Make Me Remember
I have to meet my co-host, Carlye, on First Street in an hour, but I’m sitting here in my pajamas writing this review that I believe I can finish in the next fifteen minutes. Let’s not dwell on a vision of Carlye sitting at the Flour Bakery rolling her eyes and writing me a text to go fuck myself because she’s by herself and I haven’t gotten there.
The OA caught me off guard. After Ray Donovan, I dabbled in other shows and films, but nothing really caught my interest. Brit Marling is an actress that has impressed me over the last decade. She’s beautiful and intelligent and you could see her playing Ivanka Trump-esque characters in political thrillers where you underestimate her and then she turns out to be the star of the film. She’s not that girl — she’s the OA.
Did you watch Another Earth and the movie she made with Alexander Skarsgard? Her writing and direction are so good that Alexander Skarsgard getting out of a bathtub outside a cabin in the woods isn’t even the most interesting part of the movie. IMdB her summary, I have a lunch date not to be late to.
The OA caught me off guard. I had watched The Sinner so I thought it would be a story about someone recovering from the trauma of a kidnapping. I also believed that there would be an element of sci-fi in it because of Marling, but I wasn’t prepared for what it was. I binged the two seasons in a single week.
I really want you all to watch this show so I don’t want to give too much away. I’m going to explain this the way that you would explain a story that happened to a friend.
Prairie was adopted by a family in the Midwest after being orphaned when her Russian father dies. When she was a kid she was in an accident that robbed her of her eyesight. Her parents coddle her because she’s blind, but she has the will to see the world and explore. She is also is a virtuoso violinist.
This picks up on the radar of an evil doctor that collects people like Prairie — people that have experienced near-death experiences. He believes that the light at the end of the tunnel isn’t just the end of the road, it’s a tunnel in the next world and he believes there’s a way to hitch on to that train and head on into the next.
The first season plays out in two different times — when Prarie is returned to her family after missing for seven years with her sight restored and what happened to her during the years that she was missing. The second season concentrates on what happens to all of the players involved in season 1.
What Marling does well that you need to understand to comprehend how great her work is to understand people that don’t live in the details. If someone sits you down to tell you about how they spent seven years in captivity — there are two types of people; those that would be concentrated on the horrific experience and those that would go along with Marling and understand that the important part of the story is what she cares about. Sure, there was multi-dimensional travel, physical abuse, starvation, and murder, but I need you to focus on how in all of this I met a really great guy and I’m trying to find my way back — all of Marling’s stories characters that get lost in extraordinary stories as they search for the most basic quests, being reunited with their loved one and normalcy
The set-up for season three is so meta that I pray Netflix doesn’t give up on it because there isn’t another show like it on television. I have to get back to Carlye and get this Podcast going, but please tune into The OA. I’ve been gone for seven weeks, but time is of the illusion, and if we were to look at it deeply, you would understand that I have always been here, talking to you, filling you in on my daily activities and was never gone. Were you paying attention?
