A Glimpse Of A New Dimension
He doesn’t tell her to say it out loud for the crowd to hear it, but for him, as in Karim, to hear it. This implies that Karim and OAs connection is much deeper than a mutual interest on a missing child case. While this is happening, Karim sneaks into the control room backstage and finds the secret entrance to the house, the same door featured in Q Symphony. Old Night kills OA for 37 seconds in order to help her remember a self from the future that she’s forgotten and her “mission.”
In her fourth time dying in the series, OA experiences her third NDE. She crawls through an airplane’s cargo area, up into a bathroom, and out into the aisles. As she hears Old Night’s voice countdown from 37 seconds, she sees one woman that stands out among the passengers: a women with short, blonde hair in a floral sweater, watching something indiscernible on her TV screen. Then, Karim revives her. This NDE is yet another dimension. Eventually, learn that the woman, whose face is blurred out, in the plane is another version of OA. However, it’s, arguably, the most mind-blowing twists in television history. Read about this twist under “The Other Side Of The Rose Window.”
Tree Internet
After Karim kills Old Night, he and OA escape. They proceed to navigate the underground. Eventually, they crawl through a tunnel the size of a coffin to enter the home, walk up either side of the curved, double-sided staircase, and proceed to ascend to find the rose window (the pattern discovered in Ruskin’s dream studies), where they presume Michelle might be. They find themselves in two rooms.
OAs room takes her to an ethereal, arboraceous dimension, wherein she encounters the Tree Internet, a series of interconnected trees that function like a series of synapses. The Tree internet tells OA that they’ve been waiting for her, that Nina Azarova is a medium from the outside world, warns her of Hap’s plan to use a damning piece of information against her, and recommends she gathers a team. The environmental efforts of the medium and the wealthy miner’s wives seems to have a connection to the home’s supernatural foundation. A unique combination of Victorian parapsychology, Native American shamanism, natural, metaphysical elements within the earth, and a touch of the unknown have either created this benevolent Tree Internet or bridged this dimension with it.
However, it actually isn’t some concept that the brilliant minds of Marling and Batmanglij conceived of. There is an actual network of interspecies trees that communicate with each other underneath San Francisco and effectively protect each other through a collective harmony. As much as we’s like to believe, human beings didn’t create the internet.
Karim’s Room, The Robots, & Hap’s Inner Lab
Karim’s room leads to a bleak, terraneous, seemingly endless dimension. After narrowly escaping an attack by the trapped, “unworthy” people emerging from the ground, he runs toward a red door in the distance, where he enters a house of mirrors akin to a room one might see at a carnival. There, he encounters Zendaya, a mysterious Q-kid who assisted him on his investigation earlier that links the investigation to Haps inner lab experiments. However, there is something strangely different about the gamer since we last encountered her in Chapter One. Karim doesn’t make it to the other side of the rose window in the attic. Not this time, at least. Was OAs encounter with the Tree Internet the jolt she needed to stand against Hap and his masterplan?
That leads us to Hap’s damning piece of information: There’s more than one way to travel. Hap has a chance, romantic encounter with an experienced traveler who introduces him to The Robots, five miniature, AI figurines that perform the five movements of interdimensional travel. This could, potentially, negatively affect OAs morale and turn a lot of her beliefs on their heads. Meanwhile, he’s been Ruskin’s therapist, extracting the precious information he needs in order to fuel his sinister research in his inner lab, which includes creating an interdimensional map.
“Every human mind contains the multiverse. An actual garden of 14 paths within a soul, just waiting to be fertilized.” – Hap
These flowers in Hap’s garden of horrors offer a glimpse into other dimensions, a map of the multiverse. All one has to do is imagine to travel there, like OA did when she imagined Homer (Emory Cohen) and jumped in Part I. That’s when she sees the consequences of his inner lab: the Scott (Will Brill), Jesse (Brendan Meyer), French (Brandon Perea), Steve (Patrick Gibson) and more of her friends of this dimension lie dead in his garden: The price one pays for creating an interdimensional map at all costs and the blind pursuit of scientific discovery without ethical limitations.When Hap shows OA the garden, she explains that her life here was everything it wasn’t in the first dimension.
