A quick recap of season one of The OA, a supernatural US drama that acquired an avid cult fanbase when it dropped without warning on Netflix in 2016: Prairie (Brit Marling), a woman who had gone missing years earlier, suddenly reappeared. Not only was she no longer blind, she’d also renamed herself “the Original Angel”, following an epiphany she had while held prisoner by Hap (Jason Isaacs), a bad mad scientist. Recruiting a gang of local teens to her cause, the OA passed on a set of powerful dance movements, learned in moments of celestial lucidity brought on by near-death experiences. In the somewhat controversial finale – either transcendentally beautiful or scorchingly tasteless, depending on how fully you’d bought into the show’s aesthetic – the teen posse halted a school massacre by performing the movements. Prairie was shot but it was implied she might dodge death and cross to another dimension, thanks to her friends having done the special dance.
Part of a wave of outlandishly confusing but resolutely sincere dramas that started with Lost and also includes Sense8 and The Leftovers, The OA was the most out there of them all, provoking fervent fan-forum adoration but leaving other viewers angry or bemused. It is vaguely about death, faith and the interconnectedness of all our souls, but all these shows are really just a kind of philosophical opiate. The subtext about outcasts possessing a hidden power or purpose needn’t coalesce into anything concrete. Wondering what’s going on, and believing it to be significant, is more important than finding out what’s going on. Viewers get a murky canvas on to which they paint their own reassuring pictures. It’s hooey. It’s woo. It’s hokey bunkum.
As the new season begins, Prairie wakes up in a parallel universe in which she has reverted to her birth name of Nina. Wait, I didn’t mention: Nina was an aristocratic Russian girl sent to America for adoption after she was blinded in an accident because … oh, it doesn’t matter. The ensuing plot unfurls like a narcissist recounting a nightmare, pausing neither for breath nor to worry about being understood. Nina is once again Hap’s captive guinea pig, meanwhile there is a detective (OA newcomer Kingsley Ben-Adir) looking for a missing girl in San Francisco. A weird puzzle app may reveal her fate. Here is a creepy abandoned house, an opaque tech startup, some Roman numerals and a cache of cassette tapes. There’s a secret door. There’s another secret door. Hey, look! A weird mirror!
Events, characters and half-formed ideas are thrown at the screen then abandoned in favour of fresh mysteries, the show infinitely rolling out a carpet of kookiness. I lost it and started bellowing with laughter when a choir of blind children in swimming costumes appeared in the bar of some Russian-American fetish theatre, this being the harbinger of a scene in which Prairie/Nina is publicly groped by a psychic octopus.
Other, similar shows have narrative or character payoffs within their grand design, but The OA doesn’t allow for that. So it’s rubbish, but handsomely mounted rubbish. Apart from sense and reason, the main casualty is perhaps Zal Batmanglij, who co-created The OA with Marling and directs the bulk of it. His camera movements are incisive and his eye for a spooky but lush composition is unerring. Whether it’s a motel exterior or a womb-like neon chamber at the heart of a sinister experimentation facility, Batmanglij imagines it with dark flair. What might he do with a script in which the protagonists are rounded humans who meaningfully interact with each other, instead of inert pawns sacrificed to a woozy stream of WTF? Maybe one day we’ll have the answer.
