Episode 5 - The OA Part 1

Episode Transcript

(00:00):
Welcome to Disaster Peace Theater.
I'm your host, Tom Trefilo, your stalwart sherpa through the cinematic sludge.
and sludge we have this week, my friends.
Today we're going to be breaking down something that, quite frankly, I've been putting off doing.
I've had this episode ready to go in my mind for quite some time, and yet I couldn't bring myself to do it.

(00:23):
.999I hate, with passion that it cannot be described, the show we're going to talk about today.
It turned me on to the notion that there is no God, because this show is so abysmally awful, so wildly disrespectful of its audience, so frankly offensive in toying with one's emotions and for its own pomposity and self righteousness, and yet somehow it got two seasons on Netflix.

(00:51):
And yes, I do understand the irony of me, Bitching about someone's own self righteousness and pomposity.
I get it.
That's how fucking bad this is.
So, what we're talking about today, I'll stop teasing it. 12 00:01:06,894.999 --> 00:01:08,394.999 We're gonna be breaking down the OA. 13 00:01:08,764.999 --> 00:01:21,810 The OA is a Netflix original, and the way it's described is Quote, having gone missing seven years ago, the previously blind Prairie Johnson returns home, now in her 20s, with her sight restored. 14 00:01:22,289.999 --> 00:01:26,879.999 While many believe she is a miracle, others worry that she could be dangerous.

(01:27):
.9So, heh heh heh.
With that description alone makes me want to scream into the void, but that's how the show describes itself.
What is it really? What it really is, is a dance of how many episodes can be filled without moving a plot forward in any meaningful way.

(01:51):
It's a show that posits that perhaps through the power of interpretive dance we can stop school shootings, and what this show really is is Is a way to let you, the audience, know that writer, director, and star Brit Marling is really, really fucking cool.
So now what we're going to be doing here is something slightly different than we have previously.

(02:15):
Whenever we've approached a TV show, I've always done it one episode at a time.
The problem with the OA is you don't really get a sense for how terrible it is until you take it in in its entirety, and quite frankly, dear listener, I like you too much to recommend you watch this entire piece of shit.
So.
What we're gonna do is, I've watched the entirety of the OA, not just the first season, but the second season, all the way up until it got shit canned, and I'm gonna be going through the entire first season here.

(02:44):
So that way you have a full breadth and depth of understanding for how abysmally awful this abortion of a show really is.
So, before we go any further, I'm gonna take a break, find my happy place, get zen before we dive into all of the mess that is.
The OA, part one.
All right, let's do this shit.
The show starts off with Prairie Johnson, played by, again, writer, director, and star Britt Marling, who has been missing for seven years, waking up in a hospital, and calling herself, quote, the OA. 29 00:03:17,109.999 --> 00:03:52,760 Now, you might be wondering, what does the OA stand for? And, while the show doesn't really want to tell you for at least four episodes, Spoiler alert, it's the original Angel, and immediately this show is swinging big right off the bat saying that this main character is the most pretentious, most important, most special person in the entire show, and everyone around her, every, the entirety of this show is built around the central premise that Britt Is really, really fucking cool guys.

(03:52):
So, right off the bat, most important person in the world, Britt Marling Prairie Johnson.
There's some emotional scenes, and again, there, there are people that you would recognize in this show.
Uh, Phyllis from The Office has been dragged into this shit.
Riz Ahmed has been dragged into this shit.
.999And like, uh, Jason Isaacs, Lucius Malfoy of all people, is the main antagonist of this show. 35 00:04:17,859.999 --> 00:04:19,780 Which makes it extra sad for me.

(04:20):
.999That ultimately all of them are just there for set dressing and to stand around and go, Wow, Brit, you're so fucking cool and pretty and most amazing person in the world.
.999It's, it's a massive waste of talent.
.999It's an incredible ego job for again, the writer and director of the show.
It's almost like they're being held hostage and you can see it in their eyes in every scene, despite being incredible actors in their own right, people with tremendous skill and capability and clearly professionals.

(04:51):
You can just kind of look past that and see the soulless performance in their eyes and just how they're, they all stand around and go, I, I made a mistake. 41 00:05:00,874.999 --> 00:05:02,045 I have to fire my agent.
So anyway, after Perry wakes up from her whatever the fuck, who knows, she's been missing for seven years.
.999We start in the hospital, she goes home with her parents. 44 00:05:11,634.999 --> 00:05:17,685 And they try to reintegrate into life after having been gone for seven years.

