The first season of The OA debuted on Netflix in December of 2016. Marling and Bamanglij had previously made three moody, mystical films together (Another Earth, The Sound of My Voice, and The East) and Netflix was in a brief, intense period of signing major deals with emerging filmmakers in search of a hit to follow House of Cards. The studio signed up The OA and Stranger Things at roughly the same time, perhaps making a play for the genre fans who were flocking to Game of Thrones. But while Stranger Things, which debuted first, hit in a massive way, scratching a nostalgic itch for a generation raised on Spielberg flicks, The OA became a far more peculiar cult object. The scope of the show was more ambitious—it moved between Russian mansions and suburban America, the past and the present, and with two separate casts acting on two separate planes. It was also more obscure and inaccessible. And then came the season one finale—one of the more controversial episodes of television to air in recent years.

Before we get into that finale, we need a brief overview of the first season. Brit Marling plays Prairie Johnson, a blind woman who was adopted as a child when she was still known as Nina Azarova, the daughter of a rich Russian businessman (he died suddenly, leaving her an orphan). When the show begins, Prairie has been missing for seven years, but has recently returned home with a remarkable story and a remarkable development: She can see again. She meets a group of teenage boys (including a sensitive transgender boy, a straight A student, a violent troublemaker, and a troubled stoner) and their teacher, Betty Broderick-Allen (later known as BBA), to whom she starts to tell her life story in the attic of an abandoned model home. It would be impossible to sum up all the twists and turns, but here’s the short version. Prairie was kidnapped, in New York City, by a man named Hap (Jason Isaacs) who became interested in her after learning that she went blind due to a terrible bus accident in which she almost died.

Hap collects (read: abducts) people who have had near death experiences, or NDEs, as he believes that they have acquired some essential knowledge about the boundaries between this universe and other dimensions that may exist. He keeps his prisoners in his basement, in a glass tank that looks like a giant terrarium. Also in Hap’s dungeon when Prairie arrives are Scott (Will Brill), Rachel (Sharon Van Etten) and Homer (Emory Cohen). Another prisoner, a Brazilian woman named Renata (Paz Vega) arrives a few years later. Hap tortures his victims by nearly killing them while monitoring their brains, his attempt to replicate NDEs in real time. He puts his subjects in a helmet that slowly drowns them before draining at the last second, and it is through these experiments that the five prisoners come to learn “the movements,” or a series of modern dance sequences that they receive from a celestial apparition right as they are about to die. These movements are never treated as absurd or invented, but instead of truths revealed right on the brink of death, the physical manifestation of the white light. The movements are rhythmic and transfixing, involving a lot of gut punching and spirit fingers and deep sighing and tossing of the limbs. They have powers, when done in tandem. They can bring a person back to life, heal disease, even transport a person between astral planes. Still with me?

At some point, Hap decides he wants to use the movements to “jump” to another dimension (jumping requires five people doing them at once), so he threatens his captives with death if they don’t help him travel through space and time. Meanwhile, Prairie has escaped, and convinced the local boys and BBA back home that she is an OA, or “Original Angel,” who is destined to return to the site of her capture and save Homer (with whom she is in love) and the others from Hap’s dastardly plans. She teaches her new audience the movements, in case they need to use them for transport. What they end up using them for, in the season’s final moments, is diverting the attention of a school shooter who walks into the cafeteria with an automatic weapon, distracting him long enough so that a janitor can tackle him to the floor. As the shooter goes down, his rifle ejects a single bullet, which goes through a glass window in the side of the building and right into The OA’s heart. End scene.

