Backstage recently reported that producers of 'The Oa' are now actively recruiting child actors for the film shoot in Portland, Oregon. Shooting is scheduled to begin this month for the Netflix original.
Fans are waiting in eager anticipation to see if Netflix's season 2 will reveal secrets of the title character's story of being trapped for years in a near death experience experiment in which she and her fellow subjects learned five "movements" that can heal the sick as well as make inter-dimensional travel possible."The OA" stands for the Original Angel, and the title character believes that this is what she is, though we, as an audience, may be unclear as to its meaning.
In a way, it sounds a little off-the-wall.
Is the OA psychotic?
Psychosis is a kind of detachment from reality in which the sufferer does not know that he or she is inventing fictions about reality and then believing these fictions are true. "The OA" depicts a young woman who disappears for several years, then returns home and shares the story of her captivity at the hands of kind of a mad scientist. This is Netflix science fiction at its best.
In "The OA," the mad scientist, Hap, kills then revives her and her fellow subjects, repeatedly, to "record" their near-death experiences with some futuristic equipment.
During the near-death experiences, the subjects of Hap's experiment learn "movements." These are choreographed dances which, when orchestrated in a special sequence, have amazing power. But is the story true, within the context of the show, or did Prairie, the young woman who is the central figure in the Netflix series, weave the story together from events of the present day? Is she mentally ill?
There are some clues that point to mental illness as the source of Prairie's story in "The OA." For example, Prairie says that one of her fellow trapped subjects was named "Homer" and there is a startling moment when one of Prairie's high school student friends, in the process of investigating her story to prove its truth, discovers a copy of Homer's "The Iliad" under her bed, suggesting her entire story might be a kind of psychotic fiction inspired by current events.
In one episode, Prairie also mentions taking psychiatric medicine to her father. Yet there's more to this Netflix series.
The OA's story is not simply delusional
Den of Geek! reports that creators Brit Marling and Zal Batmanglij know what is happening in the storyline and are filming "The OA" as a kind of a riddle to be solved. There are, according to Marling and Batmanglij, clues scattered throughout season 1 which no doubt will also be woven into season 2. Some of these clues are hard to spot, but they are there. And the clues suggest something more profound, than delusion, occurring in the series. For example, The Insider analyzed a sequence in which one of Prairie's high school followers rides his bike by an accident scene which looks very much like the accident scene described, by one of Hap's subjects, as the source of her first near-death experience, suggesting that different dimensions may be coming together and that a linear timeline is no longer holding.
And the timeline seems also out of whack for the filming of the Netflix series itself. There have been various reports that filming of season 2 is complete. Backstage says that filming will occur in Oregon in June. And On Location Vacations reported that "The OA" was being filmed yesterday in New York. Perhaps the filming of the series and the content of the series are all equal parts of the riddle to be solved.