(05:17):
She takes a walk around at night and There's some kid doing parkour on the rooftops of his house in this neighborhood. 46 00:05:28,305.1 --> 00:05:39,945 If you've listened in chronological order, it's like this kid watched jujitsu and saw all the flippy spinny kick moves they were doing there and was like, Oh man, I gotta try that.

(05:40):
The only place I can go to possibly learn how to do the jumpy spinny kicks is on the roof of my own house, which let's back up a little bit.
This is an affluent.
Very white suburban development that scene takes place in.
.001So there's exactly zero chance that a kid doing backflips on his roof at midnight wouldn't draw a crowd of at least a dozen concerned citizens, probably a cop car or two, and several dickheads yelling at him to jump. 51 00:06:08,984.999 --> 00:06:15,535 So, 15 minutes into episode 1, this show requires a huge suspension of disbelief.

(06:16):
Way too much.
The show's already lost me.
After we see this kid jumping around on his roof, we realize that doesn't matter.
.999It's just a way to introduce this guy is a fucking edgelord.
He's just some kid.
He doesn't really matter.
So, the mystery at the center of this show.
is what happened to Prairie Johnson in the seven years that she's been gone.

(06:39):
So rather than, you know, explore that mystery and really start to peel back some of the layers of what happened, perhaps seek counseling, some therapy, talk with her family, any of the healthy things that a normal human would do, instead, Prairie starts a video diary.
Filming herself under her sheets, kind of an ASMR vibe, and honestly, she probably could have been huge on TikTok if she had just waited a few more years.

(07:05):
This show came out in like, I want to say 2016, 2017, so she had stayed missing, hadn't resurfaced for a few more years.
could have been an internet sensation, made millions, and we wouldn't even have this terrible show to talk about.
So I guess it's a win for me.
But as she's starting to reintegrate into the world, uh, she's immediately thwarted by her parents not letting her have internet access.

(07:28):
So, This is a side note here.
Her parents are in their 70s, and the show makes sure to tell us that when she went missing, Prairie was 21 years old.
So now, I need to ask the question, why in the fuck did her parents have internet restrictions on this fully grown woman? There's a story there, one that I think we need to explore. 69 00:07:48,354.999 --> 00:07:53,105 What did they catch her doing? Something ridiculously suspicious and shady had to have happened.

(07:53):
.999Um, child smuggling, perhaps, uh, drug trafficking, maybe, maybe she had his, uh, MySpace page where she was trying to sell herself.
I don't know. 72 00:08:06,39.999 --> 00:08:17,710 The flip side of this is that this show really is bold in demonstrating the fact that these elderly people know enough to have internet restrictions in place just really highlights it.

(08:17):
Thank you.
The pitfalls of teaching old people how to use technology.
When will we learn? We need to not let old people know how to use modern things.
Every time old people get their hands on new technology, it inevitably gets ruined.
That's why the world is a cesspool of toxicity online. 78 00:08:34,69.999 --> 00:08:39,520 Because we let old people learn how to use the internet, and now, now we can't have nice things.

(08:39):
So after a failed attempt at starting a vlog, Prairie decides that she's gonna go analog and start a storytime cult in her, uh, ran in her little suburban development.
.999So she recruits, uh, Jumpy Flippy Kid, uh, a couple other random high schoolers, and Phyllis from the office where she can tell them her story.

(08:59):
.999I guess it's a good consolation prize? In terms of, you know, uh, an audience for your insanity, why you would feel the need to divulge this to five random strangers is beyond me.
The show goes to great pains to show And with some tremendous acting.
The actors that play her parents, that they have this true love.

(09:23):
I'm going to be clear with you, Britt Marling is a terrible actress.
.999I don't find anything that she does believable, I don't find any of it compelling, it pains me to watch. 86 00:09:31,489.999 --> 00:09:35,780 And the fact that she is the centerpiece of this whole show is endlessly frustrating. 87 00:09:35,999.999 --> 00:09:40,010 But again, there is a wonderfully talented cast around her.
And so her parents play the emotion of having lost a child.

(09:45):
And having had that person be missing for seven years only to resurface in your life and do an incredible job showing what that pain looks like.
But, they're, again, Matt, like every other decent actor in this show, they're wildly underutilized, stuffed to the side.
They're making Brit look bad, by comparison, so we have to keep them off screen.

