I devoured The OA in two days, and Brit Marling's tale of Prairie (Marling) and her lost boys has stuck with me ever since. Maybe that's because the ending was so... well, meh. Did everything that Prairie claimed happen really occur, or is the so-called Original Angel just coping with some serious post-traumatic stress instead? While we won't get our answers until The OA returns for a newly-confirmed season 2, the star and creator did tease that one popular fan theory holds water... and I'm holding out hope that it means Prairie's story is the real deal.
Clever Redditors have been digging for the truth since The OA premiered, and one particular Reddit thread dives into the different braille symbols that appear on the show. On a bulletin board in the FBI office that Prairie visits, some fans noted that there is braille that seemingly spells out R1C85L. The "1", "8," and "5" could correspond to the numerical value of a letter of the alphabet, meaning that the braille actually spells out RACHEL, a.k.a. the woman kidnapped alongside Prairie who never received a special movement.
Some fans believe that Rachel's name in the FBI office suggests that she was working with the agency, and others go so far as to say she was a spy for Hep, rather than an actual "angel." While Marling did not speak about Rachel, she did suggest that this braille symbol was purposefully left for fans to find in a new Facebook Live with Vulture. Marling stated:
"Things that we thought it would take the audience a long time to find, like to unravel the braille that's sort of in the background in the FBI agent's office... You know within 48 hours someone had posted and unraveled that braille and we thought that would be harder to find. I think that's an exciting part of telling a mystery now, is that there are a lot of super sleuths working together on the internet to figure it out."
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There we have it: Rachel's name in the FBI agent's office really was a clue. Now the real question is: a clue to what?! Does it have something to do with why Elias showed up to debunk Prairie's story?
We'll get our answers soon. In the Vulture interview, Marling also promised that The OA has a true ending, and that the team knew exactly where the story would end up when they started writing. So... yep: every clue matters, and this is one twisty mystery I can't wait to spend more time unraveling.