If ‘The OA’ Season 1 Finale Tested Your Faith, Season 2 Will Restore It

Very mild spoilers for The OA: Part II ahead.

There’s an episode in Season 2 of The OA, Netflix’s mysterious drama, where six characters camp out in a church for a night. The youth pastor’s daughter invites them to stay, because her father says the church is open “to any pilgrims of faith passing through.” She pauses. “That’s what you are, isn’t it?”

The OA, both the show and the character, has always asked for faith. Creators Brit Marling and Zal Batmanglij tested that faith with the Season 1 finale, which implied that protagonist Prairie Johnson, also known as the OA, was a fraud, and that the fantastical, 8-episode tale she had spun was in fact, all a lie. The ending divided critics, and I admit, I was a non-believer: I only stand for “All Just a Dream”-ism when Connor4Real does it.

But on Friday—nearly two-and-a-half years later—my faith was restored with The OA: Part II. Forty-two minutes into the 65-minute premiere, you’ll get the answers you’ve been waiting for since 2016. You also, naturally, get a helluva lot more questions. Chapter 1, “Angel of Death,” starts off slow. We meet a new character named Karim Washington (Kingsley Ben-Adir), a private detective hired to find a missing girl named Michelle. Karim’s sleuthing leads him to “the puzzle,” an augmented reality mobile game that’s all the rage with teens. OK, sure, but why should we care? Who are these people? Why is Zendaya here? Where’s Prairie, and Homer, and Phyllis from The Office? Have faith, says The OA, and you’ll be rewarded.

Since it’s in the trailer, I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say: Yes, Prairie (played by Marling) jumped dimensions at the end of Season 1. Yes, she did spend seven years trapped in a basement with four other people while a mad scientist (Jason Isaacs) experimented on them. Chapter 2, “Treasure Island,” offers a few more oh-holy-shit type of answers that I won’t spoil—but I will say it was the kind that had me expanding my hands in front of my forehead in the universal gesture for “mind blown.” (Pro tip: Rewatch Season 1, Episode 4 to get the full, mind-blowing experience.)

There’s plenty of room for cynicism in this season, too. The listeners to her tale from Season 1—a group of teenage boys and a middle-aged teacher—don’t yet know Prairie survived the shooting at their school, where she was seemingly the only victim, thanks to a dance they did to distract the attacker. They are asked, again, for faith. The troubled bad boy Steve (Patrick Gibson) chooses to believe, while the intellectual good boy Alfonso (Brandon Perea) chooses to not. Detective Karim, who teams up with Prairie later in the season, is another skeptic, focused only on his job and questioning the magic he encounters along the way.

Marling has said that she and longtime collaborator Batmanglij didn’t intend for their show to be religious so much as fairytale-like. But it’s hard not to see the show as a spiritual journey, even if it’s not strictly Christian. For one, “the OA” literally stands for “original angel.” For another, Marling’s New Age-y, crystal-loving, Matcha-drink vibe is hard to ignore—she and Batmanglij spent a summer as “freegans,” or people who eat food out of dumpsters to protest consumerism. Indeed, Phyllis Smith’s character this season is accused of recruiting students into a cult, and it’s easy to see why: All this multiple-lives-dimension-hopping mojo is starting to sound an awful lot like Scientology.

I say this not as a knock—these overtones add a layer to The OA that is rarely seen on TV. There are exceptions—The Leftovers, God Friended Me, The Path and Touched by an Angel come to mind—but most shows, especially sci-fi shows, default to secularism by offering black-and-white, yes-or-no rules for their universe. It’s clear The OA, while providing some answers, has no such plans. Either you believe in the divine, ancient forces at play, or you don’t. This puzzle will never be fully unraveled, and whether or not you accept that will determine whether or not you enjoy the ride.

At one point in Part II, we meet a giant talking octopus. The six episodes made available to the press offered no explanation for this tentacled prophet, and to be honest, it kind of lost me. But if The OA wants me to have faith in a slightly perverted old sea creature, I’m willing to give it a try. They’ve proved me wrong before.

Stream The OA on Netflix