The OA (Netflix original series)

Lear60man

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Kind of into it. Slow burn Sci-Fi about a blind missing (kidnapping) girl who comes back years later with sight and???
 
It's hella weird, but somehow I keep coming back to see what happens next. One thing I do like is that it's different, it's bold in a way. Pushing the boundaries of television and cinema is something I admire !
 
Part II just dropped over the weekend!! What did everyone think?

Personally, i was completely enthralled! I really really liked part I, but this is just... sooo next level. I hope to God there will be more (I know the show's creators have said they have all 5 parts mapped out, and did have when they picthed it to netflix)
 
I def would help as there are several things from S1 that are referenced again. This is one of the wonderful side benefits of the show's creators having had it all mapped out in the beginning.

That being said, there is a lengthy recap at the start of S2 which shows the major events... but a rewatch of S1 is always awesome any
way :)
 
And it doesn't seem like it's going into very weird territory? It may just be me halfway watching it while working. What's up with the octopus??
 
I really enjoyed the first season,but I had trouble getting through the second season.i found it hard to follow and flat out weird.but there’s also a lot of people on here saying how great it was so maybe I just gotta give it a second watch and pay closer attention.
 
It just didn't look that interesting when I was scrolling around Netflix, but because of the thread I am going to give it a try this weekend.

People keep saying it is weird, without spoilers in what way is it weird?- that term can mean a lot of different things.
'Fringe' series weird?
 
I've not watched "fringe", so couldn't say.

i think why it's often described as weird is because some of the concepts are a bit out of the norm, and it plays with your perception--which i personally love.

The first season is very much a question of the unreliable narrator. The second...? Well I'll say that it answers several questions while simultaneously posing a thousand more. but not in a continually unsatisfying way, like LOST did (and i LOVE Lost) but I have never felt with The OA that it was being made up as they went along. There are SO many things which were set up in S1 that pay off in S2.

You'll want to keep your Open Mind handy, and don't let some things trip you up. There is much ado about 'the octopus", for example. Just go with it.
 
Watched the first episode last night- I like the show. It is getting off to a slow uncomfortable start but I love how that school teacher joined her group of five. I stopped watching there because I think my wife will enjoy this series.

I do recommend Fringe- some wonderful mind bending stories in the vein of X-Files with a massive over all story arc which develops over seasons. I did not care for where they took the show for the final season but that is just my personal tastes.
 
keep going! it gets stranger...but SO good!

Since I have recently got into CAD design and 3D printing, I decided to work on the movements machines from Series 2.

JnTe9ie.jpg
 
Because of this thread I am giving it a try. I'm about three episodes in. I won't ask any questions that might spoil anything, but I was just wondering--in episode 1, when she is a little girl talking to her Dad, why do the subtitles come 5 or 10 seconds after the speaking parts? Was there some reason for that? Then later on the subtitles seemed to catch up with the conversation.
 
Okay, I sat down and watched the entire first season yesterday. I will admit I was caught up in the story and really wanted to see what happened next. After thinking on this almost all night I can't quite decide if I like this or not. I don't know whether to call it sloppy writing or what, but there is really a lot of stupid things going on in this show. Again, I've only watched the first season, if these things are cleared up later on--I take it all back.

Here are a few of my problems with this show (seeing as how this is over two years old I'm not going to use spoiler tags. If you don't want to know this stuff, just skip over).

First off, I have never bought into these "I'm going to tell you a campfire story and it will change your life"/flashback stories. We, the audience, see the flashbacks, but the listeners don't. When was the last time someone just told you a story and it changed your life? Other than the teacher, these kids would have been about 9 years old and younger when Prairie disappeared. They probably wouldn't even remember it. To them it would just be "here's some crazy lady who people said was missing for seven years and they say she was blind." Uh okay--big deal. All they did was sit down for an hour a night for a few nights while this girl told them a story. Maybe I missed something, did she do anything that would've given any of them a shred of proof that her story was real? Yet, all of them drastically change their behaviors due to it.

Why did they have to leave their front doors open when they went out to see her? This was made such a big deal out of "to let me in", then just completely dropped. Never explained and never mentioned again.

I asked before about the subtitles in the first episode, what was up with that?

