Nina Azarova & Karim’s Calling
OA happens upon Haps former romantic partner and fellow traveler at her family’s club. The traveler teaches her that she, Hap, and Homer, after traveling together, are linked, whether they like it or not. One dimension can echo other dimensions. It conspires to bring these people together in each dimension,. Simply put, everything is connected. To leave an echo is dangerous. You can find yourself inside an unrecognizable life, and shatter yourself.
The traveler says OA needs Hap, that he is her shadow. The traveler only encountered Hap so that she could give her instructions. She must become one with Nina again. Going back to the time when their memories were shared before the bus crash by facing her fear. So, OA drowns herself in her bathtub. She wakes up to witness her life if she’d grown up without getting on that bus, and the two become intertwined
OA visits Hap as Nina upon her own free will after the two souls become one. OA is, essentially, undercover, completely confident and at ease, even telling dirty, Russian jokes. However, an impromptu kiss brings Homer’s memory fully back of the first dimension back. OA uses Nina’s memories as leverage, as she knows more about Percy now than Hap. She essentially interrogates Percy, explaining to him that she and Pierre discovered an eternal object, the house that wanted to show them something, citing that Percy’s book suggested that certain metaphysical secrets could be glimpses inside the pane of the madness, or the rose window and explain why the construction workers restoring the house were going mad. She hired him, but she left to attend to her father’s affairs after his death. Percy betrayed Nina. He planted the seed, so to speak, in Ruskin’s subconscious, during therapy, to create the game to lure people to the house to find out more about it.
Meanwhile, Karim loses faith in OA, and they go their separate ways. After admitting she’s an interdimensional traveler, Karim regrets breaking her out of the clinic.
“I’m asking you to imagine that reality is stranger and more complicated than you or I could possibly know. Then, sometimes we get glimpses of it in dreams or in déjà vu when you feel like what’a happening now has happened before or maybe it has, but a little differently, and somewhere else.” – OA
After discovering that the MI5 agent who used to work for C.U.R.I. was killed after exposing a video showing Michelle collapse after seeing the other side of the rose window, Karim’s scales the house a final time. Although Ruskin is the obvious suspect in the former employee’s death, The Voi could still very well be behind this.
Now that Karim has the video evidence that OA gave him tracking Ruskin to Michelle’s disappearance, Karim visits him, who admits to knowingly letting these kids play a game that causes death, insisting he has legal immunity. We finally see Michelle with her grandmother at Ruskin’s. Why hire Karim for the job, then? Well, her grandmother claims that’s only her body, and her consciousness is in the house. Furthermore, there was a fourth pattern that emerged in the C.U.R.I. dream study patterns. An image: the face of Karim Washington.
“The house is calling you. You, and only you. I don’t know what it wants to show you, but I have a feeling it’s akin to what the astronauts saw when they looked at earth from the moon. It’s an overview.” Ruskin is referring to the beauty in Rilke’s first poem of his “Duino Elegies.”
Elias, BBA, & Homer’s NDA Revelation
The team the Tree Internet told OA to gather? They’re coming, with the help of a push in the right direction from a disembodied Rachel. BBA, the kids, and the enigmatic Elias (Riz Ahmed), who ultimately proves to be an ally in the fight against interdimensional evil in Part II, are closing in on the Treasure Island clinic. How they’ll jump dimensions remains to be seen, but Elias knows way more than, possibly, any character introduced on “The OA,” to date. He may have another method besides The Robots that can get them there. Where is there, there, anyways?
“What is a space? A house? A school? A church? A motel? A clinic? Part of you knows. Part of you has always known, hasn’t it?” – Elias
This leads us to our final revelation: Homer’s NDE in Part I had far-reaching implications for how we interpret “The OA’s” interdimensional landscape. Homer described a sterile crawl space, a suspended bridge out the window, and repeatedly hearing the name Dr. Roberts as he ran through a hospital, naked, before swallowing a sea anemone whole out of a five-sided fish tank. As we navigate the Treasure Island clinic in Part II, it becomes evident that it is the exact location of Homer’s NDE, making the new dimension one that exists solely as Homer’s NDE, explaining why he is the only one oblivious to the interdimensional conspiracies happening around him this reality. This would mean that this dimension exists approximately seven years in the future from the first dimension in Part II, and that every dimension is interconnected, as evidenced by the numerous voices BBA, who can sense other dimensions, hears in her head. When she explains to Elias that she thought she was losing her mind, he replies, “You’re not. You’re just finding new rooms inside it.” Yeah, we’ve got a fellow traveler on in our presence. No question.
