At the risk of having thousands of people decide to post internet videos of themselves enthusiastically dancing at us, we’re going to call it here, folks: The OA is dead. The sci-fi-mystical Netflix series—about an ethereal, dimension-hopping “Original Angel” (hence the name)—was canceled a few weeks ago. (Or was it?!) (Yes, yes, it was.) But there was always hope that the series might get that now-standard shot at end-series redemption, a chance to cram whole seasons of truncated plots into one neat little package: The big finale movie.
But sadly, it was not to be, with Variety reporting tonight that there was simply too much OA left in the tank to fit into a two-hour film. The series—which ended on a truly bonkers second-season cliffhanger—was originally planned for five seasons, after all, back when “trying to do a five-season series at Netflix” didn’t seem quite so obviously like tempting fate. Plus: The OA was produced in-house by the streamer, which means the chance of a resurrection by another network is fundamentally nil.
Series star Brit Marling—who also created the show, with Zal Batmanglij—posted a very long Instagram post earlier this week thanking fans for their love and support. Given that the show went very meta-fictional there at what is now, unarguably, the end—as in “suggesting that Brit Marling may, in fact, be an amnesiac version of The OA trapped on Earth” meta—it’s probably about as complete a farewell from the character, and the series, as fans are now likely to get.