In praise of: The OA

issa
12 min readDec 24, 2016

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(and lengthy musings on episodic plot structure)

The OA is not quite like any other show you’ll watch this year. It’s also not anything like my favourite suggestions of late, like Jessica Jones or The Get Down (shows I push regularly upon my friends with the zeal of an out-of-luck heroin dealer). It doesn’t immediately grab. It burns slow. There are no big statements, no big social or historical ideas being explored.

But not only does it still impress in its quiet, understated way, its assured grasp on the fundamentals and subtleties of filmmaking and storytelling allow it to use that understatement to create profound, enrapturing highs that sing in your bones.

Watch it, and give it through the end of the first episode. The title card comes a bit late, but the moment you see it you’ll want to keep going. It’s perhaps bad manners to instruct one on how to approach a show, but I’d recommend not treating The OA like a puzzle to be solved. There are many mysteries and ambiguities woven into its fabric, but the better experience is likely had not by trying to outsmart it but instead to just let it all wash over you. And trust me: the finale pays everything off.

Beyond here lie spoilers.

The fundamentals

Too many shows these days, particularly those that revolve around mysteries and big reveals, completely neglect the fundamentals of storytelling. Episodic plotting is often the first to go, but we’ll explore that in (painstaking) depth in a moment. The next to go is character. Reveals are mistaken for development; anger and brooding and erratic decisions are mistaken for hardship. Typically, the latter end up being driven by the former—but this precludes the audience from being able to participate emotionally with the characters: how can you empathize with a character and their actions when you don’t understand what’s going into those decisions? You can’t even go “no no no that’s a terrible idea no” because maybe for some reason you don’t understand it’s not!

The OA’s characters aren’t like that. Yes, the titular character’s backstory is a mystery, but her motivations (help people, which clarifies into helping her friends) are never unclear, nor are the means she clearly believes will accomplish that goal: listen to my story and you will understand. What’s more, the five side characters are each a beautiful balance of the mundane and the troubled. They all have struggles that are simple and common. Somehow, the basic prescription of life has failed them, and in their own ways they’re slowly falling out of the system. They’re misfits, but not the kind we typically apply that label to.

French is a great example: he’s slowly self-destructing by maniacally following that life prescription. He’s working too hard, he’s pursuing the things he’s supposed to—taking care of his mother, scoring a scholarship for college—with the kind of zeal that can only give way to a deep crisis when something finally goes wrong or he reaches the edges of the blueprint. The system isn’t working for him, whether he realizes it or not.

It’s not working for any of them. But by listening to The OA’s story, by participating in something larger and more troubling and deeper than themselves, they finally find an anchor in life. It doesn’t become their whole purpose, it doesn’t renew them wholesale; it just gives them a shared experience and something, anything to care about, to give some small corner of their life meaning.

On episodic plotting

That story also gives the entire show its structure. But how the show manages that story is worthy of note. In the decade since LOST spearheaded the modern movement of serialized storytelling, shows chasing that formula have increasingly lost sight of the craft Lindelof, Cuse, and the writing staff put into telling an extended tale steeped in mythology. Particularly now in the Netflix era, where showrunners need merely to convince the viewer not to touch their remote for fifteen seconds between episodes, more and more shows seem to have abandoned completely any attempt at episodic plot structure. Shows like Luke Cage exemplify this trend, but even the much-vaunted prestige show Westworld, despite being on a weekly schedule, lacks concrete story arcs in most of its episodes.

Part of this is because such arcs are increasingly regarded as old-fashioned: the CBS-style villain of the week format feels dated to some, and with online streaming now an option for catching up and with viewers increasingly accepting long, mythologized tales, the weekly episodic arc is no longer necessary to hook and ease new viewers into watching the show.

Other specimens

But there are many points on this spectrum, and while a show like The Blacklist shows how the two schools can be elegantly married, one need look no further than LOST to find a compelling argument in favour of sticking to the episodic format. For LOST came in a time when none of the aforementioned trends came to be, and while almost every one of its episodes has its own compelling and standalone plot, clearly no viewer was about to just drop into the middle of season four and stand a chance of understanding any of it.

LOST stuck to a perhaps-obsolete story formula because it works. Whether delivered in weekly drips or in a single avalanche, 40- to 60-minute shows work best when each episode has its own rhythm, when there is an emotional arc that both the characters and the audience feels between the cold open and the credits. This is no different than the acts of a film. And imbuing each episode with its own plot objectives is the underlying structure for building that emotional arc.

