Did Netflix’s The OA leave you guessing?
With major spoilers, here are our theories about 10 of its burning questions…
Warning: this feature contains spoilers.Read our spoiler-free review of The OA here.
Here, were going to do our best to present (and answer) those lingering queries.
Wherever that nickname came from, it seems pretty clear thats what it stands for.
Well, theres the other big question.
How reliable a narrator is Prairie?
Lets stack the evidence for and against.
So, Prairie was definitely missing for seven years.
Her sight definitely came back at some point during those seven years.
Certainly, bits of her story add up.
But Hap, the other captives, the sheriff and his wife?
No-one else could find evidence that they existed.
Theres not even any evidence that shes Russian beyond her word.
Those are some pretty big gaps there.
However, I think that everything Prairie said was true.
Theres one thing that cant really be explained away, and thats what she did when she got home.
She expended a lot of effort into getting an Internet connection, purely to see if Homer was real.
That wasnt a performance for anyone, nor was it a second hand account.
But the books arent all theyre cracked up to be.
For a start, they appear to be unread.
Theyre still in the Amazon box, even.
And can Prairie even read?
Shes been blind since childhood.
And how do we know the books informed her story?
Maybe she bought the books to better understand her experiences.
The books are almost too neat an explanation for her story.
Thats a bigger question.
He may even be working with Hap directly.
Homers wounds are even replicated on his own face.
Was this a literal event, or some manifestation of Frenchs paranoia?
She says that her fellow captives are no longer here.
Shes vague about what that means.
The thing is, the story of Prairies escape is massively incomplete.
So what happened in that gap?
Or possibly the rings of Saturn.
This is something I cant explain at all.
A trust exercise, perhaps?
Im not entirely sure this one matters, but there has been some discussion around it.
If it does matter, the list of candidates isnt very long.
If its not him, it might be one of the other captives.
It could even be Hap.
Wherever she was, it clearly wasnt her usual afterlife dimension.
Instead, it was a white room bathed in soft light.
So maybe shes alive, but has gone crazy and is lying in a ward somewhere imagining meeting Homer.
Maybe shes dead, and thats her heaven.
Or maybe shes in another afterlife entirely, and has been reunited with Homer.
