of human existence. Unbeknownst to him, by experimenting with Prairie, Homer (Emory Cohen), Scott (Will Brill), Rachel (Sharon Van Etten), and Renata (Paz Vega), he gives them the ability to connect with their guardians, like Prairie’s Khatun (Hiam Abbass) – which by the way, is how she recovers her sight. They teach them a series of movements that will allow them to escape Hap’s prison by traveling to another dimension. They never get to fulfill this though, as Hap removes Prairie from the equation just when they learn the fifth and last movement. Prairie then teaches the movements to her new gang and – in a distressful and problematic school shooting – they use them to distract the perpetrator, getting her killed in their world while traveling to another in search of Homer.

Part II of ‘The OA’ Amps Up the World-Building (and the Weirdness)

If any doubt remains about Prairie’s fate following Part I’s finale, Part II gets on with it quickly – Prairie shifts to another universe where Hap and his prisoners also travel. She occupies her body in that dimension, where she never lost her sight nor her dad, and everyone knows her as Nina. Meanwhile, detective Karim (Kingsley Ben-Adir) is investigating the disappearance of Michelle – Buck’s counterpart in that dimension – which leads him to a mysterious house that Nina owns Nob Hill, San Francisco. They converge when he helps Nina escape Treasure Island, a psychiatric hospital commanded by Hap. Now, why does Nina end up again with Hap and company? Because they’re a constellation – as fellow traveler Elodie (Irène Jacob) explains – with a connection so strong, that it echoes through the multiverse.

Among the many discoveries posed in Part II, Nina has a connection to other living beings – specifically an octopus called Old Night (Eijiro Ozaki) and a tree network – who emphasize her uniqueness and explain Karim was sent by an unnamed figure to protect her (not unlike Riz Ahmed’s Elias Rahim). On the tribe’s side, BBA is revealed to have an interdimensional sensibility that allows her to track Nina in the second part’s climax. After meeting Elodie, Hap realizes there are other ways to travel, like her mechanical boxes that replicate the movements. After he sends Scott to Nob Hill, he also uncovers that every mind holds the multiverse, and can be mapped out if harvested (literally, like a plant) correctly. Not only that, but you can also previsualize the dimension you will jump to if you eat the petals that branch out of the harvested beings. Oh, to say this show is wild is an understatement.

‘The OA’s Uniqueness Lies In Its Modesty

The OA is low-budget sci-fi at its best. Many of its scenes take place in ordinary suburban settings – Costco, Olive Garden, Goodwill, Applebee’s. It’s a fantastic storytelling device that resonates with middle-class America. Science fiction is not exclusive to billionaire playboys. Apart from the scenes involving Khatun, Old Night, the tree network, and the mechanical boxes that replicate the movements, not much CGI is needed to concoct this elaborate tale. It is through Marling’s mellow voice, the movements choreographed by Ryan Heffington, and Rostam Batmanglij’s magical theme song, that we get immersed into this world of wonders.

The series is also about second chances, unlikely bonds, and acceptance. OA’s tribe is made up of imperfect beings: Steve is a bully who’s taken wrong decisions, Jesse struggles for his voice to be heard, Buck is fighting to be recognized as the boy he is, French aims to be his family’s rock while coming to terms with being gay, and BBA is grieving her estranged twin brother. The death of one of them comes not because of interdimensional experimenting, but rather because of an overdose after not being able to overcome OA’s departure from their world. Human issues still plague this group as they try to come through together.

What Happened After 'The OA' Was Cancelled?

Part II’s finale stands as one of the most innovative plot twists in recent TV history by meshing fiction and reality. After Hap finds a way to replicate Elodie’s mechanical boxes, he entraps Nina among them, and – while she apparently comes to her full angel potential – they travel to another universe, ours. In this dimension, they’re filming The OA as Marling and Isaacs, and she suffers a life-endangering fall that rushes her to a hospital in an ambulance. The last twist is Steve also managed to cross over as the tribe was performing the movements at the same place and same time. On August 2019, the show was canceled with a bunch of loose threads and then some. A group of fans was hopeful this was a publicity stunt following “Brit’s accident,” but that wasn’t the case. “How would The OA have continued?” is a question we may never get the answer to, but Isaacs has stated there was a five-season plan that blew his mind when he was told about it.

The efforts to bring The OA back were plenty. Fans took to Twitter to get the hashtags #SaveTheOA and #TheOAIsReal trending. The movements were performed and uploaded to social media by several users. A physical performance took place in front of the Netflix headquarters that also included a woman going on a hunger strike. A GoFundMe campaign was launched and raised $5,500 for a Times Square billboard with fan art and the #SaveTheOA hashtag. While a movie was still being considered to give closure to the story, it was ultimately dropped by Netflix.

In the end, the experience The OA offered was unique but short-lived. Had Netflix been smart enough, they would’ve taken advantage of the spotlight the fans shone on the show and painted this as a fake cancelation to go with the series’ storyline, but sadly they weren’t. Marling’s truthful and heartbreaking statement after the cancellation is enough to make any fan wonder what could have been. Nowadays, The OA would’ve been more successful with the multiverse genre boom, but that’s a “what if?” scenario to be answered in another dimension.

Stream The OA on Netflix in the U.S.

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