"The OA" on Netflix, with spoilers

people coming back is the weirdest fad. so many people coming back shows.

i'm pretty open to any form of supernatural plotline but i dunno, i resent when things go for profundity without having done the necessary grunt work to make me care. profundity is like the end point of every other good thing in a show, imo.

It felt to me like faith and what you do with faith when you're on the receiving and the question of how much credulity you're willing to extend for the sake of faith are underlying themes of the show. In a way, Prairie's motives are as ambiguous as Hap's. They both gained the confidence of followers without providing much evidence to back up their stated motives. The audience is being taken on the same ride as the OA's new crew, and there's always that question of how reliable a narrator she is. It's less about whether or not it's earned than it is whether you're willing to take the leap and trust that it's worth it.

'when you're on the receiving end'

Old Lunch, that's a good read of it. I found this show profoundly touching. Without going into specifics, I went through a period of trauma and rehabilitation and OA's sharing and transformation of her pain via the group sessions was deeply affecting.

people coming back is the weirdest fad. so many people coming back shows.

this reminds me that les revenants is way better than any show discussed in this thread

it is very good but the second season is deadly slow

Just finished. I liked this a lot. I really admired its boldness. It felt really uncompromised, for better or worse. The movements were just the uncoolest loveliest thing.

I felt kind of vindicated when they dropped the blatant "garden of forking paths" reference about halfway through the series because I had already been thinking about borges with this show and even more about bioy-casares.

Amazing acting across the board, really the thing that made it stay aloft, but Hap, Prairie, Homer and Steve were particularly awesome.

I thought I was going to open this thread to find ppl tearing it to shreds. <3

her parents really started bugging the hell out of me and i was kinda hoping they would be abducted. all those sad wet-eyed looks....ugh. so glad they aren't my parents. this was true of dad on walking dead too. just got so tired of his sighing disapproving ass.

that's the only shreds i'm gonna rip though.

borg queen alice krige would be AWESOME in horroe movies though. a la carrie's mom. does she do any? i could totally see her with a big knife in her hand creeping down a bloody staircase.

She was the evil woman spirit in Ghost Story!

"horror" movies...

see i barely remember that movie. i haven't seen ghost story since the 80's.

ah, she was in silent hill. she should only be allowed to make horror.

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-oq-UCIJPSHw/UWTrsiPECaI/AAAAAAAAB1s/SaER9YA_OWU/s1600/silenthill31.jpg

nice...

http://s0.cinema.com/image_lib/3779_cap01-21.jpg

Oh also, I liked les revenants quite a bit but this was way more toothsome for me.

when he could tell that someone had died by hearing faint music on a subway platform i kinda figured this was a fairy tale she was telling. unless he is magic. maybe he's a magic mad scientist.

if you're worried about an answer about whether prairie's story is true or not, it seems like the only good answer is that some of it happened and some of it didn't, because there's pretty solid evidence for some of it being true (she got those scars somewhere and they seem almost impossible to self-inflict) and some of it being untrue (her narration of scenes she wasn't involved in at all)

"when he could tell that someone had died by hearing faint music on a subway platform"

? I missed this

she got those scars somewhere and they seem almost impossible to self-inflict

wait i thought she DID self-inflict them. how else?

xpost I think scott was referring to the leap in logic required for Hap to have made the assumption that Prairie was a near-death experiencer based solely on her buskery.

oh yeah i guess she did the scars herself. sorry i am dumb.

xpost I think scott was referring to the leap in logic required for Hap to have made the assumption that Prairie was a near-death experiencer based solely on her buskery.

― Dr. Shitfuck (Old Lunch), vrijdag 6 januari 2017 15:33 (eleven minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Didn't Hap have a gift to 'hear' someone had had a NDE in the way they played music? Same with the Cuban woman iirc.

Yeah, but that's a thing I didn't quite understand wrt Hap's discovery of Prairie. The suggestion is that Rachel and Renata are tapping into some new style of singing that resonates with fellow NDE survivors, so it makes sense that Hap might know what to listen for in those cases, but Prairie was just playing a song from her childhood. IDGI.

i think it was meant to be the manner of her playing it, not the tune

which is why i think you just have to go with the whole "once upon a time..." fairy tale thing with this show. whether anything really happened to her or not.

maybe she was actually on another planet! that's what i'm hoping. that grand canyon he lived next to looked pretty alien....

