CULTURE

The OA Season Two Will Expand Its Already Confusing Storyline Into Multiple Dimensions

Season two takes place across multiple dimensions.

Feb. 27, 2019

Nicola Goode/Netflix

The first eight episodes of The OA were difficult to comprehend not just for viewers, but for many of the show’s secondary characters as well. The Netflix series’ first season saw creator and star Brit Marling‘s Prairie Johnson—or, as she prefers to be known, The Original Angel, OA for short—enlisting a group of teenage outcasts to help her open up a portal to a different dimension. Along the way, she shares her reasoning behind the existence of the portal, as well as her own complicated backstory, rife with near-death experiences (NDEs), an extended kidnapping plot, spooky premonitions, and visits with a one-winged woman who resides in some sort of void.

The second season, it seems, will be even more mind-boggling. As seen in its first trailer, released Wednesday, the new episodes pick up right where the first season (controversially) left off, after Prairie’s new friends performed “The Movements” (the key to opening up the aforementioned portal, of course) to distract a would-be school shooter, who nonetheless fired off a stray bullet out a window, striking Prairie square in the chest. In the trailer, she wakes up in the hospital, no bullet wound in sight, and apparently in an alternate dimension, as evidenced by the fact that her nurse has never heard of Barack Obama.

Per an official season synopsis from Netflix, the new episodes will take place across both dimensions: this new one, in which Prairie is still the daughter of a Russian oligarch (rather than an adopted Midwesterner) and can embark on her mission to save the other NDE survivors who were also kidnapped by Hap (Jason Isaacs)—while, somehow, still ending up in Hap’s clutches once again—and the one from the first season, in which those feisty teens (and The Office‘s Phyllis Smith as “BBA”) are still trying to wrap their minds around the unbelievable story OA has spun for them. Prairie will also cross paths in her new life with Karim Washington (Kingsley Ben-Adir), a private detective searching for a group of missing teens, because there simply weren’t enough missing/kidnapped/dimension-hopping young adults in this show already.

Watch the full trailer for season two, which debuts on Netflix on March 22, below.

Marling previously spoke to W about how, exactly, she and co-creator Zal Batmanglij built up the puzzle-like narrative of the show. “We started really telling The OA as a story just orally, back and forth to each other over a year and a half, and we felt like if we were gonna make something that was a mind-bender and long format and could potentially last for many seasons, we had to sort of find a mystery that would sustain us, so that it felt like it was worth potentially a decade of our lives invested into one story. We spent a lot of time upfront sorting that all out,” she said. “Sometimes I’m still sort of shocked that it was made and that it was made in such a pure form by a handful of people.”