Netflix’s The OA Will Be Back For a Second Season

In December, Netflix gave us a present in the form of mystery thriller The OA, a new original series announced just four days before it premiered. Well, the streaming service recently confirmed that the show will be back for another season.

The sci-fi storyline follows Prairie Johnson, played by co-creator Brit Marling, who went missing for seven years and returns to her family cured of her blindness.

In an interview last month with Entertainment Weekly, Brit Marling and co-creator Zal Batmanglij shared their inspiration for the show. “I met a young woman who had a near-death experience and when she told me the story about that I found it really fascinating,” says Marling. “It was like she had a brush with something inarticulable and that was now contained in her energy.”

After doing some research, the team discovered that there was some common threads. “There were stories of people who had these experiences and came back with different skills — they were tone deaf before and came back with perfect pitch, or had sudden language fluency,” Marling explains. “It’s this interesting strange thing and there’s a convergence around near death experiences from all over the world; people report the same thing despite different religions. It seemed like a rich setting to dive into.”

Batmanglij adds: “We just wanted to tell a novelistic story — not have all the main characters in the first hour, that builds toward a climax.” The eight-episode series has been garnering critical acclaim and leaving fans with plenty of theories about its head-scratching finale (spoilers, obviously). Though Marling says that giving the first season a second watch will answer some burning questions for the eagle-eyed among us.

“It feels to me like most of the provocative questions that are raised are eventually answered,” Marling says. “From a writing perspective, there isn’t anything we haven’t solved in our heads. But the question is: How long does the story continue?”

And don’t worry if you haven’t finished the first season—there’s no release date for The OA Part II just yet, so you have plenty of time to catch up.