Yeah and there's the sound of saturns rings thing

Michigan has never looked so mountainous.

has anyone seen Another Earth? or anything else Brit Marling and this collection of people have done? I remember when Another Earth came out that the trailers looked intriguing; but then I never watched it. They also did a film about a cult which sounds similarly open ended.

I posted about "Another Earth" on a different thread where I compared it to a more mainstream Melancholia. The comparison may be surface or slight, as the biggest similarity here is a planet looming over the earth while a tale of grief goes on down below. It's a beautiful film though.

Watched the first episode last night and thought it was wanky bollocks of the first order, but I was very tired/jetlagged, maybe I was wrong?

i watched the whole thing, but would not argue with anyone who felt that way.

finished this last night.
i struggled to go the whole way.
up to ep3 i was on totally board, then it went off on its detour,
and i lost patience with a lot of the storyline.
once i got the idea that it was basically "breakfast club vs flatliners" i could not shake it.

for the record, wanky bollocks was always my favorite beano character. oh the mischief he would get up to!

i feel like, in general, people are so not good at creating well-rounded 3-D characters on t.v. now. and maybe not just t.v. in books and movies too. everyone is good at creating "types" and scenarios. but there is so little depth. we don't know much about any of the people on this show. just some broad stroke characterizations. the teacher's brother died. that's it. that's all we need, i guess. not saying everything has to be the wire or the sopranos. sometimes i think it just comes down to a lack of experience. a lack of worldly experience. and it just creates a lack of caring on my part. which is why i wouldn't spend time defending this show even though i was entertained by it for the most part. there isn't a whole lot of there there. that's my famous motto that i made up.

my favorite shows have always created worlds. and not everyone has the luxury of creating worlds in the hurly burly world of television. you have the budget you have, i guess. but stranger things created a world on the cheap. it can be done. OA is pretty vague. her character did most of the heavy lifting. she was compelling to look at. you wanted to see what she would do next. but it felt random.

which is why i wish sci-fi writers got to write t.v. they can really make you feel for/root for the thinnest of characters just based on their talent for creating forward motion.

i'll try and use your famous motto tomorrow in the pub.

has anyone seen Another Earth? or anything else Brit Marling and this collection of people have done?

Haven't seen Another Earth, but I did see I Origins - I dunno. I'm generally against unearned profundity and may have muttered "bollocks" a couple of times.

once i got the idea that it was basically "breakfast club vs flatliners" i could not shake it.

Lol thanks for this. Flatliners doesn't have much to recommend it but at least it didn't have any goofy-as-fuck interpretive dancing.

The biggest mystery about The OA is how it managed to hold my attention until the final episode despite being almost entirely dumb and ridiculous. Unearned profundity otm.

Just finished this.
Lots of really unnerving gutpunches in one way or another; as scott says upthread even the credits in the first ep got to me. The casual way in which we're introduced to the other scientist guy talking about his subjects!! The deaths in the head tank thing. The way you KNOW something awful is happening as the camera stays on Prairie's face as she goes downstairs in Hap's house. Rachel's singing. I found the school shooting really affecting too but also didn't get why she had to be there or how she figured it out. The bit with the cop's wife was also really dramatic but felt cut off.

I like the level of 'sincerity' as well although could've cut down some of the talky talk; mind you I sat through all of Westworld so this was like lol zing city in comparison.

Was initially convinced that 'Theo' (Allen?) was going to be part of TheO A. Maybe he will.
The Kaiser Sose stuff in the final ep was really bizarre, what was that all supposed to be about? Surely for Alphonso to have jumped to his conclusion the books would be well-thumbed and probably stamped with 'PSYCHIATRIC DEPT LIBRARY 2009' or something rather than be in a recent Amazon box? What even was the point of FBI guy?

With the books, had she told her parents more of the story and they'd ordered books to read up on it? maybe I missed something idk

This felt like the final project of a writers / actors workshop made into a tv series

oh my god, I loved this so much. Rare that every episode of something has me leaning forward totally rapt for its duration.

I didn't think it was aiming for cosmic/spiritual profundity tbh! Despite its big reveal and the one thing you had to swallow being so theologically out-there. But while soooo many shows obviously think they're deeper than they are, I thought the great thing about this was that its concerns were so rooted in real life and its traumas. It didn't go out of its way to make a grand philosophical point but just explored in a pretty nuanced way how people deal with being/feeling trapped - the line about captivity being a state you carry around with you was key imo.

