Before You Read the Treatments
Our Story So Far…
Two seasons of extraordinary television, compressed into the essential truths.
The OA · Netflix · 2016–2019
“I want to tell you something — something I have never told anyone. But you have to promise me something first. You have to promise that you believe me. Because if you don’t believe me, I can’t tell you.” — Prairie Johnson, The OA, Part I
Part I: The OA
Prairie Johnson disappeared when she was twenty-one years old. She was blind when she vanished. When she reappears seven years later — walking into traffic on a bridge, discovered by security footage — she can see. And her back bears scars: deep, strange, symmetrical. She will not explain them to her parents. She will not speak to the FBI.
What she will do is gather five strangers in an abandoned house in the middle of the night and tell them everything.
Prairie was born Nina Azarova in Russia. Her father was a powerful man. As a small child, she drowned in a school bus that plunged through ice — and in that near-death experience, she encountered a being named Khatun, who offered her a gift: she could return to life, but she would return blind. She accepted.
Adopted by American parents, renamed Prairie Johnson, she grew up ordinary and closed. Until she learned her birth father was still alive. Until she traveled to find him and was instead found by Dr. Hunter Aloysius Percy — “Hap” — a researcher obsessed with what near-death experiences leave behind in the body. He trapped her. For seven years, he kept Prairie and four others — Homer, Scott, Rachel, and Renata — in glass cells beneath his house, subjecting them to controlled drowning, studying what they brought back from the other side.
What they brought back was the Movements.
One by one, through their NDEs, the captives received choreographic gestures — five of them — each one a fragment of something larger. Performed together, with “perfect feeling,” the five Movements could heal the dying and bridge the space between dimensions. Hap wanted the Movements for himself. He could see the science. He couldn’t feel the meaning.
Prairie escaped when Hap made a mistake. She returned to her parents’ house in Crestwood, Michigan — to a suburban neighborhood that didn’t know what to do with her. She gathered five strangers: Steve (a volatile teenager), Buck (a trans high school student), French (a brilliant, pressured student), Betty (a middle school teacher), and Jesse (a quiet boy). She taught them the Movements. She told them her story.
When a troubled student brought a gun to the school cafeteria where Steve, Buck, French, Betty, and another student named Angie were eating lunch, the five of them performed the Movements together — spontaneously, without rehearsal, in front of everyone. The gunman faltered. Someone tackled him. The room was saved.
Prairie was shot.
She died — and crossed into another dimension.
Part II: The OA
Part II begins in San Francisco, two timelines running in parallel.
Prairie wakes up as Nina Azarova — her counterpart in a new dimension, Dimension Two. She is a wealthy Russian-American woman with a therapist and a different life. This dimension’s Hap is Dr. Percy, a psychiatrist at a mental hospital called Treasure Island. He is subtler here. More humane. He is already watching Nina, waiting for her to remember who she is across dimensions.
Meanwhile, in the first dimension, the FBI agent who was assigned to Prairie’s case — Elias Rahim — is revealed to have been watching the group all along. French, grieving Prairie’s disappearance, discovers in Elias’s files that Prairie’s story may have been fabricated — assembled from books in her house, a fraud. This fractures the group’s belief.
But the second storyline runs alongside: Karim Washington, a private detective, is hired to find a missing girl named Michelle. Michelle is connected to a video game, a puzzle house in the San Francisco hills, and a series of identical dreams being reported by participants in a sleep study run by a man named Dr. Pierre Ruskin. The recurring dreams describe four things: a coffin-like tunnel, a curved staircase, a rose-tinted window, and the face of a man who looks exactly like Karim.
In Dimension Two, Prairie slowly breaks through Nina’s consciousness and reclaims herself. She reconnects with Homer’s counterpart — Dr. Roberts, a surgeon who has no memory of their shared captivity in D1. She relearns the Movements. She confronts Hap, who is simultaneously running experiments in D2 and engineering dimensional crossings.
Hap and Prairie, both transformed by their time in D2, perform the five Movements together — they are rivals, co-researchers, adversaries bound by the same obsession — and leap through a dimensional boundary.
The Cliffhanger
Where Part II Ends — Where the Stories Begin
The Fourth Wall
They land in Dimension Three.
There are cameras. Production assistants. Cables running across the floor. It is a television set — and it is, unmistakably, the set of The OA on Netflix.
A production assistant rushes to Prairie, kneeling beside her, speaking urgently into a radio. She calls Prairie by another name: “Brit.”
Hap gets to his feet. His voice has changed — a British accent, easy and practiced. He tells the EMT that the injured woman is his wife. He gives his name as Jason Isaacs.
In Dimension One, at the same moment, Steve, Buck, French, Betty, and Angie have gathered in the school gymnasium. They perform the Five Movements together — the full sequence, with everything they have — trying to open a portal, trying to reach their teacher who has vanished into the unknown.
In San Francisco, Karim Washington has reached the top of the puzzle house. He presses his face to the rose-tinted window. Through it, he can see — across dimensions, across the border between reality and fiction — Prairie and Hap on the set of a Netflix television show, surrounded by strangers who know them by different names.
The show cuts to black.
This is where Netflix left us. This is where the stories below begin.
Who They Are
Prairie Johnson / The OA / Nina Azarova — The dreamer at the center of everything. A woman who died and kept dying and kept coming back. Each death gave her something: a Movement, a dimension, a deeper knowledge of what she is. She is not a hero in the conventional sense. She is a bridge.
Hap (Dr. Hunter Percy) — The scientist who became the captor who became something stranger. His obsession with the Movements began as research and became religion. In D2, some of his cruelty fell away. In D3, he is Jason Isaacs — a celebrated British actor, charming and comfortable in his own skin. Which version is real?
Homer Roberts — Prairie’s great love across dimensions. He was the first of Hap’s captives to fully trust her. His near-death experience on a football field gave him the second Movement. In D2, he is a surgeon who doesn’t remember any of this. In the stories, he is the one searching.
Steve Winchell — The angry teenager who became a believer. The first of the five strangers Prairie gathered. He loved her without knowing how to say it. In the S2 finale, he runs onto the bus Prairie is being taken away on, refusing to let her go alone.
Buck Vu — A trans Vietnamese-American student who understood, more than any of the others, what it means to know who you are even when the world insists otherwise. The Movements, for Buck, were never just physics. They were a language for what was already true.
French (Alfonso Sosa) — The pragmatist who wanted proof and couldn’t find it. The one who discovered Elias’s files. The one who saw, in a mirror, another face looking back at him — and didn’t look away.
Betty Broderick-Allen — The middle school teacher who lost a student. Who taught a room full of children to be present in their bodies. Who performed the Movements in a school cafeteria when a gun was pointed at people she loved.
Karim Washington — The detective who appeared in everyone’s dreams before they met him. The shepherd between worlds. The one still standing at the rose window when everyone else has crossed.