'The OA' - Season 1

Spiritual Dancing Sci-Fi

Some of these Netflix original content shows are tremendous. Some of them, not so much. This one falls into the latter unfortunately.

Spoiler Alert. I mean, I'll try not to spoil it, but in some ways I don't know what would spoil it. It's pretty idiosyncratic.



What's Good About It

Not really sure. No, honestly, it's a weird one and I can't point to any one thing that I think is good in the traditional sense. It keeps you watching, but I realise now it's because I kept waiting for it to get more interesting or better. Not sure that moment ever came. I dunno. I'm not looking forward to season 2 of this thing if they ever make it. There's enough good content going right now that I can't say for sure this deserves another season's viewing. If 'Ascension' didn't get a second season, I don't see how this thing should. At least that show was interesting. This one is just vague.

What's Bad About It

It really comes over as self indulgent on the part of Brit Marling, who Co-produced, Co-executive produced, Co-wrote and stars in this piece. That's Orson Welles terrain and there's nowhere near enough of that kind of fireworks in this thing. Instead you're treated to almost whimsical coverage of the star-producer-writer-director.

A lot more coherent story telling would have helped. As it is, there's a lot of sitting around in half-built house talking about stuff.

It's also told from the wrong character's point of view. It's the evil doctor who is doing the interesting, active, motivated stuff of researching and finding people with near-death experiences, kidnapping them and sticking them in his dungeon do he can do these experiments on them. It's completely in the realm of Joseph Fritzl, but at the same time, he's the one who is doing the most motivated stuff. The rest of it is just fluff. And that makes the show really ill-conceived and misbegotten - but you can see it's like that because the produce-writer-star is so keen to focus on the wrong character. It could have been a lot more energetic and interesting, but it wasn't to be.

On the whole it's way too fanciful, way too winsome, way too ambiguous and largely un-engaging.

What's Interesting About It

Here we go, here's another series featuring a girl who has a special ability and when the ability happens, her nose bleeds. Let me just say right now, Eleven is much cooler than Prairie; in fact Prairie is simply not a very cool character. And that right there is the problem. I don't want to know what happened to Prairie during her 7 years away. Finding out what happened feels like it is forced down my throat.

I know I'm being a little dismissive, but the thing is, it's hard to defend a show that teases and teases and teases, but then doesn't deliver. Then again, I found 'The X-Files' in its original incarnation to have the same problem of endless teasing, no revelation worth spit.

They Do A Little Dance

Okay, this is the spoiler so don't read this bit if you hate spoilers.

At the climax season 1, a gunman turns up to shoot up the cafe. In that tense moment, 5 people get up to do a dance routine in the face of the gunman, who gets taken down by a charging canteen staff member. The whole thing is this really weird elaborate way of making us watch bad contemporary dance.

Of course, there is a little more to the dance than just that. The series is very concerned with the afterlife and notions of moving into other dimensions through near death experiences. It is sort of interesting that a show about miraculations would tie it to dance exactly because there were ancients who believed in this kind of thing too. There are ancient rites in many a religion that involve elaborate gestures, and let's not forget magic involves gestures and incantations. There's also brands of yoga as well as esoteric buddhism that believes in gestural magic, so it's not exactly out of the ordinary.

What is more interesting about that aspect is that it's a bunch of white suburbanites wish casting an alternative reality, trying to invent for itself a kind of magic through contemporary dance. On the whole that part of it is interesting because it's the bit that fits the least well in this rather clumsily assembled narrative.

A Fiction Of Ambiguity?

One of the scourges of post-modernism has been this thing where the text is narrated by an unreliable narrator who is found out to have been lying all along, that not only is fiction a lie, the story is a lie within the narrative of a liar. Films like 'Atonement' have led the way in putting that brand of literary theory to the test and they end up with a largely dissatisfying tale of meaninglessness that insults the viewer. When a story disembowels itself in front of you, it doesn't add meaning to the text or for that matter the world - it merely creates another moment of meaninglessness that need not ought to have been created with such budgets and effort.

I know I sound curmudgeonly, but anybody who thinks this kind of fiction is the way forward is probably a psychopath. We turn to fiction to enter into a meaningful transaction with the author. Not to be let down and cast adrift on a sea of meaninglessness. As such, I just can't bring myself to like this series that makes moves towards this kind of abdication of authorial intent, disguising its move as ambiguity. Really, they shouldn't be wasting our time like this.