Redditors have found alleged clues that the Netflix series is coming back in the Instagram posts of stars Brit Marling and Jason Isaacs. They have scrutinized Netflix's non-statements and the meta finale to justify their belief that The OA isn't dead. But most of all, says Rachel Handler, The OA's hopeful message is fueling the conspiracy theory. "If you allowed yourself to be swept away by The OA’s strange, gently bonkers poetry, you were rewarded with an increasingly rare sort of hopefulness," says Handler. "Comparisons are often made between The OA and Twin Peaks — another absolutely unhinged show I adore about time, space, and blonde women trapped in interdimensional rooms — but Twin Peaks wasn’t a hopeful show. Twin Peaks held a mirror to humanity’s darkest, most nefarious impulses; it ended with its main characters trapped eternally in the wrong dimension, howling infernally. Conversely, The OA was a show about believing in impossible things (and I don’t mean psychic octopi and brain flowers). The OA was one of the only contemporary shows I’ve ever seen that leaned on the notion — as creator-writer-star Brit Marling put it in her mournful post-cancellation Instagram post — 'that the collective is stronger than the individual,' that 'there is no hero,' that 'humans (are) one species among many and not necessarily the wisest or the most evolved.” It was one of the only shows to grapple directly and beautifully with things like toxic masculinity, American gun violence, PTSD and trauma, the pitfalls of capitalism, impossible ethical quandaries — all this on top of coming up with that freakin’ octopus and staffing one of the most diverse casts and crews in TV history."
TOPICS: The OA, Netflix, Brit Marling, Jason Isaacs, Zal Batmanglij, Reddit