(10:06):
And so instead of talking to her mom and dad, who love her very much, even though they have some weird quirks about being online, instead of talking to them in a healthy way about what happened to her, she instead divulges her secret to her random little story time cult.
When Brit pulls her cult people together, we really see a breakfast club assortment of tropes here.

(10:27):
You've got the jumpy flippy bad boy, you've got the brainiac, the gay one, the nerd, and the spinster.
And, and I'm not joking here.
All of these characters are played remarkably one dimensionally.
.999The description I've just given you for these five people is what you're going to get if you watch the entirety of the show.
.999There is nothing more to any of these characters.

(10:49):
.9995They're all one note, one dimension. 100 00:10:52,354.9995 --> 00:10:59,245 And again, you have to remember, only Brit Marling is allowed to play a character that has more than one dimension.
Or at least try.
And it's really weird.
So you decide that there's, this is taking place in a very affluent white suburban development.

(11:10):
And they're, they sit around in the roof or in the attic of an unfinished home.
Why does it take place in an unfinished house? Frankly, I feel like they were squatting there.
I don't think that for all the Netflix money they had, I think they blew it all on good actors that they don't use in the show.
And instead, had to have a set where they were just like, Oh, fuck it, that house is, no one's working on that house right now.

(11:32):
Let's just go in, we'll get our shot, we'll get the fuck out. 109 00:11:35,744.999 --> 00:11:38,445 So, it's all very, very strange.
And I had to ask myself, You know, what is it that's so compelling about this mysterious pretty white girl? And there it is.
That's all it is.
It is just this mysterious pretty white girl lured people in.
And I get it.
.999We've all been there.

(11:54):
I mean, shit, I've lost track of the number of cults I've joined trying to get laid. 116 00:11:58,89.999 --> 00:12:00,495 Saying it out loud Makes perfect sense.
So, we get our backstory.
And the fact that this is a story within a story, a little bit irksome, not a big fan of this trope, but, you know, shitty movies love it, so here we are.
We've got our story within a story, and we have our nice little flashback. 120 00:12:16,784.999 --> 00:12:24,710 It turns out, That our, our heroine, the most important woman in the world, used to be a little rich girl in Russia.

(12:25):
She was involved in a car crash, had a near death experience where she almost drowns. 122 00:12:29,859.999 --> 00:12:44,350 And there's some blah blah yadda yadda about near death experiences, trying to couch it in terms of this pseudoscience nonsense, but, yeah, near death experiences in and of themselves are just pseudoscience.
So this show is building a foundation where it's gonna talk about spiritualism, through a lens of go fuck yourself.

(12:54):
.999Anyway, so in her near death experience, Prairie gets saved by an intergalactic old woman dressed like a Romani stereotype in a cosmic house of mirrors, who I'm just gonna call Esmeralda the Angel. 125 00:13:06,649.999 --> 00:13:12,500 In exchange for sparing her life, this eldritch gypsy rips her eyeball, rips Prairie's eyeballs out, making her blind.
So after recovering his now blind daughter, Her Russian father is like, Ugh, get the fuck out of here.

(13:19):
Blind kids? Get I can't have that.
.999So he smuggles he gets her out of the country, dumps her in an American boarding school for the blind, and establishes himself as a total dick.
So we cut to her growing up and being an adult in America, a blind woman living in the city.
And she ends up meeting Uh, Jason Isaacs, who I'm going to refer to as Dr.

(13:42):
Evil because he leans so hard into this ridiculous, ludicrous stereotype.
He is the worst scientist ever because of the fact that he has hitched his wagon to the pseudoscience of near death experiences.
And he's got a bad case of the ethical oopsies.
Uh, spoiler alert, he's the guy who kidnaps her for seven years.

(14:04):
Now, he tells her about working in an operating room and hearing a whooshing sound when someone flatlined and another whooshing sound when the heart restarted.
Instead of acknowledging that operating rooms have very specific airflow setups to ensure that a sterile field is maintained.
Or any of the equipment that is on during a surgery, making any degree of noise or background or anything.

(14:31):
This man is absolutely convinced that he heard the soul leaving the body and then coming right back into it. 139 00:14:39,94.999 --> 00:14:48,795 And he has the audacity to say, quote, I did what any good scientist would do, and dedicated his life to studying pseudoscience.
Um, so I'm going to stop you right there, but you absolutely did not do what any good scientist would do.

