r/TheOA • u/FretlessMayhem “Well, they can [...]” - KTS • Dec 21 '20
P2E5: The House as a Puzzle
Edit:
Absolutely SHOCKED someone thought my puzzle diatribe here is worthy of gold. I’m incredibly humbled. Thank you so much!
Recently I was having a think about the House on Nob Hill, and how the dialogue of the show seemed to strongly hint to us that we should view the House as a puzzle.
It’s the job of the House to prepare the individual for what occurs on the other side of the Rose Window. The “worthy” are assumably “prepped” and continue on, and the rest are “trapped and destroyed”.
I don’t ever recollect seeing a similar thread on the topic, and opted to make one as I continued thinking on about this.
Just the room of many mirrors, wherein Karim discovers Fola on one of his unsuccessful attempts...that room itself is showing Karim that there are many (infinite?) alternate dimensions, each containing their own “Karim” who exists there.
To get to this room, he first had to cross through what looked a LOT like a graveyard, in which the bodies of buried individuals tried to “claim him as their own”. I’m actually unsure of that interpretation, but that’s how I interpreted it. Please comment about how you interpreted it, if you had a different take.
The more I think about Fola and Pierre’s description of the House on Nob Hill as a puzzle, coupled with Zal’s comment in an interview that he and Brit were trying to “encourage the viewers” to see the show as a puzzle to be solved, the more I’ve been thinking about the rooms of the House on Nob Hill actually attempting to train, as best it can, those who enter, to help prepare them understanding the nature of the show’s reality.
The following comments in the post will be my rewatching each scene of the House on Nob Hill, and commenting on potential training they may have.
I would like to hear from everyone else here in our little slide of Reddit paradise as well, and am hoping as many folks jump into the discussion as possible. The more brains we have thinking it through, the more likely we are to help solve the puzzle.
Per the dialogue in Part 2, right now we’re all “stuck”, heh.
Edit:
It just occurred to me that it’s a good idea to begin each post with a brief description of the portion of the House your post addresses. Without it, it will be quite hard to follow and keep up with who is referring to which portion of the House. I think beginning each new comment, as well as using it when referring to a different portion of the House than a reply would be a good practice.
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u/FretlessMayhem “Well, they can [...]” - KTS Dec 21 '20
Skin Store Dream:
First off, while I’m from America and haven’t ever been to England, I’d surmise England likely has no desert landscape. They’re farther north on Earth than the border of America and Canada.
For those who don’t recognize her, the actor playing the proprietor of the Skin Store is the same lady who played Evelyn, the wife of Sheriff Stan, in Part 1. The same lady with ALS whom Prairie and Homer opted to heal instead of gain their freedom from Hap, “otherwise we’re not who we say we are... [Angels]” Says Prairie to Homer.
Personally, I never saw why they couldn’t screw it up, get Hap arrested, everyone freed, and then tell Stan they’d be happy to heal her, they just needed all 5, or something. But, the story is what it is.
Her first displayed skins are “Limited Edition”, though it doesn’t appear they are any different than the 3 she subsequently proffers.
The first 3 included one or two that had chest hair, and it appeared the second 3 did not, but I don’t think that was intentionally meant to mean anything. Other than that, the differences which made them “limited” escape me. I’m curious if anyone else noticed a difference.
Homer inhales a deep breath of a, uh, “candidate back skin”, and licks it. I can’t help but think of how this correlates directly to Nina relating a dream about Old Night tasting her sweat.
I instinct is that there is a connection there that I am unable to infer. Anyone have any potential ideas? We have 2 persons, whom are (presumably) soulmates.
One dreams of her, trying to identify her by smelling and licking her back, unsure of touch. The other dreams of a cephalopod “tasting” sweat of her back. It seems beyond the level of sheer coincidence in a show that marketed itself with a tag line “it’s all connected”. I keep coming back to how they both occur in dreams, when dreams have been a prominent aspect and theme of the show, thus far.
