Could Taylor Swift Be The Key To Bringing Back ‘The OA’?

We all know Taylor Swift is the Queen of the Easter Egg. In fact, she told Zane Lowe she hid over 100 of them in her most recent music video, ‘The Fate of Ophelia’.

So what exactly is it, you may ask, that ties this unrivaled pop-star to Netflix’s most lamented cancellation of all time? Braille.

During Swift’s recent appearance on fiancé Travis Kelce’s podcast, “New Heights”, she explained the art of the Easter Egg to his brother Jason, saying:

I want Easter Eggs to be a certain thing like where if you are a part of the fandom and you want to experience music in a normal way, then you don’t even see these. You don’t even care what that thing is above that doorway in under that dimly lit flickering light over there that’s upside down backwards in braille. You don’t need to know what that is.

Now, while die-hard Swifties have tracked down this was a reference to part of the Eras Tour set that spelled out the message, T-A-Y, there is one particular TV show that drove us all insane with Easter Eggs of the braille variety first, and that was The OA.

The brainchild of co-creators  Brit Marling and Zal Batmanglij, gave us the story of unreliable narrator Prairie Johnson alias the OA aka Nina Azarova, a woman who purports to be the orphan of a Russian oligarch, who was adopted by a midwestern couple, and then kidnapped and held hostage in an evil geniuses underground lair as he repeatedly “killed” and resuscitated his hostages to try and record what “happens” and “where we go” after death.

This outlandish tale is told upon Prairie’s return to her Michigan hometown, Crestwood, where she recruits a group of misfit teens (and their teacher) to aide her in a quest to save the remaining hostages she had to leave behind. Oh, and she returns from her captivity able to see, after living decades in blindness.

During some of Prairies “near death experiences” she has visions of a woman named Khatun, whose face is covered in braille messages that had fans flocking to Reddit to decode together.

There was also a scene in the office of an FBI agent, who was supposedly trying to help Prairie cope psychologically after her time in captivity, where fans spotted another braille message displayed using what appear to be thumbtacks. This message spelled out the name of one of Prairie’s friends, “Rachel”.

By the end of the first season, there have been so many Easter Eggs dropped along the way to make us question if Prairie is telling the truth or just lying, including a cardboard box of books that tie back to her stories of growing up in Russia, her lost love named Homer, and her wild claims that she is the “Original Angel”.

Of course in the second season, we learn she was telling the truth, as she successfully travels to another dimension after being shot in the chest by a school shooter, but unfortunately the series was cancelled before we got many of the answers we had desperately searched for.

That’s where Taylor Swift comes in.

The second season of The OA saw the characters jumping dimensions once again, except this time, it was into our dimension, the one where we were watching the show. Prairie became Brit Marling, and series villain Hap became Jason Isaacs.

Fans hoped and prayed that the cancellation was all part of a marketing ploy that tied back to this plot point. It was during the days of the Jon Snow resuscitation after all, so anything was possible, but not even fan-funded billboards and hunger strikes could sway the streaming giant, and since Netflix owned the show, other studios were unable to pick up the show.

If anyone understands the absolute tragedy of an unresolved Easter Egg, or the inability to control your own IP, it has to be Swift, and after her Eras Tour, she also likely has the budget to take on a project of this size. Searchlight Pictures already announced in 2022 they were producing her directorial theatrical debut, so why not add a TV series to the mix, or perhaps she could convert the remaining storyline with Marling and Batmanglij into a movie franchise.

Anything is possible when there is a room full of Easter Egg masterminds involved.