(14:55):
Might I recommend reading The Demon Haunted World? Uh, Carl Sagan has some great insights in critical thinking.
.999Specifically around near death experiences and how to understand what is a real science and how a real scientist would approach these things instead of, uh, putting your conclusion at the front and then finding the evidence to support it along the way.

(15:15):
So as she's struggling with her life in America, uh, there's one scene that particularly struck me where we watch Perry Johnson as this person As a blind woman, living in New York City, taking the Staten Island Ferry.
And she sits, it is painfully long.

(15:38):
.999It's almost as if they just set the camera on her for the entire boat ride. 146 00:15:42,589.999 --> 00:15:44,469.999 And you watch it in real time. 147 00:15:44,890.001 --> 00:15:46,59.999 It's incredible. 148 00:15:47,79.999 --> 00:16:05,844.999 And during this sequence, There's the Statue of Liberty behind her, all framed and lit up, and her just looking very sad because, you know, goddammit, it's really hard if you are white, attractive, and coming from an affluent background to make it in America. 149 00:16:06,644.999 --> 00:16:36,210 But, even after all of the punch in the face, all of the subtlety of a sledgehammer, That this scene is played out with I couldn't help but feel like it was about to break out into a Zoloft commercial at any point where this woman just Sad staring into her into the ground and a voice comes on over the background If you or any loved ones experience sexual dysfunction anxiety or any other symptoms while taking Zoloft, please talk to your doctor It's fucking ludicrous.

(16:36):
And the fact, again, that this show has absolutely no respect for its audience is it shows that it lingers too long, overstays its welcome, and again, yes, I see the irony. 151 00:16:47,369.999 --> 00:16:48,479.999 So moving on from this.
Alright.
.999So, Prairie gets kidnapped by Dr. 154 00:16:52,659.999 --> 00:16:52,979.999 Evil.
And he takes her back to his remote mountainside cabin in an underground laboratory, which is totally different from a volcano lair, Go fuck yourself.

(17:01):
He locks her up inside his underground human terrarium so he can experiment on her.
And it, it took us way too long to get to this point, right? We're, we're three, four episodes into this show, which is, each of these is an hour long.
And it took us that, that number of hours to get to our central conflict, being locked in a dungeon, experimented on by an evil scientist.

(17:23):
But, she's not alone.
In this human terrarium with her are four other people and the five of them are all locked up together In their own little chambers within the human terrarium We find out that Dr.
.999Evil's experiments are taking these people, one by one, out of the terrarium, sticking a fish tank on their heads, and repeatedly drowning them to induce near death experiences.

(17:49):
.999You know, like any good scientist would do.
So, we, we spend the nex this is the show.
Guys, at this point, from here on in, all we're doing is watching, uh, we're watching Lucius Malfoy bring a bunch of people to near death by drowning them with a fishbowl on their heads.

(18:10):
And, you know, I guess your mileage will vary.
If that's your thing, go ahead and watch the show. 167 00:18:15,104.999 --> 00:18:20,605 Otherwise, you're in for a lot of hours of just sad looking around.
Some hand wringing and questioning of, Oh, why is this happening? And then, if you're really lucky, you'll get some cutbacks to the modern time when you get to watch Prairie Johnson tell this story to five other people who are sitting around asking, Oh, wow, why did that happen? Aren't you so special for getting out of there? It's, it's a fucking slog.

(18:41):
I hate this show.
Anyway, so, we're back in, Prairie's in one of her near death experiences.
Each time she drowns, she comes back face to face with Esmerelda the Angel.
.999And we find out, over the course of God knows how many near death experiences, that Esmerelda is actually Morpheus from the Matrix. 173 00:19:04,104.999 --> 00:19:18,510 But instead of offering her a red pill and kung fu, she instead gives her a live bird, tells our intrepid heroine that If you eat the bird, it'll teach you magical interpretive dance moves, and it'll also give you recite back.

(19:18):
.999So Prairie scarfs that bird down in such a ferocious manner that frankly, it's jarring.
I thought we took a hard left into some type of horror movie.
It's aggressive.
But then, it leads us to the greatest possible.