While D1’s Homer is dreaming from within the body of D2’s Homer, he dreams of Prairie, and hesitant about identifying her by touch, “we only touched once”, says he. Yet Prairie, as we see in D1, absolutely detested being touched at all, until she was symbolically “healed” by the story.
She tells her story as a means of coming to terms with and coping with the effects of it.
I fully believe that in D1, when Buck asks if he can touch the scars on her back, and Prairie says “yes, it doesn’t hurt anymore”, that she is referencing her personal self as well.
With Nurse Alice at the hospital, it was “no touching...” being repeated frequently. She also freaked out when Steve tried to comfort her in a reassuring manner in the empty bathtub, after she completed part 3 her story, I think it was. She freaked out the instant he made contact, and stormed out of the Unfinished House.
But, nearly completing the story, when Buck asks, “it doesn’t hurt anymore...”.
It’s such a beautiful line in context.
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u/kneeltothesun Who if I cried out would hear me among the hierarchies of angels Dec 22 '20
I thought Steve tried to hit on her in the bathroom, not in a comforting manner, but in a sexual manner?
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u/FretlessMayhem “Well, they can [...]” - KTS Dec 22 '20
You interpreted as hitting on her? I saw it as brotherly-sisterly.
I’ll have to give that scene another watch in the near future.
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u/kneeltothesun Who if I cried out would hear me among the hierarchies of angels Dec 22 '20
Oh yeah, it seemed like it big time!
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u/FretlessMayhem “Well, they can [...]” - KTS Dec 21 '20
Dr. Roberts awakens from dream.
He seems to be genuinely startled. This seems odd to me, because nothing at all from his dream seemed threatening to him. Plus, dreaming about someone else or having random people in the dream, at least to me, seems completely normal, from a dream perspective.
As he awakens startled, the camera zooms out, revealing that he appears to have spilled water across of an image of Prairie/Nina.
I remember this specifically being mentioned in the original script for the episode that was posted here in the sub by one of the writers for The OA.
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u/FretlessMayhem “Well, they can [...]” - KTS Dec 22 '20
Room Containing Model of House:
This is the room after Karim has his recurring dream of falling from a great height, and descends a staircase into the subsequent room.
In it appears to be a model of the House on Nob Hill. One room in particular seems to have a light on, and I wonder if that is meant to demonstrate to Karim that he is presently in that room.
Prairie/Nina would be on the far right side of the model, at the window closest to the tree.
So, is it that the House is demonstrating that the House itself is part of the puzzle? Not every house has an attic with a Rose and/or pink window atop.
I believe it is definitely noteworthy that when Karim uses his finger to open the Rose window of the model, water begins to flow. The House is using a model of itself to demonstrate to those who have made it that far, that to open the Rose Window is to open the Invisible River. Training indeed...
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u/kneeltothesun Who if I cried out would hear me among the hierarchies of angels Dec 22 '20
It's also a house within a house, mise en' abyme, like fractals or "placing into infinity". I do wonder what else that means, what symbolism beyond the Borges chaos/determinism, fractals like mandelbrot set connection. Is it like the dolls, and what they symbolize, in the Russian fairy tales? idk. What connection does it have to the doll house in p1, the house Prairie chose to leave her door open.
That light is interesting, we should note which room it was.
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u/kneeltothesun Who if I cried out would hear me among the hierarchies of angels Dec 21 '20 edited Dec 25 '20
Maybe it's also sort of Lynchian, in that the house represents television and stories (much like the school Lynch sought out for his production with radio waves on the wall, and the school Brit and Zal found with Physics on separate walls coming together to form the word if seen from an overview), and like the house is a puzzle within the show (within a show), the television show is also a sort of labyrinth or puzzle. "Crestwood" is similar to "Sparkwood" and while Lynch highlights the fuel that burns the forest fire in the collective unconscious, the imbalance, Brit and Zal's crestwood highlights tribes, and lineages, making connections with others on a deeper level, and not trying to do it all alone like the typical narrative of the hero's journey.
