Absentia: In Your Face and Worth Watching

I binged Absentia the past few days - on AXN in 2017 and now on Amazon Prime.  It starts out with a scenario we've seen before (FBI agent Emily Byrne, played Castle's Stana Katic, shows up after presumably being held hostage for six years, and declared dead), but soon takes off in vivid and less conventional ways.  Her husband Nick Durand (well played by Patrick Heusinger), also an FBI agent, has happily remarried, and the two are raising the son Durand had with Emily.  Like The OA, The Missing (season two), Thirteen, and other reappearance stories, Emily's return continues or sets off a new series of terrible crimes.

But Emily Byrne is a much more powerful character than the "victims" in those other series, with the exception of Prairie in The OA, who is powerful, but in a more mystical rather than Criminal Minds way.  Emily soon becomes both the hunter (of the person who held her captive) and the hunted (she's implicated in a string of new murders), and the narrative plays it so close to the vest that's it's not easy to tell which she is - at least, on the basis of logic - though I never lost faith in her.

And lest you think that's a spoiler, it's actually still not clear, at the very end, what she did and didn't do during her years in captivity.  Clearly, as she herself recognizes and tells her husband, she's not the same person she was before she was kidnapped.  Is it just her mind that's not quite the same, or has she acted on those dark fantasies (assuming they're fantasies not memories).

Katic does an outstanding job in this role.  The supporting case is memorable too, especially Paul Freeman as Emily's father, Neil Jackson as her brother, and Cara Theobold as Nick's new wife.  The plot is tight - I guessed some of the suspects, and was proven wrong just about every time.  Highly recommended, but not for little children.

The OA: Everything I Say Is A Lie

One of the most famous - or infamous - paradoxes is the paradox of the liar.  My favorite rendition of it is this statement: This statement - what I'm now saying - is a lie.   If it's true, that means it's indeed a lie.  But if it's a lie, that means it's true, which pitches us right back into the previous statement (If it's true, then it's indeed lie) ... and so on, ad infinitum, with no way out of the paradox.

That's, of course, what makes it a paradox - an example of the limits of logic - and so much fun, and so frustrating, at the same time.  And it's the basis of Netflix's remarkable new series, The OA.

If you're reading this, you likely know the story, so there's no point in my repeating it to you in any detail again. But the gist is: Prairie runs away from home, is scooped up by today's version of a mad scientist - bent on discovering/proving there's a life or dimension after death - and holds Prairie and a bunch of other new adults in his basement, where he conducts experiments with them.  He has selected them because they all have had near-death experiences.  They figure out a way of harnessing forces - "movements" - that enable them to cure disease, bring people back from the dead, but not yet quite escape. But the mad scientist does set Prairie loose.  She returns to her home town and her adoptive parents, and systematically puts together a new group of high school kids, plus a middle-aged vice principal, who under Prairie's tutelage, learn the moves - that is, learn how to harness some of the cross-dimensional forces that can have so much impact in our reality.

Now in the above story, here are the only things we know to be true: Prairie ran away from home ... Prairie gets back to her home town (and everything after).   But everything in the three dots - or ellipsis if you want to be fancy - well, all of that may be true, or may just be a product of Prairie's super-fertile imagination.

The first season puts this question to the test, in the worst possible a way.  A shooter enters the high school.  Prairie's team uses their moves to ... stop him.  Not by laying a finger on him.  But  doing what look to the uninformed like crazy gestures - but to those of us informed by what we saw in the previous seven episodes, the moves that summon the inter-dimensional forces.  The result is that the shooter is frozen long enough to be tackled.

So ... does this prove that Prairie was telling the truth - that she figured out a way, in the mad scientist's basement, of summoning some kind of trans-dimensional forces?  Well ... no ... because the gestures or movements to summon the forces are so bizarre, they could have distracted the shooter in the high school long enough to be tackled.

And if this crucial, penultimate, undecidable scene isn't enough, we discover that Prairie, who was rushing to the school, was shot at some point, and is rushed away in an ambulance, very badly wounded.

What does that tell us about the truth or fiction of Prairie's account?  Well, if her friends at school have really mastered inter-dimensional life-and-death powers, and can get themselves to the hospital, they can bring her back to life if she died, and/or to full health is she was only badly wounded.   If not - if Prairie and those people at school are only kidding themselves, then Prairie will die.   And that's exactly where this first season ends.

Since this a television series, and now a very successful one at that - well, your guess is as good as mine.  On the other hand, if there is no second series, then, well, Prairie's new friends and we the audience were just brilliantly lied to.



more alternate dimensions here