(19:39):
So again, she eats the bird that teaches you magical interpretive dance moves.
Put a pin in that, we're gonna come back to it, because it's the only good part of the show.
.9995So, along the way, through this endless slog of drowning and resuscitation, we learn that Dr. 181 00:19:58,344.9995 --> 00:20:10,235 Evil has this magic gas that not only knocks people out, but also mind controls them so they can respond to incredibly vague commands like raise your arm or keep your chin down.

(20:10):
Which is a super convenient way to have this evil, this main antagonist character.
Be an independent person while still manipulating this unwieldy Literal fish tank rig over people's head so he can drown them over and over.
It's super convenient and the show fucking knows it. 185 00:20:32,889.999 --> 00:20:38,215 So they have the story, the the cult story time cult group Hand wave it all away.

(20:38):
But as we're watching this scene play out where Prairie tells the, the storytime cult about this fish tank and the dying experiments, the actors, you can see they can't really contain themselves because they understand it's a super bullshit plot contrivance.
And I swear to God, you can see Britt Marling glaring at them as they try so hard not to laugh.

(20:59):
It's one of the few bright spots in an otherwise abysmal, uh, abysmal TV series.
But, this is not the biggest challenge that these actors will face.
Because now we get to learn the magic interpretive dance.
And so this show has made clear rather quickly that near death experiences are definitely not hallucinations as the brain is starved for oxygen desperately trying to save itself.

(21:26):
No, no, no, no, no, no.
Near death experiences are a conduit to magic powers that can only be manifested via the power of interpretive dance.
And dear podcast listener, Thank you I respect you way too much to recommend that you watch this show.
It has no message beyond science bad, spiritualism good, and quite frankly that's how we get anti vaxxers.

(21:48):
But this magic bird dance is hands down the funniest fucking thing that I have ever seen.
It involves hissing at each other, waving spirit fingers, people slapping the shit out of themselves.
It's incredible.
.999And the way it starts out is probably the most believable this show ever gets, where Prairie Johnson wakes up and just magically start or just like a woman possessed.

(22:14):
starts screaming, winging her body all around, smacking the shit out of her chest, and hissing at the people that she's surrounded by in her human terrarium.
And they all stare at her like, what the fuck is happening? I like to believe that when this scene happened, they didn't let the other actors know about it so they can capture the most realistic reaction.

(22:35):
But oh, so good.
In that initial moment, you can see the look of true terror on the actors faces like, nooooo.
No, you can't be serious.
We're gonna all have to do this shit? This looks so fucking stupid.
.999It's so good.

(22:55):
This is the dumbest thing I've ever seen.
.999You can find it on YouTube. 209 00:23:00,34.999 --> 00:23:01,265 It's worth at least that. 210 00:23:02,234.999 --> 00:23:05,225 But, so these magic dance moves have no defined power set.
The first time they do the dance, it brings a guy back to life.
And this motherfucker, who spent a shitload of time dead, exposits to us that the dance moves can transport people BETWEEN DIMENSIONS! So this show, that has started out with a very tenuous grasp on Uh, entertainment has now flipped a switch and gone full multiverse of madness.

(23:28):
It's completely unearned, it's fucking stupid, but here we are.
So now, so now that we've got interdimensional dance magic requiring five people to execute, we've got ourselves a cult of exactly five people who hang on Prairie's every word, the stage is set for our finale.
And you might be thinking, Wow, for an eight episode series, hour long episodes each, it feels like we've just rushed into the finale, and you're, you're not wrong.

(23:57):
This show is more concerned with angsty looks, and reminding us constantly how important and cool Brit Marling is, that, that's the only thing I've really cut out.
Just know, podcast listener, I love you.
This show hates you.
So anyway, we're ready for our finale.
.999All we need is some sort of final showdown, perhaps with Dr. 221 00:24:21,554.999 --> 00:24:21,894.999 Evil.

(24:22):
You know, close the story, make him get his comeuppance.
And have full resolution for the evil that he has wrought.
Yeah, uh, the problem with that is, according to Prairie, Dr.
Evil took the rest of her magic dance troupe from the human terrarium to another dimension already. 226 00:24:39,690.1 --> 00:24:54,560 And thus, we learn that the entire time Prairie has been returned and recruiting her cult, she's just been using these people with the intent of opening a dimensional portal so she can go save her real friends.

