A few things before I start this post:
- I watched all of LOST. I didn’t like the ending, but I understood how the writers got themselves stuck there. Bad Robot tried to say it wasn’t purgatory when it was, so they had to make that story sort-of-work.
- I’ve watched most of the shows that Sci-Fi nerds are into (Dr. Who, Buffy and Angel, Dollhouse, Stargate SG:1, The Leftovers, the 4400, Stranger Things– I need to finish, Alias, all the Star Treks, The Expanse, John Doe, Sleepy Hollow, two seasons of Grimm, Reaper, several seasons of Supernatural, Krypton Cree… I mean Smallville, etc.)
- I am a trained creative writer, though I turned to the dark, dark arts of “genre” fiction (stuff like comics, TV, movies)
- One of my favorite movies is Cabin in the Woods. I ADORE The Usual Suspects.
I am not the sort of person who tries to write a bombastic review, even if I do resemble Comic Book Guy from the Simpsons and do have a side of my teaching persona that as a gamer can be wickedly sarcastic about things.
That said…
Yesterday I referred to Netflix’s The OA as a steaming pile of shit. I’d like to revise that. It’s a steaming, stinking pile of cat shit that missed the litter box. Seriously, this show is garbage.
The look of the show, and the feel of the early episodes, the mysterious story, the at times endearing and at times loathsome characters, showed potential. The odd memories of the protagonist as she recounted the tales of her real father and her adventures growing up (and dying young, then having an “angel” take her sight before sending her back) started a Fringe-or-LOST style supernatural mystery, resembling Point Pleasant in ways but with an intriguing stylized touch.
After two episodes, I said to Julie “this show just isn’t quite hanging together for me.” Then I put down an outline of sorts of what was going on, the things we had to “accept” for the narrative to work, the things that seemed like plot holes. I told her I felt like it needed at least two more solid hooks to be a complex but rich story. We had a short talk about how poets see writing vs. how storytellers/novelists see writing.
We watched two more episodes, and it was starting to get a little messy. There was the moment where (a) Prairie (home companion) was kidnapped by Hap the crazy NDR researcher, in a circumstance we are supposed to buy as a viewer that went like this: Prairie/OA had a dream that her father would meet her at the Statue of Liberty, so she went there, blind and confused. He wasn’t there. When he wasn’t there she lingered for just the right amount of time, then she chose for no particularly compelling reason to play the violin in a train station. And Hap heard her, and KNEW FROM THE WAY SHE PLAYED THE FUCKING VIOLIN that Prarie had suffered a NDR (near death experience– which was actually dying, so… why it’s not just D, I don’t know). Then, even though she’s blind and a stranger seems to know things about her from her musical prowess, she sits down for dinner with him in a travel stop, sucks down some fries, mysteriously gets on his single engine plane to go to his magical research hut (his murder dungeon with a NDR biodome in the basement). Then she lets him walk her into said dungeon and lock her in a glass cage (of emotions) next to a dude named Homer who she’s obsessed with, although the first thing we find out about him is that he has a kid he wants to get a message to.
Soon the narrative falls apart even more as the brilliant plan that Homer and OA (there’s no logic to when she’s called OA and when she’s called Prairie, but OA is shorter, and was who she was later than sooner, I think, so let’s go with that) come up with is to steal one of Hap’s bills, write a note on it, then stick Homer’s bulky football championship ring into the envelope as “proof” they exist. This, of course, is the ring that somehow Hap didn’t notice was in his bathroom for months (years?). And obviously, as we all know, the smartest thing you can do to sneak something past someone is put a ring that is over an inch in diameter into a bill envelope. No one would ever notice that. Of course it doesn’t matter, because they botch the hand off and lose Hap’s Verizon bill.