There are many ways to approach this: LOST started its run by framing its larger story and discoveries within the context of the everyday struggle to survive on the island. Quests to find water, or send a distress signal, or provide medical help for an injured castaway occupied the characters’ and audiences’ attentions, driving character development forward and establishing the rhythm of the show, while the incidental mysteries found along the way paved the path for B- and C- plots to explore the slower-burning bigger elements of the show. As the show evolved, the meaning of survival evolved with it, but the structure stayed in place. In fact, its weakening in the sixth season is arguably a contributing element to that season’s lackluster response. Shows like The Blacklist and Person of Interest follow a similar strategy of backdooring their mythological elements within the structure of a villain-of-the-week format but actually codify that storytelling structure in the premise of the show: the characters are in it literally to take down one baddie per week.

Westworld goes too far in the other direction. While it deftly creates powerful story engines to push the plot forward, Nolan and Joy don’t put much effort into getting the beats of these stories to line up with episode boundaries. The experience of watching a Westworld episode is like watching a ten-hour movie where every hour or so something shocking occurs and the audience goes “oh, I guess this is the end of the episode?” and three seconds later we cut to credits. It remains compelling, and is more truly an “X-hour movie” than most shows to which that term is applied thanks to the thought the show put into how to stretch the movie storytelling format into an evolving, act-based ten-hour narrative, but the show remains a place to visit an hour at a time rather than an experience you put yourself into each time you watch an episode. It also shoots itself in the foot with regard to characterization by obscuring its protagonists’ intentions from its viewers (in the case of Maeve) or even from the characters themselves (in the case of Dolores).

The OA

Part of what I find particularly fascinating about The OA is that it’s found a spot on the spectrum that I hadn’t yet seen successfully occupied, and it mostly pulls through. In The OA, the arc for each episode isn’t so much seen as it is felt—but it definitely exists. And—not always, but often—the way that arc manifests serves as a sort of deconstruction of the serialized storytelling methodology: often, the basis for a particular episode is to discover some piece of information, or to learn more about a particular thing. But critically, the desire to learn more belongs not just to the audience but to the characters themselves, and manifests not in terms of a general air of the mysterious, but in concrete goals and actions the characters take. Let’s actually walk through a few episodes:

The pilot falls into the category of “not always”: it’s driven by action. Prairie makes clear early on that her immediate mission is to help some people. Over the course of the first act, we discover that this is Homer, or perhaps many people who are with Homer. We learn that she needs five strong-willed people in order to do so. The entire episode revolves around her goings about to make this happen. This isn’t necessarily compelling yet; Prairie is more of a cipher than a character at this point. We stick around mainly because the show entices us with the kind of mystery many of its lesser contemporaries rely upon for their entire run: what happened to her? What really happened to her? How did she get her sight back? Jazz hands mystery! But the (brilliant) final quarter of an hour of the pilot makes clear that this isn’t that kind of show: we’re going straight into that backstory, and while it may take some time to get through, the show isn’t going to play coy and rely on big reveals to drive the narrative forward.

Episode two, then, picks up from that brilliantly told story by focusing on the loss of Nina’s father. The whole episode is built around establishing her long-distance relationship with him, where absence has very much made the heart grow fonder, before rending them apart. She is devastated and reeling, and whilst (or possibly as a result of) dealing with that trauma, she is tantalized by a premonition of a reunion far away. The episode closes right when the consequences of that arc with her father are reified and carved into stone: when she becomes a captive.

Champion, the third episode, is all about answering the natural next question: “what does it mean to be in captivity?” This is both our question and Prairie’s. First, we explore the visceral feeling of being a blind woman trapped in a plexiglas cage. Then, we learn more about our fellow captives and do our best to bond with them, in order to learn more. The first gassing comes and we get some idea of what Hap’s study looks like, how it feels to be a lab mouse. Then the obvious contraquestion emerges: can we escape captivity? And we then see a series of escape plots that finally end with Prairie’s failed success, wherein we learn by watching and feeling that for a blind woman, captivity doesn’t end at the walls of the captor’s house, but that the big, vast unknown is just as bewildering, unfamiliar, and unnavigable. So, that’s that question answered, and we close on the episode.

We’ll finish up with episode four, because this essay is already becoming perilously long: After being literally told that there is no escape, The OA determines that perhaps the only way out is in, and proposes that the group try to discover what the experiment itself is about. Again, this is a key question for the audience, and the show makes it the characters’ own explicit mission. And again, it does so not just by having the question hang over their heads, but by giving them a physical task which should they accomplish ought to give them that answer: by having Homer stay awake through the experiment and relay his experiences. Our question becomes the characters’ question becomes their physical motivation and thus becomes the structure of the episode.