(24:55):
which are a great representation of how cults actually work.
So we've got a half hour left of runtime, absolutely no chance for our primary antagonist to be confronted, and the show is in desperate need of a climax. 229 00:25:10,94.999 --> 00:25:21,025 Now I can promise you that you are not prepared for the wildly upsetting conclusion to this show about kidnapping, near death experiences, and dance moves that are more powerful than the infinity stones.

(25:22):
It ends with a school shooting, so with 10 minutes left until the credits roll.
We cut to a high school, and some kid decked out in body armor and a rifle decides to shoot up the school where our cult of dance fans is having lunch.
Again, if that feels really rushed, that's not me.
That's the show.
.999It realized that it ran out of money, it ran out of time, and it needed to just put its pieces in place to get to where it wants to go next season.

(25:47):
So I say it's wildly upsetting because, well, several reasons.
First, this show gives no explanation of who this person is.
It doesn't matter.
The school shooting is just an opportunity for our interpretive dance cult to do their magic dance and save the day. 239 00:26:03,174.999 --> 00:26:10,495 Clearly the writer's room forgot that their story had no climax, so they put kids and tragedy into Google and decided that the first hit is what they were going to run with.

(26:11):
Um, for perspective, this show premiered in 2016, four years after the Sandy Hook shooting.
According to Wikipedia, there were 15 school shootings in the U.
S.
in 2016. 244 00:26:22,54.999 --> 00:26:29,644.999 So this is a real trauma that leaves a lasting emotional scars on its survivors, and this show is exploiting it for cheap tension. 245 00:26:30,434.999 --> 00:26:34,555 Fuck the creators, fuck the writers, they should all feel ashamed of themselves.

(26:34):
It's It's infuriating for me.
So this kid who decides to shoot up the school corners everybody in the cafeteria and so our four heroic teams plus fellas from the office all bust out their magic dance moves.
And they know because they have been brainwashed to the point that they genuinely believe these magic dance moves have the power to heal the world or some shit.

(27:03):
Which is really undercut immediately when the kid raises his rifle and opens fire at one of them.
But he misses shooting one of our band of five heroic dancers and instead ends up shooting Perry, who is standing outside the school like a creeper and takes a bullet right in the chest.
Somehow, if this couldn't get any more offensive, being shot directly in the chest is somehow the catalyst For Perry Johnson to jump dimensions.

(27:35):
And so not only does this show and on.
A wildly, uh, nonsensical note.
.999One of the messages that could be taken away from this is that school shootings are actually a good thing.
Because that's how you end up transcending your dimension and moving somewhere better.
That's a really fucking dangerous message. 257 00:27:55,689.999 --> 00:27:58,110 Now, I'm, I'm an atheist. 258 00:27:58,189.999 --> 00:28:01,910 I, I do not believe in any sort of spiritualism.

(28:02):
And to promote this in a way, That actually says that dying is a good thing, and you can transcend the reality that you're in, is really fucking dangerous.
Once again, fuck the creator, fuck the writers.
Everybody involved should be ashamed of themselves.
Um, the show ends on that cliffhanger where Prairie jumps dimensions and for reasons I can't even begin to fathom, Netflix gave the green light for part two of this bullshit.

(28:32):
.999Um, and part two gets really fucking wild.
If you thought this was part two Insane and nonsensical.
Part 2 has people being used for computing power to solve an augmented reality game.
It's got plants growing out of people's ears.
And even more bullshit spiritual fantasy.
So, maybe someday I'll review Part 2. 269 00:28:50,364.999 --> 00:28:52,725 But for now, my rage meter has reached peak.

(28:53):
We're gonna close the door on the OA Part 1.
So I'll close with a few thoughts here.
This show is absolute garbage.
What's disappointing, more than the pseudoscience, the horribly contrived plot points, and the blatant disrespect for school shooting victims, is the fact that there are some legitimately engaging performances by some wonderful actors.
.9Scott Walker, in particular, like I said, is heartbreaking as a father who just got his daughter back after seven years, only for her to come home a totally different person as a result of her trauma.

