SPOILER ALERT. THIS IS A REVIEW OF A TELEVISION SHOW. STOP WHINING.

When they started doing a spastic yoga dance is when I lost it. Four episodes in, the OA, which was swimming along brilliantly—weird and hard to pin down, more psychological thriller than sci-fi, more mysterious than mystical—toppled over into straight-up silliness.

The main character—the OA (the Original Angel, real name, Prairie Johnson) a blonde, blind girl who had disappeared and been held captive for seven years and reappeared with her sight intact—leads her fellow captors in a weird dance. She is in a glass cage, surrounded by other glass cages with three other captors. They had been kidnapped by a smooth-talking, obsessive scientist named Hap, who is determined to find out what really happens in Near Death Experiences by drowning them alive over and over. The captors dance because they are trying to bring a dead person back to life.

But! There was hope! In one pivotal scene, the OA meets a mystic in the afterlife named Khatun (she has the scarves; she’s just missing the crystal ball), who feeds her a bird and then Prairie understands that there are “movements” that will somehow make them free.

The five movements—resembling a jerky Janet Jackson video crossed with kundalini yoga— was supposed to have time traveling capabilities, could bring back the dead, and heal the wounded. If done with feeling (once more!) they could transcend this mortal coil.

To quote Vizzini from the Princess Bride: “Inconceivable!”
via GIPHY

There were so many layers to this absurdity—from the origin story (she's actually the rich daughter of a Russian oligarch, who, after her father is killed, is sold for cash by her aunt running a whorehouse to an older couple on the Russian adoption black market) —to the giant, Swiss cheese-sized plot holes (so many, but here is just one: the school bully being sent to boarding school and escaping because his teacher bribed his caretakers with a $50G check and no one goes to jail or loses their job because of it), but you go along for the insane ride because Brit Marling, the actress playing Prairie, and also the co-creator and co-writer of the OA, is a great cult leader. You go along, because the metaphysical world is trippy, and because you have to have suspense of disbelief for anything fantastical anyway and why not, what’s eight episodes? You’re game. You watched Lost for six years and never figured out what the Island is. No, you’re not bitter.

The question of Prairie’s reliability as a narrator always hangs in the air, but you root for her to be right and for her group of oddfellows, three teenage boys and a middle-aged teacher, to win.

There is more than one commonality with the other big Netflix show, Stranger Things—the unlikely friendships and kids hanging out after school working on secret projects, a metaphysical world that exists in another dimension, a monster (in the OA it’s, Hap, the man who allegedly kidnapped and tortured them, in Stranger Things it’s the Demogorgon) but the OA lacks Stranger Things’ Spielbergian charm.

That's not to say I didn't watch the shit out of the OA. I did. Finished it in two days. I also have no life. But the denouement featuring a school shooting and interpretive dance—which some poor, inattentive saps were surprised by—was predictable. I called it four episodes before the end. But I couldn't figure out what the point of Prairie’s journey was. I guess I should do the five movements and travel to another dimension where time is a flat circle.