The Owful Anding
The last fifteen minutes of a movie or TV show has a disproportionate effect on how I enjoy said movie or TV show.
This is rarely the case with books, strangely enough. I always find myself speeding up my reading as I near the end of the book and generally the final page, the final sentence, isn’t going to greatly pivot my appreciation of the text. But for moving pictures, it’s different. The figures and units change but let’s say the final 10% of what I see accounts for around 40% of how I feel at the end of a cinematic/televisual viewing.
The first season of The OA was destroyed by the final scenes in its last episode. I’m not going to go into detail but let me say that while I enjoyed the unfurling mysteries of season one it all fell apart after the credits started to roll. It’s not a story that ends with the main character waking up and discovering it was all a dream after all. But its in the same ballpark, playing rounders instead of baseball. Either way, I felt like I’d been hit by a bat when the twist/revelation/conclusion occurs.
So when The OA Season Two came out a few years later, I kept my distance. Today I had some time to kill and had a canter through the plot synopsis for Season Two. You ever felt truly vindicated? Like an Andy Dufresne from Shawshank Redemption level of vindication? Except I didn’t need to crawl through a river of shit to get mine. I just read the following line from episode four “Chapter 4: SYZYGY”:
Prairie is strapped to a chair on the stage where a telepathic octopus, Old Night, straps his tentacles onto Prairie and has her communicate messages via his telepathy.
And with that, I’d invested 0% of the effort and gained 100% of the satisfaction knowing I made the right decision.