(29:22):
Underneath all the lunacy, there are actually great ideas and interesting themes, but instead of exploring any of that, we get an unintentional meditation on how vulnerable people join cults because they want to learn some sweet magic.
It's sad.
.9625Instead of being anything interesting, instead of being anything worthy of ire and rage, this show just It's an exercise in futility. 278 00:29:49,235.0625 --> 00:29:50,995.0625 It's an exercise in nonsense. 279 00:29:51,45.0625 --> 00:29:57,485.0615 And it sets itself up with this hero in Prairie Johnson who is completely infallible. 280 00:29:57,975.0615 --> 00:30:10,155.0625 Even when she's put five people in mortal danger and taught them that the only way to save themselves is by bird hissing and slap fighting their way through a magic dance song. 281 00:30:10,805.0625 --> 00:30:12,465.0625 A magical interpretive dance. 282 00:30:13,125.0625 --> 00:30:18,925.0625 Instead of there being any real consequence to her, her doing this. 283 00:30:18,975.0625 --> 00:30:22,215.0625 It all works out being in service of this higher power. 284 00:30:23,95.0625 --> 00:30:29,5.0615 So it's a very, very dangerous, a very dumb, and a very sad show. 285 00:30:29,425.0625 --> 00:30:32,905.0625 I, I genuinely dislike it. 286 00:30:33,235.0625 --> 00:30:42,795.0625 This has been remarkably painful for me to go back through, but that bird dance, man, that fucking bird dance is so good. 287 00:30:43,275.0625 --> 00:30:49,905.0625 Just, it's, oh, I can't, I can't do it justice in an audio only format. 288 00:30:49,915.0625 --> 00:30:51,335.0615 You need to go check it out. 289 00:30:52,285.0615 --> 00:31:08,260.0625 But, um, so I, I always come back to what was the point? And the point of this show is just to let you know that Brit Marling is the most important, most special, most infallible person in the world. 290 00:31:08,600.0625 --> 00:31:10,390.0625 And she has a TV show to prove it, guys. 291 00:31:11,990.0615 --> 00:31:12,530.0615 Fuck. 292 00:31:13,430.0615 --> 00:31:14,220.0625 Oh, man. 293 00:31:14,990.0625 --> 00:31:23,585.0625 Uh, how would I rate this? Well, so how would I rate this? Um, I can't give this a conventional rating because no scale really seems appropriate. 294 00:31:23,955.0625 --> 00:31:29,725.0625 So instead, I'm going to give this a solid, I'd rather have an all powerful cosmic being rip out my eyes. 295 00:31:30,455.0625 --> 00:31:50,55.0625 And who should watch this show? Nobody, nobody should watch this because it's got a bad, a bad message hidden under all sorts of just misinformation and nonsense with very little redeeming entertaining value. 296 00:31:50,805.0625 --> 00:31:58,915.0625 The, the well acted parts are not that good and the bad parts, quite frankly, aren't bad enough to be that entertaining. 297 00:31:59,435.0625 --> 00:32:01,275.0625 There's only one thing worth watching. 298 00:32:01,820.0625 --> 00:32:03,940.0625 And it is that fucking bird dance. 299 00:32:04,20.0625 --> 00:32:05,470.0625 So you can just get that on YouTube. 300 00:32:05,930.0625 --> 00:32:06,860.0625 Don't watch this show. 301 00:32:07,190.0625 --> 00:32:08,550.0625 It's, it's garbage. 302 00:32:09,110.0625 --> 00:32:12,50.0625 And so that concludes our screening of The OA Part 1. 303 00:32:12,540.0625 --> 00:32:17,680.0615 We're gonna bring on the house lights back up, close the curtains, and uh, yeah. 304 00:32:17,800.0615 --> 00:32:18,510.0615 The show's over. 305 00:32:18,960.0615 --> 00:32:20,750.0625 Thank you guys as always for joining us. 306 00:32:20,750.0625 --> 00:32:29,160.0625 I apologize for this being a bit less funny than I really wanted, but I, I hope you found something to enjoy. 307 00:32:30,150.0625 --> 00:32:31,650.0625 The next one will be funnier, I promise. 308 00:32:31,680.0625 --> 00:32:32,790.0625 We'll have a palette cleanser. 309 00:32:33,300.0625 --> 00:32:34,660.0625 We will do another Nick Cage movie. 310 00:32:34,660.0625 --> 00:32:35,720.0625 That's always good for a laugh. 311 00:32:36,430.0625 --> 00:32:39,590.0625 Yeah, but in the meantime, thank you for listening. 312 00:32:39,960.0615 --> 00:32:41,370.0615 I appreciate you being here. 313 00:32:41,420.0615 --> 00:32:43,480.0615 And as always, I'll see you in the next one.