Ritualistic dance has enough mystic/religious history behind it across so many traditions that the interpretative dance stuff didn't bother me.

Lots of reviews seemed to criticise the finale for being tasteless, which I don't get - why is a fictional depiction of that horrific crime (which has been foreshadowed heavily) somehow beyond the pale after the entire series is centred on a fictional depiction of another horrific crime (surely I wasn't the only person who thought of Natascha Kampusch, the Fritzl case etc)? It makes it pretty explicit that the backdrop is a society permeated by violence and horror. (So many times characters, even just walking around, were stalked by the camera as though they were in a horror film.)

I also assumed the FBI guy planted the books because after making it clear to OA that his role was solely a counsellor, why would he be hanging around her house in an official detective capacity? I guess if they get a second series they'll go full govt conspiracy in that case? I don't know why he assumed Alfonso would break in and find them though.

I assume a lot of the answers people didn't get are meant for series 2 - would dearly love to see Hap get his comeuppance - but I felt that ending was a pretty effective way to wrap up the series. Less important to tie every loose end than to draw a firm line.

they didn't do anything to the gunman with those yoga moves. they just distracted him.

― scott seward, Tuesday, January 3, 2017 6:19 PM (two weeks ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yes, isn't this the point though? They did aerobics at him out of desperation and he got rugby tackled. But what OA taught them was still key - not in the sense of magic movements, necessarily, but the themes of bravery and sacrifice to save others in her narrative. I found it pretty moving.

I don't think she was embellishing or making stuff up though. There's way more "evidence" to suggest she was telling the truth than scamming them.

I guess my one complaint would be the pretty common one of characters going mute and withholding information for no reason just so another character, usually the mother, could have a dramatic spin-out.

Ritualistic dance has enough mystic/religious history behind it across so many traditions that the interpretative dance stuff didn't bother me.

Very good point. There's a degree of ethnocentricity in the eye-rolling this show has elicited, not because the movements are reminiscent of any particular culture per se but because 'lol we don't do any goofy stuff like that here because it looks really stupid what's even wrong with those people'.

it actually reminded me of when i tried to get maria and then my kids to watch that first loooong rehearsal scene in Out 1 and i thought they were going to jump out the window and run screaming down the street. they couldn't watch it. it made all three of them really uncomfortable. rufus especially couldn't comprehend why i would want him to watch it. like i was showing him some horrible horror movie or something. i thought it was cool! buncha squares at my house. OA is obviously nothing like that. but modern dance moves in general can make people squirm/giggle/uncomfortable.

i dug it in this show just because when do i see that kind of movement in a show like this?

Season 2!! Woop :)

https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/1*wJR2xpSTqFeS41xfVqLJpw.gif

Hurrah!

I kept meaning to bring this up but:

When she was little Nina, did she learn to read/write English? Because she lost her sight BEFORE coming to the US, which suggests that the Amazon shipment wasn't hers. (Although she did know how to Youtube.)

we should do the movements and see what happens

ugh terrible news, I loved this show, both seasons of it.

https://www.instagram.com/p/B0ykCdLJYD5/?igshid=i1eh6h5w4d7q

I thought this show was very special even if most people would probably be inclined to ensconce that sentiment in scare quotes.

You know, I would have been OK with this after the first season, but now that they've proven that (to my surprise) they can pull off "just set up some new weird thing which will be weird in a similarly OA way but different" once, I feel like maybe they could pull it off several more times, and I'm sad they won't get to.

This sounds like some major wishful thinking, but who knows?

https://www.insider.com/the-oa-cancellation-fake-netflix-fan-theory-2019-8

Paddy Gibson as Steve as "Paddy Gibson" on the final scene of "Part II."

Aces.

that would be fucking awesome and it makes sense. I'll hold out hope.

Can anyone else imagine some sort of 'we want sauce' Rick and Morty bullshit from OA fans?

https://www.reddit.com/r/TheOA/comments/cmmhrr/what_if_it_is_our_responsibility_to_save_the_oa/

Forgive the thread spam, but I wanted to note that this show's 2019 season is nominated in the 2019 ILX TV poll:

ILX's Best Television of 2019 Poll / VOTING AND CAMPAIGNING THREAD / Voting Ends January 31

If you like this show and you'd like to see it have a good showing in the poll (running in February) all you need to do is submit a ballot including it and your other favorites (4 minimum, 25 maximum, organized by your favorite to least favorite) to forksclovetofu at gmail by end of day today. It'll take five minutes; get to it!