Prairie gets her sight back by a knock on the head? Come on!! That is soap opera and cartoon science. In fact, what was the point of her blindness anyway? It served nothing in the story except to maybe give the Mom a reason to adopt her. Then it seemed like "okay, no need for this anymore, let's just knock her on the head to get rid of that plot point." And you are telling that after all that time Hap wouldn't have picked up on her being able to see? I can understand her maybe faking it if she was still going upstairs to clean and cook, but this guy has 24/7 surveillance on these people. She lived in the cell for several more years doing all kinds of stuff and he never noticed this? How smart is this chump?

He constantly drowns these poor folks, over and over, God knows how many times over seven years and not once is CPR called for. He drowns them, they die, he releases the water, they cough and come back to life. That simple. Sure, he says people who have had a NDE have a better chance of coming back, but it doesn't make them invulnerable.

Hap just lets her go? So confident that no one will be able to find him? He just murdered three people, one of them a local cop! No one is going to come looking for them? And that stupid cop! He just believes Hap's cockamamie story right off the bat like that? This guy should not be allowed to carry a gun! He must've just watched The Green Mile. And his wife just happens to have the fifth move? Wow, that is convenient!!!

The note: The Mom is really so stupid to hide this knowledge from her beloved husband for all this time? She lets him think their daughter could be kidnapped and killed instead of just telling him about it? Granted, she was kidnapped, but the Mom did not know that.

The Five Moves: Okay, I'm just going to skip the part about that being the corniest looking thing ever, but what was the point of them doing it during the school shooting? Yeah, seeing a dancing flashmob during a school shooting, that really looks cool. What did they think it would accomplish? Would it turn the shooter into a good guy? Make him disappear? Make them bulletproof? Why would they even attempt that? By this time they had already learned that Prairie's story was probably false.

And how did the red head guy even get back in school? They were shipping him off to military school. The teacher bribes those guys, they leave and he just goes back to his school. His parents and the school administration don't notice that?

That's about all I can think of at the moment. I'm not saying the show is bad, in fact I really enjoyed it. Just seems like some lazy writing....Unless, like I said, these points are cleared up later on. I'll probably do part 2 next weekend. I'm assuming that it where the black guy from the 'poster' comes in? Is part 2 still about Prairie or is this 5 parts about 5 different people?

Oh, and one other thing....Who else noticed this show was written by Batman?:lol:
 
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Best I can respond to that is, as Kristen mentions above, they knew they had it planned out before they started. That's not obvious watching just S1, but, it's surprising how many of those are addressed with S2.

Fair warning, i was saying WTH repeatedly the first 2-3 episodes of S2. To say it's a shift is putting it midly, but by the end it starts coming together.

I have a feeling there's a lot of stuff in the first and second seasons that doesn't pay off til further down the road. Whether that payoff is big or little, who knows.

As far as the school bit, well, you don't HAVE to withdraw your kid from school before sending him off to a military school. You have to at some point, but as I recall (been a year since i saw S1) they made the call one night and the next morning they were there to get him. Not really enough time to withdraw him formally if that was the case.

And, yes, I did notnice it was written by Batman :) I laugh at that every episode :)
 
Maybe I missed something, did she do anything that would've given any of them a shred of proof that her story was real? Yet, all of them drastically change their behaviors due to it.

She won them over to it in more subtle ways... like when she went to talk to BBa the first time and seemed to be able to know just what she was thinking/feeling.

Real proof, though? No. And that's actually sort of the point of the first season. She was asking them to have FAITH.. to believe in impossible things, to cross a border that's hard to define.

Also, season 1 is definitely a study in the Unreliable Narrator. it's actually why i like it so much, because at that point we don't really know, so we have to decide if we're going to believe her, or write it all off as bunk--just like the choices the five had to make. remember french in particular didn't buy all of her story. After he found the books on angels, The Illiad by HOMER and others, he suspected she was conning them.

Why did they have to leave their front doors open when they went out to see her? This was made such a big deal out of "to let me in", then just completely dropped. Never explained and never mentioned again.

It's mentioned again... in season 2.

For the purposes of season 1 it could be used to symbolize keeping an open mind, but after the events of season 2, there is MUCH more to it.

I asked before about the subtitles in the first episode, what was up with that?

Dunno... could have been a programming glitch. When I watched it the first 3 times, i had no subtitles..so technically i had no idea what roman and Nina were saying. But I caught the feeling of it instead.

