The latest Netflix original The OA premiered last Friday and now that we’ve had a full week to think it over, here’s our review.
You may not be aware that The OA came out since its marketing campaign began just a few days before the actual release, but this show is definitely one of the best originals the streaming giant has put out.
Well, I say best but some friends have said it’s the worst. If anything The OA has been extremely polarizing since people have finished it, and for good reason.
The OA centers around Prairie, a woman who has been missing for the past seven years. Prairie was blind when she got abducted and the series begins with her finding her way back home now with the ability to see and a very complicated history to explain. She confides in five strangers to tell her story to, and that’s where our journey begins.
It’s almost impossible to discuss The OA without spoiling at least some aspects of it. The show is one of those things that is best watched when you have no idea what it’s really about, so consider these first few paragraphs your spoiler-free review: Watch it. It’s great.
Now that we got that out of the way it’s time to talk about why I think this show is so fantastic, so here’s your spoiler warning for those who haven’t seen it yet.
When this show’s marketing campaign first started I wasn’t sure how to feel about it. Another story about a missing person? Haven’t we already had, like, tons of those? But this isn’t just some story about a missing person, this is the story about a girl who believes she is The Original Angel.
The reveal of what OA stands for blew my mind, along with my roommate’s who I dragged into watching. The show may start off as this story about a girl born in Russia but then turns into a whole new beast when we meet Katoon, someone who I can only describe as Prairie’s guardian angel of some sort. That is when we get into the realm of angels and death and that is when my interest in this show multiplied by a thousand.
The OA‘s entire concept revolves around near death experiences, or NDEs for short, and how some people who experience them come back with incredible talents like musical abilities or language proficiency. This is a real thing – people have actually had NDEs and are then reported to have incredible abilities they didn’t have before. I think that’s why I’m so in love with this show, because it takes a concept that is real and then explores the fantastical aspects.
But it’s not the concept of the show that people have a problem with, it’s the ending. So let’s get into the nitty gritty, shall we?
Prairie, who I’ll be calling OA from this point forward since that’s her preferred name, escaped her town to look for her biological father. Given that she’s blind and won’t be able to find him easily she’s convinced that her ability to play the violin (which her father taught her) will call him to her. Her musical talents definitely get noticed but not by the man she was hoping for.
Cue Jason Isaacs, who all Harry Potter fans will know as Lucius Malfoy. Isaacs plays Hap, a man who believes in the incredible effects of NDEs and wants to study them. He finds OA playing in the New York subway and manages to befriend her and convince her to come stay with him at his home. Turns out that he had no intention of playing friendly host to a stranger, and in fact OA is just one of six other people who have also experienced NDEs that Hap has abducted.
Hap kept these people in what’s essentially a large glass cage with six different compartments. It’s unsettling to watch OA sit on the bed in that cage, thankful for having a place to sleep only to realize moments later that the door was locked and she’s trapped in a tiny room, a place she’ll be for the next seven years.
Over those next seven years OA begins to understand what’s happening. Hap believes that when people have near death experiences they cross over into the after life which is exactly what he’s trying to study. He wants to prove the existence of angels and the afterlife and these five people he currently has are his key to unlocking that mystery.
In one of OA’s NDEs she is told by Katoon how she can free herself, and that’s to learn the Five Movements. Each of the captives (except one) are eventually given one movement and when performed together they can open a tunnel through time and space to escape captivity.
In the end OA manages to escape only because she was able to run away, leaving her friends in captivity with Hap. By this time they’ve learned the five movements and Hap threatened to use them to take her friends somewhere she’ll never be able to find them.
Fast forward to the end of the series, OA has managed to convince the five strangers she met at the beginning of the show that her story is true. They believe what she has to say and they start learning the five movements because OA hopes to use them to help her get back to her friends.
The series ends in a startling school shooting that provokes OA and her five friends to try and use the five movements they’ve learned to prevent the shooter from hurting anyone. The manage to finish the movements in spectacular fashion but in the end a school employees knocks down the shooter who fires one last shot that lands in OA’s chest. She’s carted away in the ambulance and we’re left wondering if the five movements were ever really real, or if OA’s story was real at all.
This is where people start to hate the show, and for good reason. We’ve just spent seven and a half episodes being told a fantastical story about angels and near death experiences and when the moment of truth comes it all falls flat.
Nothing happens. No tunnel opens, time doesn’t freeze, it’s just very anti-climactic. The FBI shows up and shows OA’s friends books about NDEs, the Oligarchs, angels and The Odyssey, all of which OA kept in her room. They’re trying to tell us that this was all fake, that OA was sick and she made the whole thing up.
But that’s the genius of it all. Having watched the story from OA’s perspective and seeing things that OA experiences we’re left wondering if it was real. It’s playing on the entire concept of believing in angels. We can choose to believe the power that OA had and her experiences or we can debunk it, leaving it up to coincidence and mental illness.
We won’t know if OA’s story was real or not until season 2, if that gets green lit, and that’s why I love it. There are so many things we can dissect about this show and decode that it’s very plausible that OA’s story was actually true and the FBI is trying to cover it up. You can choose to believe that or you can choose to be disappointed in a show that spent 8 hours fooling you.
Whatever you decide I think it’s clear that this show has easily been one of Netflix’s most captivating.