OA Review
The OA is a series which explores a girl who refers to herself as “the OA”, and was a blind runaway, who returned to her adopted family with her sight. Through a variety of well-placed flashbacks, we see the OA’s life as she explains it to a group of random people she has collected from a random YouTube video. In many aspects, this series has both awful and awesome storytelling. I believe in the beginning, the story telling is very awkward, with the YouTube video, her awkward friendship with Steve, and her strange obsession with open doors. Though everyone that she reveals her story to should be very skeptical and suspicious, they willingly accept everything she says with open arms (and doors). The likelihood of five strangers, no more, no less, from the same town watching the same video within twenty four hours, and leaving their doors open to come listen to some crazy blind celebrity is insanely low. I am all for “suspending disbelief” when watching movies, but the OA takes it a bit far without basis. I believe what makes it a bit difficult for me to play along is that not only is the audience supposed to suspend disbelief with the supernatural elements of this show, but we are also expected to go along with the premise that all the other characters in this series act in completely irrational ways without any justification for their actions. This is not just a plot building technique, I believe it is completely irrational to think that the five chosen people, (Steve, BBA, French, Buck, and Jesse) would actually do these irrational things every night, and no one is going to come along and either close their front doors or rob them. Now, recall that believing these people act this way, and that no one in the house would get cold and close a door are in conjunction with the fact that we are supposed to believe not only the OA’s story, but that these five are dumb enough to believe it. The OA’s story is basically that she was a young Russian schoolgirl who had a near death experience as a young girl where she encounters a woman in another dimension who takes her sight, and was the target of an assassination. Later her father is killed while she is in a school for blind children in America. Eventually he is killed and she winds up being adopted by her current parents, who give her a loving home and take care of her. She repays this kindness by running away to New York after having a weird dream about him. There she plays her violin and is kidnapped by a seemingly nice man named HAP. This man ends up taking her to his house where he has imprisoned three other people who have narrowly escaped death. Eventually they find out that he is drugging and then killing them repeatedly to discover how they don’t die. They get a fifth member and start a very bad dance group, which annoys him so badly that he drives her to the middle of nowhere and dumps her in the middle of the road after seven years. He then takes her place in the dance group and they travel dimensions. When she gets through the story, the group has bonded and grown closer. It is then that they realize she has inspired them to take up bad dancing as well. They learn the same movements as her original dance group, but then their parents burst in, telling them that they aren’t cool enough to dance like the OA. Saddened and discouraged, they give up, only to have an impromptu dance rehearsal when a school shooter arrives. This confuses the shooter for long enough that he is tackled by a cook. This sudden movement causes him to fire a burst of rounds (which doesn’t make any sense considering fully automatic and burst fire weapons are illegal in the United States), with one landing perfectly in the middle of the OA’s chest, because she decided to drop in and watch their rehearsal from the outside of the cafeteria window like every great dance coach. This is where the season concludes, leading me to conclude that this series is kind of garbage. It’s like a McDonald’s happy meal toy. It is cool because it is free with Netflix, but it has little to no value and I am probably never going to see it again. I enjoyed the first part, but the trailer for the next season doesn’t look too appetizing, so I will not be viewing that either.