Prairie gets her sight back by a knock on the head? Come on!! That is soap opera and cartoon science. In fact, what was the point of her blindness anyway? It served nothing in the story except to maybe give the Mom a reason to adopt her. Then it seemed like "okay, no need for this anymore, let's just knock her on the head to get rid of that plot point." And you are telling that after all that time Hap wouldn't have picked up on her being able to see? I can understand her maybe faking it if she was still going upstairs to clean and cook, but this guy has 24/7 surveillance on these people. She lived in the cell for several more years doing all kinds of stuff and he never noticed this? How smart is this chump?

The point of her blindness was that Kathun told her that each time she received and went back it would cost her. Again this is addressed more in season 2, but the concept is that The OA is in fact an Angel, and she is learning through deaths and rebirths. each time she is given a hardship, and when she has learned what she needs to learn from it, the circumstances change and it's on to the next stage of the lesson. Making Prairie blind not only served to make her adoptable, but also positioned her to be vulnerable to HAP's trap.

And while he had video surveillance, he was not necessarily monitoring what they were saying to one another. He was always striving to "remove the human element" from his experiments. i think that often led him to miss cues he should have seen.

He constantly drowns these poor folks, over and over, God knows how many times over seven years and not once is CPR called for. He drowns them, they die, he releases the water, they cough and come back to life. That simple. Sure, he says people who have had a NDE have a better chance of coming back, but it doesn't make them invulnerable.

except for Scott brown. He died upon his final NDE. It was the movements which brought him back from the dead.

They have a greater chance of coming back because in their NDEs they made the CHOICE to come back. Kathun offered to let OA stay in that place if she wanted forever, but she CHOSE to come back. It's the will that makes it possible. again, elaborated on in season 2.

Hap just lets her go? So confident that no one will be able to find him? He just murdered three people, one of them a local cop! No one is going to come looking for them? And that stupid cop! He just believes Hap's cockamamie story right off the bat like that? This guy should not be allowed to carry a gun! He must've just watched The Green Mile. And his wife just happens to have the fifth move? Wow, that is convenient!!!

Hap wasn't concerned about anybody looking for him because he intended to jump to another dimension with the other 4. He... wouldn't be around anymore for anyone to find him. He would have left this dimension.

The cop believed him because he wanted to believe Hap had a way to heal his wife.

His wife happened to have the 5th movement because the five were in the right place and had gained all of the other knowledge they needed so they were ready to receive the 5th movement.

His wife told Prairie that it was given to her by a little blonde girl in her own NDE. It is strongly hinted that this was in facr Prairie A.K.A. Nina Asarova as a child which did it. not a child in the physical sense, but in the astral Angel sense.

The note: The Mom is really so stupid to hide this knowledge from her beloved husband for all this time? She lets him think their daughter could be kidnapped and killed instead of just telling him about it? Granted, she was kidnapped, but the Mom did not know that.

I once had to tell my parents something that was a very big life changing thing. i wrote them a letter, and my mom read it and hid it from my father until she thought he was ready to hear it.

These things happen.

The Five Moves: Okay, I'm just going to skip the part about that being the corniest looking thing ever, but what was the point of them doing it during the school shooting? Yeah, seeing a dancing flashmob during a school shooting, that really looks cool. What did they think it would accomplish? Would it turn the shooter into a good guy? Make him disappear? Make them bulletproof? Why would they even attempt that? By this time they had already learned that Prairie's story was probably false.

They hadn't.

Except for French, they all believed it. They *felt* doing the moves was what was called for in that instant. They *felt* it was providence.

As it turned out, what it did accomplish was to distract the shooter long enough for someone to tackle him and take him out.

And how did the red head guy even get back in school? They were shipping him off to military school. The teacher bribes those guys, they leave and he just goes back to his school. His parents and the school administration don't notice that?

Steve wanted to be with the others. having been the most skeptical to begin with, he became a true believer, and wanted more than the others for The OA to take him with her to the other dimension.

That's about all I can think of at the moment. I'm not saying the show is bad, in fact I really enjoyed it. Just seems like some lazy writing....Unless, like I said, these points are cleared up later on. I'll probably do part 2 next weekend. I'm assuming that it where the black guy from the 'poster' comes in? Is part 2 still about Prairie or is this 5 parts about 5 different people?

Oh, and one other thing....Who else noticed this show was written by Batman?:lol:

I totally did. LOL.

MANy questions addressed and answered in season 2. MANY more posed, as well. it opens up more, and gets even weirder.

You sound as if you're about where I was at after my first watch.

See part 2. watch it again.

take the door. go deeper.
 
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