“That’s what an angel is. Dust pressed into a diamond by the weight of this world. You crushed me before I had the chance to become anything. But you didn’t destroy me. I died and came back to life with something you will never have. You have violence, and terror, and loneliness.”
OA is finally realizing the magnitude of her power.
Zendaya’s Appearance
The gamer’s appearance, specifically, her age, changes drastically from Chapter One to Chapter Six. In Chapter One, when Karim first enters the house on Nob Hill through its front entrance and meets the Q-kid, she appears to be a young woman, presumably 22 years old, Zendaya’s age. Although young, she acts wise beyond her years. In Chapter Six, when Karim rescues her from the house of mirrors room, she appears to have aged at least six decades. Interestingly, when the two break out of the house, Zendaya’s appearance returns to her actual age.
There are two theories that could explain Zendaya’s rapid aging. Considering it was only a week, tops, between Karim’s encounters with Zendaya, the natural spring beneath the foundation of the home, and those exposed to it, may have advanced aging properties or, in a much less depressing result, allowed her to time travel. The other theory is that the bridging of reality and dreams that began to occur at C.U.R.I. through the game, as told to Karim by the former MI5 agent and employee who worked there, may have dire consequences in real life. Since Zendaya couldn’t advance to the next level, she might have been perpetually stuck on the previous level of Q Symphony in reality, mentally, but in the game, physically, which could, possibly, interpret time differently.
Michelle’s Identity & The Magic Mirror
Michelle is Buck (Ian Alexander) in the new dimension. In the first dimension, Buck’s birth name is Michelle. Just as this new dimension portrays an OA if she hadn’t been blinded by The Voi, it portrays a Buck if he wasn’t born transgender and never transitioned from Michelle to Buck. Whereas Buck has been an active secondary character in Part II, Michelle remains an elusive player, pun intended, in the new dimension.
Speaking of Buck, his mirror really does have metaphysical qualities to it. When French sees Homer in his reflection in the mirror in Part I, it wasn’t clear if it was a vision or if it was actually Homer. We now have concrete evidence after Rachel (Sharon Van Etten) attempts to communicate with BBA (Phyllis Smith) and the kids through the very same mirror in Part II from the new dimension after Hap kills her.
Somehow, during her jump from the first dimension to the new one, Rachel lost her voice and any way of putting together words or figures in her mind as a side effect of traveling. However, when she figures out a way to communicate what she saw in Hap’s inner lab to OA, Scott, Renata (Paz Vega), and the other patients, Hap acts fast. We learn an important thing: When one dies in “The OA,” their soul, or consciousness lives on. Will Rachel be able to return to a physical form and get her voice back so she can exercise those beautiful singing pipes again?
The Voi & Roman’s Whereabouts Explained
Where has Roman been in this new dimension? If one listens to the background noise on Roman’s end during his phone call with a younger OA, when she was still Nina, in Chapter Two of Part I, there is a combination of distinct sounds of waves, foghorns, and seagulls. It’s the exact same background noise that Homer hears during his NDE in Chapter Four of Part I, emulating what could be very few places in the world other than the San Francisco Bay. This raises the question: has Roman been in the Treasure Island clinic in San Francisco this entire time? Perhaps his only way of evading The Voi (which translates from Russian to “howl” in English, as in wolf, as in Veles, the Slavic god of the underworld), the criminal organization that attempted his assassination and was responsible for OAs first NDE and initial blindness, was to travel, interdimensionally?
Contrarily, The Voi could be an organization associated with the same kind of NDE research Hap obsessively conducts, after the natural resources that Roman was mining. Perhaps Roman was forced to join The Voi to ensure his daughter’s safety, explaining why Roman would be in San Francisco. The Voi could very well be the interdimensional mastermind in “The OA,” and the Veles motif associated with OA may be symbolizing her cosmic connection with the criminal organization as well as potentially foreshadowing the inevitable showdown between OA and her team and The Voi. What if Nina Azarova in the new dimension works for The Voi, who has an interest in C.U.R.I.’s work? Either way, it’s likely The Voi won’t remain a passive collective character in the series. Furthermore, it would stand to reason that they attempted to murder OA and Roman for something more complex than the threat of Roman’s blue-collar mining success.
