I just finished watching the last episode of The Netflix series The OA.

PREPOSTEROUS.

Discuss.

JBArk

Ok, maybe the OP was a little vague, or even glib.

I bring it up here because it is a show about inter dimensional travel, NDEs and a handful of other things that might interest people here.

But... here is something to chew on:

(SPOILER ALERT): It is chocked full of amateurish plot holes and exceptionally lazy and thoughtless writing; as one - among MANY - examples: the OA makes an old family recipe for her captor: HE buys all the ingredients for it from a grocery list that HE makes (he even tells us so in the dialogue), then he WATCHES her make it, then has an anaphylactic attack after tasting and nearly dies, telling her after that he is DEATHLY ALLERGIC to - TOMATOES... ???!!!????

Ok, for good measure, one more: They are in isolated chambers and cannot touch each other, yet she manages to scarify her her back with complex symbols between her shoulder blades - even if years of yoga had made her EXCEPTIONALLY flexible, there are no mirrors in the cells for her to see what she is etching in an impossibly unreachable place... H

How does any of this get by: two writers, several producers and execs, the execs at Netflix (who funded the script), the makeup artist, the actors, and EVERYONE ON SET??!! Infuriating that this sloppiness can get serious money...

And yet another one: in the last episode the sheriff comes to visit to ask Dr Hap if he will help his ailing wife. The Dr hears him knocking, disarms the alarm and unbolts several locks from the door, establishing that NO ONE gets in without him letting them in, EVER. In the very same episode, the sheriff WANDERS INTO the SUPERSECURE holding, without tripping the alarm, and SURPRISES Dr Hap by sneaking up to him and putting a gun to his head... (??!!??)

There is at least one of these per episode.

JBArk

Jbark. I like your critique. Terrible narrative faux pas in my opinion. It really annoys me when things like this happen. Especially in big budget productions. When i watched Interstellar and the guys truck got a flat tyre and then the truck was ok again. Ruined the whole film for me and pretty much bummed me out for the following months. Even years later if anyone ever mentioned that they had watched Interstellar it would put me into a complete headspin and i would revisit certain factual errors that occurred in the film and get then very emotionally charged with whoever try to imbue it with any kind of merit.

So. In the spirit of the Nexus of offering succour to those in need, succour is what you will recieve......

In relation to the carving the complex symbols in her own back situation i will try to offer a solution. They were locked up for a long time so perhaps she could have wedged a sharp object into a nook or a cranny and manouvered her back against the writing implement while another prisoner guided her. They had plenty of time (years) to perfect this technique.

I don't have an answer to the tomato scene and to be quite honest i am ashamed to say that i didn't notice the grocery conundrum. But... didn't she make the whole story up anyway? So perhaps the holes in the narrative arn't so bad as it is quite difficult to lie in that kind of detail without slipping up and we really should be critiquing the characters in the series for being a bit dim and getting sucked in without showing any form of critical thinking when she recounted this series of events.

Hey hug46 - long time!

Well... you just hit the nail on the head. Good writing fills in gaps. All they had to do as show one teeny scene of her perfecting that technique to make it credible. An audience will accept nearly anything, so long as you set the rules and are internally consistent. That's the problem with bad writing - it breaks its own rules. David Lynch makes strange films in which the impossible happens - but he sets it up, writes his own rules, then sticks to them.

And yeah, Interstellar had as many holes as there are stars in the sky...

Back to The OA:

It's actually not even clear if she makes the whole thing up or not. She wakes up in a white room after being shot and carted away in an ambulance in the last scene; is the white room a hospital room? The afterlife? The other dimension she was trying to get to? Only if the last scenario is true can we say that the story she tells is true. It's unclear. Further muddying the story is the dream she has that brings her to the school where she gets 'columbined'.

Lack of clarity is definitely problematic. Loose and improbable premises also. But You can forgive all of that if at the very least the thing is internally consistent. And The OA is not - in addition to being starkly unclear and having a weak, unconvincing and unsupported premise, it breaks its own rules...

So, back to an earlier question - how the hell does this get funding!!?? I can wonder that about other shows because they are uninteresting and uninspired, but at least they are (usually) CONSISTENT, and respect the fundamentals of storytelling. there is a very big difference between a boring story and one that just outright doesn't work...

Sorry if I am ranting a bit...

JBArk