Screenshot via trailer
Apologies to everyone who sat down with their families during the holidays in 2016 to casually check out the first season of Netflix's The OA. The trailer may have borrowed the bikes and the weird helmet thing from Stranger Things, but if you plonked down next your mom expecting another light Netflix romp or whatever, good lord, were you in for a rude awakening.Brit Marling and Zal Batmanglij's sci-fi series was deeply fucking weird. Random flashbacks to 1980s Russia? Synchronized dances that open interdimensional portals? A weird witch who makes you eat birds? The batshit narrative made a lot of people—including us here at VICE—write the whole thing off as a mess. But as confounding as it was, it was also exhilarating.To this day, it's still one of the most original and compelling seasons of TV that Netflix has ever produced. And now, The OA is coming back to blow our minds and piss us off once again. On Wednesday, Netflix announced that the show's second season is finally due out next month. And from the look of the first trailer, the thing is going to be even wilder than season one.The trailer opens with OA, played by Marling, waking up in a hospital after taking a bullet at the end of season one. Except this isn't a normal hospital—it's in some kind of alternate universe version of San Francisco where Barack Obama isn't president! And then she teams up with a detective to solve some kind of noir-style mystery! And then there's more dancing! Still with us? Great, because it just gets more goddamn bonkers from there.According to Entertainment Weekly, the plot will apparently be split between two parallel universes, following OA in her new world and the other characters in the old one. There's also some kind of haunted house subplot? Here's the show's official synopsis—good luck making sense of it:
Advertisement
What does it all mean? Who knows! We'll have to wait until the new season drops March 22 to find out—or we won't, since The OA isn't the kind of show that actually gives us any goddamn answers. One thing's for sure: If you can restrain yourself from destroying your laptop in a fit of brain-addled rage and actually watch the thing, it'll be a hell of a ride.Sign up for our newsletter to get the best of VICE delivered to your inbox daily.The “mind-bending” story returns with The OA Part II, which follows OA as she navigates a new dimension, one in which she had a completely different life as a Russian heiress, and one in which she once again finds herself as Hap’s captive. Part II introduces Karim Washington, a private detective tasked with finding a missing teen, Michelle Vu. His path crosses with OA, as they try to solve the mystery of Michelle’s whereabouts and a house on Nob Hill connected to the disappearance of several teenagers. Meanwhile, back in the first dimension, BBA, Angie and the boys find themselves on a journey to understand the truth behind OA’s story and the incredible realities she described.