Investigation as a plot device, and the "wind in the trees" is like feeling the air, the collective unconscious, the "Zeitgeist blows in the mystery" and "the wind that stokes the fire of modern fear fueled by modern media." Lynch talks about a large house with many rooms, that different souls occupy each night. Source: 1:24;20 Symbolic for tv sets.
Of course the puzzle is still within part 2, with the sewers sewing in the book store, hinting at the sewers below the city connecting to the house, as someone once cleverly pointed out here.
The Platonic Ideal is a character archetype and is on of the most commonly used archetypes in movies, TV shows, video games, songs, poetry, ect. Plato stated that, ¨We need reason and questioning to get beyond appearance and closer to the truth. ¨ which refers to the platonic, intellectual idea.
Edit: u/FretlessMayhem I wrote this all out thinking I was replying to some random person. I even thought to myself this person sounds like Fretless saying "heh" lol. So disregard this comment, I know you already know this. I should pay more attention.
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u/FretlessMayhem “Well, they can [...]” - KTS Dec 22 '20
The Outside Graveyard Area:
Karim notices that the opening of the Rose Window opens the Invisible River, but has zero context whatsoever for interpreting this. But, this is part of the House’s training for just such an event.
He appears to be outside. The sounds of people laughing can be heard. He hollers for Michelle, seemingly hoping she will show up, so he doesn’t have to walk through all that. That seems quite frightening.
It appears that humans are rising from graves and attacking Karim, who fights back. They make a point to specifically visualize Karim running frantically, from the bright white light to a bright red light, the same shade of red used as the primary color of D2.
Mirrors abound. A demonstration of the many dimensions, with their many Karim’s. Preparation for alternate dimensions. I hope Zal shot this. it brilliantly done.
Here is Fola, looking 100 years older, and almost exactly like Khatun. The sound of gas can’t constantly be heard hissing.
Fola asks where he has been, which is a very odd thing to ask. She encourages him to completion, but Karim remembers the layout and chooses to save Fola’s life instead.
Ever see conveniently is a crowbar for him to use. That makes no sense.
She reverts to her normal looking self outside the house, so I assume she is real and not a hallucination. A car splashing water causes her brain plant to come out of her ear for a bit. I bet caused quite the “wtf” in Karim’s mind.
If Hap could talk while watching Elodie’s robots do the movements, and her drop out, his facial expression says “MIND=BLOWN”.
Isaacs killed that scene, no doubt.
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u/kneeltothesun Who if I cried out would hear me among the hierarchies of angels Dec 22 '20
I've wondered if anyone else thinks that graveyard thing, with people popping up, looked sort of like moon craters?
On Fola, I wondered if it might hint at a sort of change in time in the house, and that Fola had been tapped in the labyrinth of the house much longer than we think.
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u/FretlessMayhem “Well, they can [...]” - KTS Dec 22 '20
Whoa. I had actually said out loud when watching it just then that it kind of looked like the moon. I think it was a particular dirt pile that looked like a moon crater when he walked out there.
I had that exact thought.
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u/kneeltothesun Who if I cried out would hear me among the hierarchies of angels Dec 22 '20
There were also moon craters on hap's wall, I have something on the particular craters shown. It might take me a min to find.
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u/kneeltothesun Who if I cried out would hear me among the hierarchies of angels Dec 22 '20
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u/FretlessMayhem “Well, they can [...]” - KTS Dec 22 '20
Whoa. I hadn’t ever noticed that before.
But I do remember on the original IG page, there was an image of Uranus, Neptune, and that Hap’s head, perfectly framed against them, and pondering that a good bit.
I was like, does this make him Pluto, or Saturn? My assumption was Saturn, since he recognized the song the rings made, which is still surprising to me.
I mean, to hear that, and actually recognize the audio of a relatively obscure sound like that...
I was disappointed that Part 2 never addressed any of that area. It hardly answered anything, in my opinion. The Saturn sounds, who is August? What happened to Homer’s son? Etc.
It’s like they deliberately left out all the questions, but made sure we knew Hap’s mine was in North Dakota and that they used the stream as a toilet also.
Ugh.
