Ooooh Aaaah: Reflections on 'The OA' Season Two

WARNING this article contains spoilers for The OA seasons one and two, plus some bonus spoilers for The East as well.

Pretensions

Long term collaborators, Brit Marling and Zal Batmanglij, created this show together. Marling stars as the OA while Batmanglij directs some of the episodes. The first season of The OA was entertainingly unpredictable until it reached its frankly bizarre ending, in which interpretive dance engaged with a school shooter for the first time ever and most likely the last.

Team Batmanglij/Marling has form for this sort of ridiculously pretentious idea: there are also some very odd scenes in their film The East, which is basically Hollywood meets CrimethInc. When Marling's character meets the anarchists at a creepy house in the woods (hmm there's an old house in The OA season 2 as well), they sit down for dinner and there's a hilarious scene where everyone's hands are bound.

The question is how will they eat? I would definitely have just stuck my face in a bowl, which is what Marling's character eventually does. However the “right answer” is apparently to take the spoon in one's teeth and feed one's neighbour.

This is supposed to show how people who really care about each other live, but it ends up looking very silly indeed. I get what Marling is trying to communicate, but I would have done it very differently. Likewise, I suppose the ending of season one of The OA was meant to show that love can conquer all, but instead it just made me laugh out loud.

It's complicated though. I do support the writers for trying to bring ideas from the radical left into mainstream discourses, but it just doesn't feel good in this case. Anyhow, despite my dissatisfaction with how season one ended, I figured I may as well check out The OA season two and see how far I got into it.

At the beginning, the big question (once we got past whether people survived the shooting or not) was always going to be whether OA is delusional or not.

In other words, was the whole story she told about the glass-walled prison true, or not?

Of course, instead of answering that question right away, the first half of season two episode one went off on a total tangent, with a Vietnamese granny (Helen Patarot) asking a private investigator Karim (Kingsley Ben-Adir) to find her missing daughter. The daughter in the photograph is actually the person we know as Buck (Ian Alexander) in the original different timeline but I didn't realise that at first.

So ... the answer is ... YES.

Yes, it emerges that OA tells no lies and she was kept in that underground prison. She has now jumped into a new, alternative timeline where she is Nina Azarova. Homer (Emory Cohen) is now a doctor in a mental institution, who can't remember anything, whereas Renata (Paz Vega), Scott (Will Brill), and Rachel (Sharon Van Etten) do remember everything and are inmates in said institution.

What about Hap (Jason Isaacs)? He is the doctor in charge of the patients! And since he remembers the OA as Prairie, her identity from last season, so we can assume he knows about the timelines and somehow managed to get himself and his prisoners into it. Also he seems to have spent a long time building up his dodgy researches again considering he only just got there a little bit before the OA/Nina.

We get to see what Hap has been up to later on and it doesn't really make sense that he could have achieved it in such a short time. However, there is always a way round that, for example we could deny the logic of people arriving in different timelines around the same time.

No Logic

I've got to say season two of The OA is like a really drunk friend, in equal parts hilarious and embarrassing. The plot is entertainingly batshit crazy.

In episode three (entitled "Magic Mirror"), there is a completely unbelievable sequence of events which begins with Buck (Ian Alexander) thinking they see Rachel in their mirror. Remember, that Buck and Rachel have so far at least only existed in different timelines, so that's pretty crazy to begin with.

The gang of school kids gets back together, (I could list everyone, but it doesn't really matter, just check the screenshot up above to remind yourself) and they head to Buck's house but the mirror has gone. Buck's mum has given it away to the Goodwill store! So they drive down to the charity shop, only to be told it's gone to the distribution centre 200 kilometers away.

Of course, they decide to drop everything and go on a road trip!

Why not? Who has commitments nowadays anyway. Betty Broderick-Allen, or BBA (Phyllis Smith), comes back on board which is great, I love her perpetually stressed, yet caring, vibes (even if she really should be staying away from these kids after the previous furore).

The gang pick up get the mirror at the centre and accept an offer from a sweet girl to stay at her dad's church (?). They then decide to wait for dark to see if Rachel is in the mirror again, and to fill in time French (Brandon Perea) decides to go off on a Grindr date (!?). When he and his hunky boy toy are chatting in bed with a milkshake (as you do), the hunk gets him to share his woes and suggests the team visits his Aunt Lily who is a medium (!!). So, without further ado, they head off there.

What sort of storyline is this?

I do love this plotting though, it's so weird. Nobody bothers to phone home, so whilst Buck's mum is putting out a missing persons report on her son, the gang is still gallivanting around with the mirror, which they then manage to smash in a car accident. Worry not, Rachel still manages to get a message to BBA through a haunted television. It's nuts, basically. I sound drunk just telling you about it, and that's before things really go south!

Trippiness Intensifies

By this point I was in for the ride, no matter what, and thank goodness the show only gets trippier.

I do like the genre hopping, you never quite know what will happen next. There is definitely a creepy horror vibe at times, then we are basking in the cheesy Homer/OA unrequited interdimensional love story, next we are in goofy Goonies adventure territory.

Plus there's a mind-reading octopus competing for our attention.

Actually as a side-note, seeing how well that was filmed gives me hope that China Miéville's fabulous book Kraken could get adapted for television too (the recent adaptation of The City & The City is great, but I'd advise reading the book first).

I do like all the associations the show makes in my head. Let's take for example episode five, "The Medium & The Engineer," (probably my favourite episode) in which Karim and Nina try to decode the puzzle of the creepy house. At first, I was really picturing Mark Z. Danielewski's epically strange book House of Leaves and then the influences of Twin Peaks series three, and Darren Aronofsky's Fountain became very clear. It's great to have all these different signals firing at once. At times it even feels like it is going full-on Maniac although then it pulls back again into "just a dream" territory.

Themes

The central themes of friendship and love being powerful forces that can exist interdimensionally I find absorbing, although I must add that after episode 5 the pacing went a bit wrong for me, with some plotlines taking too long to unravel.

The acting is mostly very good, only sometimes the dialogue can be a bit wooden, and Marling has a propensity to ham it up.

Nevertheless, we do move somewhere through the episodes and the themes do develop. The season closes with episode eight (entitled "Overview"), which does brings things together somehow, whilst also throwing up new questions.

What makes most sense to me is that the ending of season one was related to Homer's Near Death Experience (NDE), and season two was about the NDE of Scott (Will Brill), as he narrated it in season one. OA/Nina ends up as an actress called Brit Marling and Hap (Jason Isaacs) now has a lovely British accent, as Brit's husband called Jason Isaacs. Spiffing!

Presumably, if the show keeps on being commissioned, the next seasons will be based on the other NDEs from Renata, Rachel and Scott.

And will I be back to watch? I'm a firm maybe at this stage.