So you see, what I find so fascinating about The OA’s approach is that it takes the foremost question that drives people to watch heavily mythologized shows and literalizes it, making it the characters’ own and giving them physical ways to find the answers. Every episode is about one question and its answer, and every episode has a different approach to it (episode five follows up four by asking the question of what the five movements are and whether they’re even real, and ups the stakes by making death itself the mechanism of discovery), and whether by effort or as a natural outcome, the show avoids overemphasizing these structural mechanisms and thus the overt feeling of any episodic plotting. But it’s there, and in keeping with the show’s overall aesthetic and approach, its understatedness makes it all the more powerful. I’ve seen it compared to a novel more than other shows, and I don’t think that’s by accident.

The subtleties

The show’s visual language is equally extraordinary. In a very complete act of form follows function, the show is graded very close to its flat raw source, eschewing the oversaturated look that all our modern media tends towards (and which frankly exacerbates the problems of digital filmmaking). What’s more, the show chooses a color palette that hews just slightly toward the unnatural and unexpected—almost everyone notices the abundance of purple, but green is often used as an accent against that purple, a use of secondary colors that reminds one of Watchmen. But that’s all not just aesthetic: it paves the way for moments like the very beginning of The OA’s story, where the big shots over snowy Russia expand the show in every way, from the scope of the plot to the style and language of the narrative to the visual variety on display.

It also excels at blocking, framing, and the language of cinema: when Prairie is led into Hap’s basement, the long lens, claustrophobic close-ups, and shallow depth of field keep our understanding of the surroundings on level with Prairie’s own, while simultaneously hinting at the nature of the situation. The OA’s storytelling sequences always start at something of a profile shot, but as you’re drawn into her story for each session, and as things get more intense, the framing grows closer and closer to head-on and everyone comes closer to staring straight into the lens. We begin to inhabit it. And this assured, deliberate understanding and use of the technical art of camera placement empowers the creators to make deliberate detail decisions like shooting the group walking up to the abandoned house from inside the house, handheld: the universal sign for “you’re being watched,” and having it actually be felt by the audience.

The score reflects the less-is-more ethos, too. With a very limited instrumentation and a restrained arrangement, the composers make the smallest expansions of the musical boundaries deeply felt: a small, quiet synth line is all that’s needed to make the encounters with Khatun feel wondrous and beyond conventional understanding, while the crescendos that accompany big moments peak only for moments and yet feel like a sustained rush of emotion.

The power of storytelling

This is helped by the showrunners’ decision to have a character literally and orally tell a story to an audience within the text of the show. The OA’s narration isn’t voiceover for the benefit of the audience, they’re words she actually speaks to her newfound friends. This leads to a couple of powerful things.

First, it gives the writers the freedom to be intensely personal and poetic. For film history and theory reasons, voiceover work tends to either be quick and dry, or to poke metatextually at itself (cf at least half of Shane Black’s output). V.O. text that feels too flowery, or delves too far into a character’s feelings, tends to feel and be regarded as hacky: most of the time that material is best integrated into the text of the story itself, and the failure to do so is typically a failure on the part of the writer. But here, The OA’s story isn’t outside the bounds of the story: it’s in the text; indeed, it’s a reward, something we don’t get to experience unless this unlikely group of five people agree to experience it with us, and moreover it is how those five experience it. It’s actually vital for The OA to recount her story a bit like a novelist. In this regard, the show calls up the fine traditions of ancient oral storytelling, of bards who learned or wrote or built upon epic tales and whose recountings of those tales were works of art in themselves: the reference to Homer, made literal in the final episode, is no accident at all.

Second, it gives the show the opportunity to recontextualize and call into question that account, a powerful move they reserve until the very last episode. But I don’t think the show is about an unreliable narrator, nor about trying to puzzle together what is true and what is not; instead, it’s about the act of experiencing a story, about how consuming a story like The OA’s is to open yourself up to it, to volunteer yourself to her as a storyteller and allow yourself the vulnerability of belief, as our five friends in the show themselves do—and about what can come out of that kind of connection.

Polarized opinions

And I think ultimately that is what makes or breaks the show for you: I suspect that the many who will watch this show treating it with suspicion, waiting for the big trick and the big reveal, and trying to outsmart it will end up severely disappointed. But if you stop trying to question and prod at The OA and give yourself over to it, you will be rewarded with its incredible emotional highs and thematic strengths.

My hat is off to Brit Marling, Zal Batmanglij, their entire creative team, and all the actors involved, and I can’t wait to see how they use the foundation they’ve built to do ever more incredible things.

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issa

i believe in the wholeness of things. i fight for the users. i make things. i play music.