TV REVIEW: 'The OA' Part 2 is as earnestly bizarre as ever
Brit Marling and Kingsley Ben-Adir in an episode from Part 2 of The OA.
Over and over again, The OA proves to be a show whose existence is entangled with that of streaming services. The series, from indie-film auteurs Brit Marling (Another Earth, I Origins) and Zal Batmanglij (The East, Sound of My Voice) first appeared on Netflix in 2016, and became a minor sensation with a story that blends elements of the sci-fi, mystery, and psychological thriller genres. And now with its new season (or “part”, as Netflix bills it) available after a three-year hiatus, the show remains an impossible-to-classify item in the platform’s catalogue, a show that makes you sound a bit crazy when you try to describe it.
The show follows a young woman named Prairie Johnson (Marling) who, as the series begins, has miraculously turned up after being kidnapped seven years previously. The first wrinkle, though, is that Prairie has somehow had her sight restored, despite being blind since childhood. As she recounts her story to the authorities and her family, things get even weirder. Prairie claims to have been held by an insane researcher known as Hap (Jason Isaacs) in an underground bunker with other captives, where they were subjected to experiments involving near-death experiences, all in an effort to unlock the ability to travel to other dimensions.
Now separated from the other captives - who she has come to see a de-facto family - Prairie recruits a group of misfits in her sleepy suburban community to help her unlock her hidden abilities and oppose Hap. As Part 2 begins, Prairie seems to have been successful, only she’s jumped into the body of a version of herself in another subtly different dimension, all while her friends remain trapped in the one Prairie left behind. This event then splits into a labyrinth of story threads, one that can sometimes feel like it’s meandering pointlessly, but does finally come together at the end.
Ben-Adir as a private eye named Karim Washington, investigating a missing girl.
The OA is a show that wears its inspiration on its sleeve. There’s callbacks throughout to shows like Lost and Stranger Things, but the show that I kept thinking about as I watched Part 2 was Twin Peaks. To be clear, The OA does not delve into the same sense of primeval dread that Twin Peaks does, but Prairie’s fundamental earnestness and unflinching ability to confront existential quandaries makes her feel like a very Dale Cooper-esque character at times.
There are also certain sequences that might as well directly credit David Lynch. Part way through Part 2, Prairie is compelled to perform in a secret Russian nightclub, acting as a psychic translator for a giant octopus that lurks in a tank on the stage, while it constricts her with its tentacles. It’s these kinds of borderline-fetishistic moments that will convince you that without a boundary-pushing tech company like Netflix giving Marling and Batmanglij carte blanche, The OA would never see the light of day on a traditional network.
Viewers looking for easy answers to the questions set up in Part 1 may get discouraged initially. The show only squeaks by in the “mystery box” test, in that it packs in new mythology while revealing just enough to keep us engaged. The audience is strung along as the show introduces a bunch of new concepts and plot threads - like a missing-person investigation by a San Francisco private eye (Kingsley Ben-Adir) - and you could be forgiven for feeling like Marling and Batmanglij have gotten lost in their creation. But there’s something so endearing about the characters - particularly the vulnerability of the people caught in Prairie’s orbit - that hooks you in. The potential catharsis of reunions between Prairie and her “soulmate” Homer (Emory Cohen), or between Prairie and her friends from the suburbs is hard to discount.
Ultimately, the show is a sort of TV smorgasbord for open-minded viewers. If you want noir-ish West Coast detective material, The OA has some. If you want otherworldly explorations of cosmic possibilities, The OA has that. And if you want these things held together with interpersonal dramas between millenials and themes of faith and of the perils of technology, this show has that too.
Emory Cohen as Homer.
In terms of form and style, The OA evens itself out in its new episodes, compared to the experiments in Part 1. The episodes from 2016 are notable for how they play around with different runtimes (some episodes clocking in at over an hour, another being just 30 minutes) and with title sequences that would appear deep into an episode. Part 2 is a little more traditional, but with the type of content we’re dealing with, this may help the show from feeling utterly pretentious and high-minded.
The best advice I can give about a show like The OA is an appropriately vague “your mileage may vary”. Given the number of ideas and storytelling choices that Marling and Batmanglij pack into the series, I circle back to the experience of watching Lost. The ABC series had a habit of spitting out viewers at different points as they each reached a personal limit of how many new diversions and mysteries they had patience for. But considering that I remain a fervent Lost fan and an occasional re-watcher of that show, I think I might be in for the long haul on The OA - wherever it takes us.
Stray thoughts
Prairie has a funny habit of waking up in hospital rooms and saying insane things to bemused medical staff.
The ending of Part 2 feels like a direct reference of one of the endings you can unlock in Black Mirror: Bandersnatch, conjuring a possible fan theory about a “Netflix Cinematic Universe”.
I sort of wanted Vincent Kartheiser to have a meatier role in the season than he did.