**Spoilers for Season 2 of “The OA,” which hit Netflix today. You’ve been warned.**
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“SUPERIMPOSE: 7 HOURS 46 MINUTES EARLIER…
EXT. WINDY ROAD – NIGHT
We hear knocking sounds, after which the camera CUTS TO a MAN, ripped jeans, skateboarding down a dark, steep road. He sees a woman in a shiny, red dress on the side of the road.
Distracted, he loses control and flies off of a cliff and onto the rocky shores below to an uncertain doom.
CUT TO BLACK:
INT. BOAT – NIGHT
KARIM (30), a tall, level-headed, stoic, cynical detective, awakes from a nightmare in his boat on FISHERMAN’S WHARF to the same knocking sounds that preceded the skateboarder’s death.”
Who is the woman in the red dress? Who is the skateboarder? What is the significance of Karim’s (Kingsley Ben-Adir) nightmare? And those are just the first 30 seconds of Part II.
“The OA” is blowing the minds of religious and casual television viewers alike, all over again, in its sophomore season. Many fans questioned why it took creators Brit Marling and Zal Batmanglij 27 months to release the second season, from the first season’s premiere date to the second season’s. Well, this isn’t a typical show. There is no “pattern narrative,” wherein writers and cycle in and out of a writer’s room and follow a narrative formula. They are drawing from their own imaginations, building a narrative from scratch every episode. Each chapter varies in “length, scope, and even genre,” according to Marling. Subsequently, “pattern budgets” can’t be applied to this style of filmmaking. One episode’s budget formula couldn’t be applied to the rest of the episodes’. Furthermore, instead of writing each episode as they went, they wrote the entire second season before filming, making it easier on Marling, also the star.
“The OA” is, essentially, an extended, experimental film. It was overwhelmingly worth the wait, as Marling and Batmanglij have surpassed their creative vision in Part I to craft a complex, metaphysical puzzle that, brilliantly and euphorically, puts itself back together. Speaking of puzzles, readers might remember the house on Nob Hill referenced in our review. This home is central to the plot of “The OA” Part II.
*Warning: Spoilers Ahead*
The House On Nob Hill
The house on Nob Hill was built by a wealthy engineer, who struck it rich when he fortuitously capitalized on the Gold Rush, for his wife, a spiritual medium, on a large plot of land that was purchased at bargain price after the previous mansion on the site was burned down from the fires of the 1906 earthquake. The medium sensed that there was something strange about the site. As they were preparing to lay the home’s foundation, they discovered a natural spring, which used to be a holy site of the Ohlone Tribe. The waters were said to give the shamans a “god’s eye view.” The medium warned against it, but the engineer thought they should protect it, so he designed the house like a puzzle. The worthy will reach the revelations on the other side of the rose window in the attic, and the unworthy will be trapped in home’s foundation. The engineer built the house based on his wife’s nightly dreams. When they moved in, he wanted to solve the puzzle himself, from beginning to end, despite his wife advising against it.
The medium belonged to a consorting of women. They were wives of wealthy mining engineers (uncoincidentally, Hap (Jason Isaacs) held OA (Marling), or Prairie Johnson, as her adoptive parents named her, captive in a mine and Nina’s father, Roman (Nikolai Nikolaeff), owned a mining company in Russia, extracting precious metals from the ground). They met to protect the trees (more on how this ties in, later). That’s why Golden Gate Park exists, according to Nina’s sketchy boyfriend, Pierre Ruskin (Vincent Kartheiser). The medium returned from a meeting day to notice her husband had collapsed in the attic, through wide open rose window, from the Nob Hill exterior. To get to him in the attic, she would have to ascend the puzzle to get to the other side of the rose window.
The medium suspected her husband was lost to whatever he had seen there. No doctor could revive him from his coma. She was convinced that someday, somebody could withstand the view from the rose window and revive her husband, but nobody ever did. OA could be the one to finally be “worthy” of the home’s puzzle, the revelations it has to offer, and reach the other side of the rose window. She’s overcome death three times, now, and carries with her the power of the “Original Angel,” given to her by Khatun (Hiam Abbass), a mysterious spiritual guide in the afterlife whom she encounters during her NDEs. However, it’s also likely she’s the guardian of whatever lies on the other side of the rose window (see “Duino Elegies”).
Khatun & Moral Gray Areas
What is the context of “worthy” and “unworthy” in the engineer and the medium’s story? For all the audience knows, “worthy” and morally sound aren’t interconnected. It is perfectly reasonable to assume that the medium’s intuition was correct. That, perhaps, the engineer’s mind was corrupted by the natural spring, not understanding its full power, similar to what Ruskin and Hap are doing to the Q-kids with the Q Symphony craze (more on that below). Who were they to be the gatekeepers of a power that they never understood, a power that the Native Americans left available to the land. What kind of angel is OA? Perhaps she has been manipulated by the wrong cosmic forces until she encounters the Tree Internet (more on this below). Khatun isn’t necessarily an overtly benevolent being. She is an amalgamation of different mythological and religious interpretations and a shepherd, of sorts, of the afterlife.
The name “Khatun” is Arabic for “queen,” or “empress.” She wears a sari, a traditional Indian garment. German, braille markings that read “Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the hierarchies of angels?” cover her face. Somebody with a close relationship with the “good guys” upstairs likely wouldn’t have that message advertised on her face. It’s the first line of the first poem from Rainer Maria Rilke’s “Duino Elegies.”