A Murder at the End of the World Is a Secret Third Season of The OA

In Hear Me Out, Primetimer staffers and contributors espouse their pet theories, hot takes, and even the occasional galaxy-brain idea.

It's all about the glasses. Those horn-rimmed glasses favored by Clive Owen's character in the FX series A Murder at the End of the World had me suspicious from the start. As a fan of Brit Marling and Zal Batmanglij's The OA, I was primed to expect anything, on any plane of existence, out of their new series. The OA traversed between dimensions, brought the dead back to life, opened portals with modern dance, and gave sight to the blind. I wasn't about to get caught off-guard with what was seemingly just a murder mystery.

Through six episodes of A Murder at the End of the World, we've followed Darby (Emma Corrin) as she's tried to solve the murder of her ex-lover Bill (Harris Dickinson) while stranded at a top-secret Icelandic symposium hosted by billionaire tech god Andy Ronson (Owen). Bill's death, along with a handful of subsequent murders, appear to have something to do with Ronson, his wife Lee (Marling), the paternity of their son, and may involve any number of the other guests, most of whom are tied up in some way with big-money tech concerns having to do with preparing for a global doomsday. And while the detecting itself has left something to be desired, Marling and Batmanglij have delivered intriguing characters and a story thick with tension.

Plot-wise, it's a world away from The OA, which ran for two beautiful and often baffling seasons on Netflix before being unceremoniously (though not quite shockingly) canceled. There, Marling played a woman who was once blind but returns from a years-long abduction now able to see, telling a tale of her captor, Hap (Jason Isaacs), and the metaphysical doors that she and her fellow abductees were able to open through near-death experiences.

Through two seasons, the show journeyed to two parallel dimensions and had just leaped to a third — a metatextual dimension where Marling and Isaacs were playing characters named "Brit Marling" and "Jason Isaacs" who were actors in a show that was presumably The OA. Netflix pulled the plug before the series could go any further, but Marling and Batmanglij talked about having a five-season plan for the show.

So, how is a technologically forward-thinking yet still very much grounded-in-reality series like A Murder at the End of the World supposed to connect to The OA, with all its parallel dimensions and talk of Original Angels (Marling is called the "OA")? It comes back to those horn-rimmed glasses worn by Andy Ronson, identical to the horn-rimmed glasses Hap sported on The OA.

The two characters share a bunch of characteristics, including an obsession with innovation within a scientific field. Hap was determined to find proof of life after death and stumbled into the existence of parallel dimensions. Ronson has gathered the best minds on Earth together, purportedly to put their heads together to devise ways in which humanity can survive the inevitable climate crisis. In both cases, any claim to altruism is overridden by their need to forcibly control those around them, and a willingness to use anyone as a pawn to their own ends.

Creating two characters on two shows with similarly villainous characteristics isn't exactly rare. But if you factor in that The OA had an unfulfilled plan for three more seasons, and also that the show's interdimensional travel allowed for Marling and Isaacs' characters to inhabit personalities different than their own (Marling jumped into the body of Nina Azarova in Season 2, while Hap was "Dr. Percy"), then it starts to seem possible that A Murder at the End of the World exists as another parallel dimension within the OA universe.

That theory hasn't been established as canon — yet! — but at the very least, Marling, Batmanglij, and FX are having fun with over-invested OA fans along the way. Ronson’s glasses are no accident (look at the way the glasses loom over Darby's shoulder on the poster), nor is the fact that the short, choppy, blonde hair sported by Darby in the show's first episode (before she dyes it pink) is nearly identical to the short, choppy, blonde hair that the character "Brit Marling" is sporting in the Season 2 OA finale.

Then there is the fact that Marling's character on Murder, Lee, has some kind of romantic feeling for Bill. This mirrors the feelings OA had for Homer (Emory Cohen) in the second season, when she jumped into the new dimension and he didn't remember her. Is Lee just another version of Prairie/OA/"Brit Marling," this time pining for Homer yet again, only now he's in the body of Bill? (To be fair, in The OA, the characters looked the same after jumping dimensions, even if their personae were different, so this doesn't exactly line up, but I'm also not going to begrudge Marling and Batmanglij for leveling up to Harris Dickinson for their new love interest.)

Other supporting evidence for my claim: In The OA, the importance of a group of five people is repeatedly emphasized, as only five together can perform the movements that open the tunnel to interdimensional travel. In the fifth episode of A Murder at the End of the World ("Crypt"), Ziba (Pegah Ferydoni) jokes that four of Ronson's guests gathered by the fire could be a tipping point for "revolution" against their host. But that group of four becomes five when joined by Oliver (Ryan J. Haddad); together, they’re able to defy Ronson's concierge, Marius (Christopher Gurr).

There's also a scene in The OA where a psychic octopus named Old Night tells Marling's character that in each dimension, the angels will send her a spiritual sibling to protect her. You could easily see Darby fulfilling that role for Lee in Murder, similar to the role Kingsley Ben-Adir played in The OA Season 2.

Talking about the plot of The OA for long enough does make you sound unhinged. You really had to be there to understand why an array of five robot claws carrying out the movements of a modern dance routine were so earthshaking in the Season 2 finale, or why the aforementioned psychic octopus gives Marling's character a near-death experience is so important to understanding where the series was headed. But OA fandom runs deep, and Reddit threads and YouTube videos abound with theories about where the show was headed in its third, fourth, and fifth seasons. More dimensions, certainly. Aliens, of course, factor into these imagined seasons, as does a shocking reveal that certain characters never existed in the first place.

My theory doesn't require nearly so many leaps of faith. All I ask is to consider that when all is said and done, we'll discover that Andy Ronson is really just another version of The OA's Hap in a new dimension, and that his wife, Lee, is trying to escape Iceland with their son because at some point she had the realization that she's the OA and Hap means her harm. Honestly, it's among the least outlandish things that The OA's fans have ever been asked to believe.

The season finale of A Murder at the End of the World premieres December 19th on FX on Hulu. Join the discussion about the show in our forums.

Joe Reid is the senior writer at Primetimer and co-host of the This Had Oscar Buzz podcast. His work has appeared in Decider, NPR, HuffPost, The Atlantic, Slate, Polygon, Vanity Fair, Vulture, The A.V. Club and more.