If people are having these out-of-body experiences—they can remember the details of hospital rooms and spaces that they couldn’t possibly have seen—is something leaving the body? Where does it go? How does it return? That area felt really like an interesting place to set a science fiction landscape in.

In terms of philosophy, later as we were editing the show [we read] Martha Nussbaum’s work. She has this book called Upheavals of Thought talking about how emotion has been disregarded in philosophy as a feminine afterthought, the important thing is more masculine, linear logic and reasoning. She’s coming in and being like, “No, emotions are incredibly valuable. They determine what is important to us and what direction you should go in as a being in order to flourish.”

I think that dovetails with a lot of the ideas of the show in terms of a return to movement and instinct and feeling. These things are all very important, and we maybe have let go of them as technology takes us further and further into living just from the neck up.

Kornhaber: A lot of people have watched The OA and seen Christ allegories or seen echoes of Russian folktales. Is any of that in your head as you’re writing the show?

Marling: Certainly the Russian fairytales, we were reading those at the time. I don’t know if you’ve ever read, for instance, the Russian fairytale Vasilisa. It’s basically Cinderella, but it’s the version of Cinderella before it was processed through a more Judeo-Christian interpretation. There’s no glass slipper, for instance. It’s about this young woman who has to go into the woods and encounter this character Baba Yaga, who isn’t a fairy godmother and isn’t a witch either. Through the girl’s cleverness and goodness she manages to get what she needs from Baba Yaga. And eventually she goes and wins the heart of the prince, all through her own effort and agency.

When that story gets retold and packaged further down the line in time, it becomes a very different story about the mythology of makeovers—your fairy godmother descending and giving you the most amazing dress, and then you win the prince. I think in general we have to go back and find the most ancient seed of a story because there’s usually a greater wisdom there. Those early Russian fairytales certainly entered the mythology of the story, which was more about a young woman’s agency than passivity in response to trauma.

Kornhaber: Why have Prairie be from Russia in the first place?

Marling: We both had seen the documentary on Pussy Riot, and that was really illuminating, hearing those young women speak so clearly and passionately. Also [Russia] is a landscape that feels easy to set this in because—at least from the outsider perspective—it has these extremes: the extreme of colds and the extreme of the oligarch families. When the OA begins telling her story it has the kind of heightened quality, the way kids daydream. It just felt right.