BBA and the kids. Upon arriving at the Treasure Island clinic, BBA thought it was Theo haunting her dreams, but it was Steve. The team is reunited after Steve stayed back to try and save the fallen Jesse. BBA detects that they’re in the same place as Nina and Percy in his inner lab, so they follow her. Running out of time as Hap brings out the robots to take himself and OA to a different dimension, they decide to perform the five motions.
Hap vows to take OA to the dimension of Scott’s NDE, which he claims to have pinpointed through his Scott-plant hybrid. One where they like each other. One where everyone refers to her as OA except for her, and she doesn’t believe any of it.
Where’s Homer?
It is unknown, specifically, to where or, more accurately, when Homer travels. However, the brief, surrounding setting the viewer glimpses alludes to a land of, quite literally, biblical proportions. All the audience knows, at this point in Part II, is that he is searching for a woman, presumably OA. Based on a dream of Batmanglij‘s, Homer enters a hut, where he meets an old woman (reminiscent of another Baba Yaga-esque figure), who proceeds to take him to an assortment of human torsos. From there, it looks like Homer begins helping the old woman “build” his idea of OA from scratch through a sensory process. It’s possible, since Homer is slowly awakening in the new dimension, that of his NDE, that this could simply be a dream (which, as we’ve learned in “The OA,” can also be dimensions, according to Marling, meant to represent the collective anxiety of living in late-capitalism where everyone is under pressure to commodify themselves, especially in San Francisco, the tech and innovation center of the world.
The Other Side Of The Rose Window
Karim ascends the puzzle for a second try. Before entering the doorway that leads to the attic, he reads the inscription:
“We shall not cease exploration. And all exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.” T.S. Eliot
The quote is very reminiscent of the feeling of jumping dimensions, arriving to a familiar place, but seeing it for the first time, in a sense. After finally reaching the attic through a series of trying obstacles, Karim witnesses OA ascending into the air like a true angel, protecting what Karim is about to witness, further reflecting Rilke’s poem. However, the body falls upon OAs consciousness jumping dimensions with Homer.
What Karim sees on the other side of the rose mirror is the most daring thing ever attempted on television. It appears Scott’s NDE was, more or less, our, the audience’s reality. The viewer is taken to the set of Part II of “The OA,” with Karim, from a cutout attic, witnessing Jason Isaacs, who’s Brit Marling’s husband in this “reality,” tend to a severely injured “Brit” from her fall from her rise to the sky as OA in the previous dimension, as a multitude of cameras obstruct miniature backdrops of San Francisco inside a studio. Once in the ambulance, Steve sneaks in, saying, “Hello Hap.” It appears Steve finally joined the interdimensional travel club after BBA and the kid’s movements in the first dimension. And he’s pissed.
Karim calls out to Buck, who, although doesn’t hear or see anything, is drawn to the window. As soon as he climbs the ladder and reaches inside the window, his consciousness in the previous dimension awakens, and we are taken back to the San Francisco dimension. Karim was, indeed, “worthy” of the rose window’s revelations. Michelle is reunited with her grandmother, and all seems relatively well.
…Except for the fact that OA is in critical condition in this meta-reality, behind-the-scenes dimension, we don’t know if OAs consciousness traveled with Homer and escaped the echo, as she discussed wanting to do with the traveler, thus forgetting each other and their past lives, Ruskin is still at large, and it appears BBA and the kids may have split up during their jump.
What Lies Ahead
As for the woman in the red dress? That was Nina Azarova. What she was doing on the side of the road remains to be uncovered…or at least put on hold until next season. How that connects to Karim’s nightmare? One theory may be that this recurring nightmare is Karim mentally reliving his own NDE, which somehow involves Nina before OA’s consciousness entered her body. Since Nina Azarova would have been the last person he saw before his NDE, then, that would also explain why he had déjà vu upon first seeing her picture and meeting her in person. It’s unlikely that Marling and Batmanglij will answer every new question the new season of “The OA” asks, but there’s a lot to mull over for another three years.
*Part II of “The OA” is available to stream on Netflix now*