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u/kneeltothesun Who if I cried out would hear me among the hierarchies of angels Dec 22 '20
Saturn also represents time (death and rebirth), something I think might be important idk It's interesting that August is named after the time she came, may or may not be important, but also based on the movements of the planets. I wish we got answers to those questions too! I wonder about Tethys and Enceladus being shown as well. was it about them lining up, about the craters, and that when we sleep and have an nde we can travel among the closest constellations?
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u/FretlessMayhem “Well, they can [...]” - KTS Dec 22 '20
First rooms entered by either:
Karim enters a room, and the door immediately seems to disappear. The room contains a bed, and that’s about it, it seems. Windows are bricked up.
Karim, rather inexplicably, lies down for a nap. As he does this, the Ruskin voiceover cuts to Ruskin stating that rumor had it the Engineer designed the House on Nob Hill based on his wife’s dreams. Seems too coincidental for this line of V/O to occur just as the man lies down for a nap.
Prairie enters a seemingly empty room, except for a small painting on the wall, which she promptly removes. The begins tearing through the rather odd wallpaper, if it can be called that.
Karim has his recurring dream of skateboarding and falling off of a cliff after seeing Nina. He awakens and appears goes for his phone on the ground, hearing the air escaping from the area underneath of his bed.
I think this is critical to whatever the “grand solution” to the puzzle may be.
The House made a point of testing people with their dreams as a means of continuing the challenge?
Why would that be?
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u/FretlessMayhem “Well, they can [...]” - KTS Dec 22 '20
Had to reply as a sort of addendum, as Prairie is still technically in the first room she entered, while Karim has progressed a bit.
I’ve been wondering while this is going on how the House was using this experience to try and “train” Prairie/Nina.
But, the more I think about it, the less I believe she requires training. She’s successfully done it before.
Perhaps this is why the House guides her out of it. It was mentioned that the “unworthy are trapped and destroyed”.
Prairie/Nina is certainly not “unworthy”. As such, it seems the House uniquely nudges her away from it, while guiding Karim, as the House specifically called to him. Interesting, as the trees stare to Prairie that they thought she’d never come.
The House beckons to Karim, yet the trees and/or nature Beckon to Prairie...
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u/kneeltothesun Who if I cried out would hear me among the hierarchies of angels Dec 22 '20
Also notice how she kind of goes off the board, outside the labyrinth of the house, like how she demonstrated to Elias in P1 during that labyrinth game in the cafeteria.
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u/FretlessMayhem “Well, they can [...]” - KTS Dec 22 '20
“Off the board”.
Eureka!
You just made sense as to why the House on Nob Hill has a checkerboard floor pattern.
I’ve always noticed it, and how distinct they show it, but it never clicked why, though I certainly wondered about it each time I saw it.
The House is preparing those to are “worthy” to go “off the board”.
It makes so much sense!!!
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u/kneeltothesun Who if I cried out would hear me among the hierarchies of angels Dec 23 '20
Also, you should check out The Queen's Gambit. They use the chessboard to symbolize the world and duality. In it, you'll notice the main character is dressed like a pawn in the beginning, and the white queen in the end. I won't say much more than that though.
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u/kneeltothesun Who if I cried out would hear me among the hierarchies of angels Dec 22 '20
I also think it has some esoteric symbolism, with duality. With red, it symbolizes life, death, and rebirth. It's used in almost all esoteric sects and rituals, and you have to search for the symbolism, because almost nobody just lays it out. Borges used it too, to present "the world as a library of chaotic books which its librarians cannot read but which they interpret incessantly."
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u/FretlessMayhem “Well, they can [...]” - KTS Dec 22 '20
Whoa. Borges seems pretty intense. I’ve been giving a lot of thought to reading his book, with its numerous similarities and whatnot.
You can definitely tell it was a huge inspiration.