The shark finally feels the merciless leap of both of OA’s bony feet when the NDR crew learn to manipulate the gas that Hap uses to make them compliant so they can watch what he’s doing, they realize to the shock of absolutely no one that he is killing them and watching them come back to life, and then OA eats a magic bird in NDR land (which is apparently one of the rings of Saturn, sad since this show seems to creep closer to Uranus). She tells Homer, and Homer eats a fish in his NDR dream. Then they discover “the movements.” Another of them dies, and the two movements (weird dance moves like the featured image above) heal that one, they discover that there are five movements. The five movements will open a door to the rings of Heav-Saturn and allow a person to cross into the dimension of stars and happiness and birds that you eat to learn a dance move.
All of this that I’ve shared here is being told as a weird form of group therapy/ghost story by OA to five outcasts she’s collected: a trangender character who is delightful and optimistic, a rage-filled screw up, the rage-filled screw-up’s teacher played by a minor character from the office, a dude named French, and another dude who has had a terrible family life. The reason this story has been told is where the OA falls to bits: OA is going to teach these five people the five movements so that they can open a door to the magic land where OA can go to save Homer and the other 3 she left behind (let’s call them Chazbert, Singer Girl and Cuban Woman with Least Backstory).
As we try to hold onto this narrative, lives start to fall apart. The group breaks up and stops their dream of being the vessels of the OA’s magical mystery tour into magicville. One of them discovers a box of books from Amazon that allow us to see, Verbal Kint style, that OA’s story was assembled from her light reading and her imagination.
Then one day a shooter shows up at their school, because why not, right? The best thing to use as a vehicle for your bad sci-fi show is the not-at-all-emotionally-taxing subject of school shootings. When they see this shooter, though, the five outcast chosen acolytes of OA do this, a hip-hop dance fest:
Yes, in the face of a potential murderer, these five people break into the worst Zumba flash mob you’ve ever seen.
And it works. Kind of. No magical doors open, but the shooter gets really, really confused, just as I would if five people randomly started doing a satanic version of the macarena while I was threatening to Pumped Up Kicks them. The school cook tackles the shooter, but not before he fires a single shot which nails OA out the window in what would be a beautifully filmed scene if we didn’t have to buy that we were seeing a Jesus metaphor in the form of a lying girl being shot by a scared school shooter who freaked out over Dance Dance Revolution.
The first season of the show ends with OA, going into an ambulance, bleeding out, telling the group they “did it,” then angry guy chasing the ambulance begging OA, the “Original Angel” to “take me with you” to the magical dimension.
The screen goes black.
Then we see OA looking into the camera so she can say the name of her beloved “Homer.”
And credits.
*blink*
There are people lauding this show as amazing TV.
Sorry. It’s not. You can like it. We all get to choose what we like and don’t like. But as a person who understands story, I cannot allow anyone to walk around claiming this was a brilliant TV show. It’s a series of disjointed coincidences that form a loose narrative that is really just a single girl lying, then some people randomly dancing and freaking out a shooter who kills the protagonist. There’s nothing truly groundbreaking or exciting here, unless you have been waiting for the moves from your interpretive dance class to become part of a religious-mythology based super-natural non-thriller. What started as an interesting mystery turned into a weird form of a girl’s prank and then a badly executed morality tale about school shootings and the value of the people we don’t think twice about.
If one of my students wrote this in one of my classes, I’d give an A for effort but I would never, under any circumstances, suggest that the student share it with anyone in this form. It had potential, but it squanders the audience’s good faith by not paying off at all and just sort of going off into a totally disjointed ending. It’s hack work. I really wanted it to be good, too. I really did. I can’t really express how upset I am about how the story unfolded.
I want the time I gave to the OA back, and that’s really sad, given the track record of Netflix. I have really rarely said something this bad about a TV show, but if you really want to experience the OA, don’t. It’s the worst waste of eight hours you’ll ever engage in, and this is coming from a person who used to have to spend eight hours sitting on the couch watching the Indy 500 then listening to old people talk about how great the race was after it mercilessly ended. It’s awful. Just… hideous.
Here’s my rating, out of 4 stars:
