Created by Brit Marling and Zal Batmanglij, “The OA” is a trippy sci-fi/fantasy series that debuted on Netflix in 2016. It immediately attracted a small but passionate audience, and I recall multiple friends recommending it to me. This is only anecdotal, but I talked to more than one member of the clergy who was very fond of it, saying it touched on fascinating themes of the divine. To explain right away, “The OA” stands for “The Original Angel,” so we’re in theological territory right off the bat.
The series ran for two seasons, presented as “Part I” and “Part II,” with “Part II” not airing until 2019. As of this writing, there hasn’t been a “Part III,” and I’m certain fans of the series wish there would be.
The pilot episode presents an interesting mystery. A young blond woman named Prairie Johnson (Marling) returns home after disappearing seven years earlier. She can now see after a lifetime of blindness, and insists that she be called the OA. She also refuses to reveal any details about where she was for the past seven years. The mystery only deepens from there, but, briefly, the OA says that she was actually born in Russia and that her original name was Nina. Nina had a near-death experience involving a bus and Russian oligarchs, and was, in the process, possessed by some kind of supernatural entity named Khatun (played by Hiam Abbass). And all of that was just the pilot episode.
Zendaya has a role in the second season of “The OA,” playing a character named Fola Uzaki, a puzzle-solver who gets involved with … okay, the mysteries on this show are complex, so I’ll just say that she’s there to help a private investigator named Karim (Kingsley Ben-Adir) with the plot.
The OA is trippy and mysrerious
The first season involves the OA character enlisting four schoolkids and a schoolteacher to join her in a quest to open a portal to another dimension where, she says, other kidnapped people are being held prisoner, specifically friends she met in captivity. The show’s entire second season is devoted to filling in Prairie’s backstory, however, before the quest can properly begin. There are a lot of visions and premonitions in Prairie’s story, and, as with all stories about premonitions, many of them will eventually come to make sense. Maybe. It’s an oblique program. It won’t be until episode four that it’s revealed that Prairie and the other captives are angels. They can open portals if five people do a very specific “dance” simultaneously. And that doesn’t even cover the bulk of the first season.
The second season of “The OA,” as mentioned, was released three years after the first, and will continue Prairie’s quest to free the other captive angels from their prison in another dimension … but also takes place in an alternate timeline wherein Joe Biden became president in 2016. This time, Prairie is joined by the private investigator character Karim, who has mysteries of his own to solve. He’s looking into the disappearance of a young girl from a haunted house, and finds that it has something to do with an online puzzle game.
There’s a scene in the second season of “The OA” wherein Karim and Prairie break into what is essentially the puzzle house from “The 7th Guest,” where Karim rescues Fola, the Zendaya character. Prairie, meanwhile, will have a conversation with a species of sentient, psychic trees. Yeah, this show is wild. Zendaya is in three episodes of the series.
The OA was one of Zendaya’s first properly dramatic roles
We here on /Film, when ranking Zendaya performances, noted that “The OA” was the first time the actress was able to turn in a hefty, dramatic performance. Zendaya had been acting professionally since she was a kid in the early 2010s, appearing in Disney productions like “Shake it Up” and movies like “Super Buddies” (she voiced a horse named Lillipop). Her film career really took off in 2017 when she landed the role of MJ in the superhero flick “Spider-Man: Homecoming” opposite her future husband Tom Holland. That same year, she was also in the biographical musical “The Greatest Showman,” and took on some voice roles in movies like “Duck Duck Goose” and “Smallfoot.”
“The OA,” though, was the first proper “adult” role she played, free of comedy, music, or superhero adventure. The same year she was in “The OA,” Zendaya also appeared on the dark-edged J.D. drama “Euphoria” for HBO, playing the lead character of Rue. 2019 was also the year of her second Spider-Man movie, and, “Euphoria” aside, she has done only feature films since then. 2026 has been a banner year for the actress, as she appeared in Christopher Nolan’s massive war epic “The Odyssey,” as well as her fourth Spider-Movie, “Spider-Man: Brand New Day.” Both of those films made over a billion dollars at the box office, and the latter may even surpass two billion. She was also in the hit drama “The Drama,” which made over $132 million on a $28 million budget, and she is slated to appear in “Dune: Part Three” this coming December. That film will, no doubt, also make piles of cash.
Yeah, Zendaya seems to be doing okay.