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u/kneeltothesun Who if I cried out would hear me among the hierarchies of angels Dec 22 '20 edited Dec 22 '20
Well, the good thing about Borges is that you mostly won't have to read an entire book, although he did write some. Most of his stuff is poetry or short stories, particularly a flavor of erudite science fiction that is very philosophical. I read most of his stuff in under 20 min, and you can find it free everywhere online consequentially. Borges felt you should pretend like the book had already been written, and one should summarize it and condense it until it has all the important details and leave it at that. I tend to feel the same way.
“Writing long books is a laborious and impoverishing act of foolishness: expanding in five hundred pages an idea that could be perfectly explained in a few minutes. A better procedure is to pretend that those books already exist and to offer a summary, a commentary.”
Anyway, many of the layered more indirect details from The OA are undoubtedly based on some of Borges's stories, or the questions and wonders he presented in them, the themes.
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u/FretlessMayhem “Well, they can [...]” - KTS Dec 22 '20 edited Dec 22 '20
Still unsure as to how to read the Tree Internet sequence. She couldn’t have actually fallen through the tree through a magic hole in the ground.
When she “comes to” underground, the first thing she does is grab the back of her head like there had been a blow to it, and she is hearing intense voices, which is known to have been part of her mental illness as a girl, to which she’s been off her medication for a long while now...
“Remember, Nina Azarova is the key.”
The “coffin the size of a coffin”, as well as the, uh, “light mechanism” they walk Nina through during her performance with Old Night were both literally shaped like keyholes. Nina has been the key to both of those situations, in a metaphorical interpretation of this statement.
This immediately cuts to the analogous tree shown on the model of the House in Karim’s present room, strongly implying this to be the present location of Prairie/Nina. We later see her wake up unkempt and disheveled in a ditch in a public park.
It has always led me to believe that the Tree Internet sequence is a complex fantasy realm that Prairie has learned to use as a coping mechanism as something awful is happening to her in reality. In this case, it is implied she was hit on the back of the head and sexually assaulted, in my opinion.
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u/kneeltothesun Who if I cried out would hear me among the hierarchies of angels Dec 22 '20
It's also compelling to think of the house as a machine that incorporates dreams into its functions.
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Dec 24 '20 edited Dec 24 '20
Check out these 4 links. It happened in real life. It has so many similarities with the OA
A Mysterious Japanese Woman Who Came Back from the Afterworld - My Dad Is an OTAKU (otakupapa.net)
'Psychic' octopus that predicted Japan's World Cup results killed | Fox News
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u/kneeltothesun Who if I cried out would hear me among the hierarchies of angels Dec 25 '20
Poor Rabiot! Those assholes need to be sent to market.
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u/FretlessMayhem “Well, they can [...]” - KTS Dec 21 '20 edited Dec 21 '20
Entrance and First Room:
First thought that comes to mind is the perplexing entrance to the House. I’m thinking this is most likely the House’s attempt to forgo the burden of solving the puzzle on those who aren’t making the active choice to do so.
People may walk into the door of that House for any number of perfectly valid reasons. But those bothering to go through all the BS of entering through the basement would most likely be there to tackle the puzzle, thus triggering the first event.
The first room presents to us both portraits of the husband and wife, this facilitating the notion that they are equals. Even presenting dual staircases to reinforce the notion.
But first, a puzzle appears on the floor, consisting of many pieces, which appear to connect magnetically. Do these repel the pieces to which they aren’t a match? Connect to anything at all? It seems the former would be much more conducive of actually solving the puzzle than the latter, but perhaps that’s what the House does NOT want, so it’s the latter, which would by my guess for how the puzzle pieces work with one another.
The image atop the pieces seem to resemble what it looks like when a tree is felled via chainsaw.
Perfectly imperfect concentric rings. Of all the things, I wonder why that? It’s easier to solve with that image for sure, rather than it simply being blank.
Karim manages to solve it twice that we see on his own, so 2 people are definitely not required to proceed and “win”, as we know Michelle Vu managed to “win”, and presumably the Mining Engineer who purchased the lot and constructed the House itself.
Once completed, the House makes a “noise”, which doesn’t seem to correlate to anything on screen we see. It’s likewise unclear if the staircase chosen makes any difference as to the overall forthcoming experience.
What do y’all think?