Chapter 4: Family Secrets

After Rohan's sudden death. The guests apart from Andy are taken to an underground safe room six stories down. They speculate what could had caused Rohan's heart attack. He had a pacemaker which could had been hacked.

Afterwards the guests are allowed back to their guest rooms but they must stay there during a snowstorm.

Only Sian and Darby go outside to investigate where the signal might be coming from that could had affected the pacemaker. They go out in a car during the snowstorm with an extreme climate suit on and crash.

The episode started out interestingly enough. There was a lot of bickering and paranoia.

Even Darby while out with Sian gets suspicious. However Sian driving fast during a snowstorm led to predictable results. The flashback was nauseatingly dull. It just went on and on.

The bit with the stuck helmet was laughably silly.

For fans who experienced the exponential pacing of The OA, they will finally bask in the glory that is the pay-off of episode 4.

Absolutely incredible. It seems a lot of the reviews written after watching the first two episodes of the series aren't acclimated, or dislike, the style of pacing that the writers use in this show. This episode finally picks up the pace where the prior three episodes were lagging behind. Fan theories and foreshadowing galore, this episode left me wondering what was next, who was next, and who would survive.

Marling and Batmanglij love to hand the underlying plot of their fictions behind the eyes of the enjoyer. Allowing them to build their own fiction and watch it unfold in front of them.

Alright. The first 3 episodes were...tolerable. This one? Unfortunately not. The show runners need to hire on technical writers and give them latitude to improve scenes and plot mechanisms.

The entire car scene and 'trapped in a space suit' bit was terrible, with the flaming cherry shaped turd being the low budget CGI of attempting to drill the helmet.

The entire car scene, along with essentially every other line of dialogue her character is given, creates a pure image of Sian being the dumbest astronaut to have ever walked the moon.

Among other things, a Volvo with snow tires (spiked) having traction issues of any kind in the given environment is entirely operator error. To top it off, it's a miracle Volvo gave a vehicle over to be crashed, considering it somehow completely failed to demonstrate airbag deployment in a multiple roll.

The fix? They said they were trapped in the hotel by an avalanche. Okay, so then have a small one sweep the car off the road instead. Easy.

The moderately good upswing of writing was the sneeze. More of that, even if a high-school junior could have more eloquently done the exiting dialogue, of which there was no need.