Aaaand we’re back with another installment of “wtf is happening on this show??”
No, but. What the frak is happening on this show?
Recap
Episode 5: Paradise
A lot of this episode was about Hap, which. Ugh. It opens with him traveling to Cuba to collect another subject, but she’s not really having any of his nonsense. He leaves defeated, and heads home to his collection. Who are all acting weird.
He finally notices the connection between Prairie (calling herself OA by now) and Homer. One morning OA wakes up and Homer is gone without any explanation.
We jump back to the present, where the kids and Betty are trying to figure out what’s next in OA’s story. French guesses that Homer’s dead and the story’s over, but the others aren’t buying it.
French apparently works two jobs to keep his family afloat because his mother is an alcoholic. She has a very strange way of encouraging her son to succeed, but that’s just me.
In the story, it turns out Hap is taking Homer to Cuba. On his last trip he discovered that Renata likes “handsome young men,” so his plan is for Homer to invite her to his room. Uh, but like…Homer is straight up BUGGING because he hasn’t been outside in however many years. Why is this woman coming up to his room with him??
But she does. And they have sex. Which Dr. Creepy McCreeperson listened to. He patched the feed back to the cells and the others heard everything. Obviously OA was seriously upset about her guy gettin’ hot ‘n’ heavy with someone else, and Hap believes he’s finally broken them and stopped the rebellion.
He takes Scott for an experiment, and Scott spills the beans on everything: what Homer and OA are doing, and that OA has been able to see for like 3 years now. Hap straight up kills Scott, and brings his dead body back to the cells.
Homer and OA start doing the weird movement things, and after an entire night of yoga dancing, Scott COMES BACK TO LIFE. Now look. He was DEAD. Stinky smelly dead. Super duper dead. And then he wasn’t.
When Scott wakes up he tells them that Homer and OA are right: there are five movements, and once you can perform all five of them, you can open a tunnel to another dimension. A way to escape.
OA tells Betty and the kids that that’s what they’re going to do: she’s going to teach them all five movements, they’re going to open the tunnel, and OA is going to rescue her friends.
Episode 6: Forking Paths
OA and the others are practicing the movements, and two more years pass. Renata gets the 4th movement, but they’re still searching for the 5th. To remember them they write them down, then carve them onto their bodies. OA has the 1st and 2nd, while Homer has the 3rd and 4th.
Meanwhile, Hap is memorizing the movements too. The captives are worried that he’ll discover the tunnel thing before they can, but since they still don’t have the 5th one, it doesn’t matter too much.
Hap apparently has a lab partner, someone conducting the same type of experiments at a hospital. Hap tells him a little about the movements and the dude freaks out and pulls a gun on him. Hap ends up killing him, basically in self defense, and then tells a nurse where to find his partner’s lab subjects.
That’s something, I guess.
Back at the lab, Hap begs OA to run away with him. She refuses, and when he puts her into the drowning tank thing she goes to outer space but doesn’t learn the movement she needs. When she gets back, Hap quizzes her about some weird sound he heard while she was gone. He plays different noises for her, and she recognizes one: it’s apparently the sound of electrons moving in waves…in Saturn’s rings.
OA and Homer dream about what they’ll do when they get out, and upstairs Hap is blissed out listening to the Saturn electrons. A cop comes by to see him, and walks in since his door is open. Hap can’t hear him, and as the cop approaches he sees the monitors of the subjects in their cells. He pulls his gun and presses it to the back of Hap’s head.
One thing that OA told the kids and Betty is that they had to leave their front doors open so she could “get inside.” Buck’s dad notices the door open, and after calling for Buck, slams it shut. That ends the episode.
This one was only 30 minutes, so a much shorter recap!
Review
It took Hap three years and the stoner telling him to notice that Prairie could see?? Come on!!
Okay, so, the title. This show is Very Serious. Very Serious Indeed. The movements, which look kinda ridiculous, are Very Serious Movements with Very Serious Consequences. I…want to take the show as seriously as it takes itself, but the movements like…take me out of it. If that makes sense. When OA started doing the weird angry yoga chicken dance over Scott’s dead body I was just like, “Whaaaaat??”
I mean, k, they’re angels or whatever. That’s kinda cool. But I’m waiting for some payoff, I guess. Not answers, exactly, because this is a show that thrives on NON-answers, but at least some reason for all of this. Everything from the episode lengths (each one is different), to the music, to the lighting, to the constant use of purple, is designed to make us ask “wtf is going on here??”
It works, but there’s a fine line between intrigue and frustration. I need these last 2 episodes to shine a little bit of light on what I’ve been watching so far.
