Summary
“Magic Mirror” takes the wind out of the story, with stories from both seasons merging.
This recap of The OA Season 2 Episode 3, “Magic Mirror”, contains spoilers. You can read the recap of the previous episode by clicking these words.
With Rachel (Sharon Van Etten) merging both stories from season one and two in the previous chapter, Episode 3, “Magic Mirror”, shows the original gang from the first dimension. Prairie Johnson (Brit Marling) is dead, with Episode 3 opening up showing her open casket. Steve Winchell (Patrick Gibson) is speeding away from the funeral, with her dead eating away at him, and Jesse (Brendan Meyer) concerned by his dangerous behavior.
Buck Vu (Ian Alexander) is experiencing strange sounds from his bedroom mirror, and in the middle of the night, he sees Rachel standing next to him in the reflection, humming a song. He sends out a message to the gang, asking them to come to his house for a surprise. Steve is eager to explore the possibility that Prairie has traveled to another dimension, and that they need to do the same. But Alfonso ‘French’ Sosa (Brandon Perea) has become strongly cynical since her death, believing they were duped.
In “Magic Mirror” we learn the effect Prairie’s death has had on the teenagers; Jesse is resorting to drugs to calm his trauma from the school shooting, and Alfonso is resorting to the middle of the night skirmishes, using a dating application for cold sex with random strangers. It seems that without Prairie, the teenagers are lost, and they need to understand if the stories she told were real.
Buck explains that in the mirror, Rachel sang three notes which were “BBA”, suggesting she was calling for Betty Broderick-Allen (Phyllis Smith). They recruit Betty, and due to Buck’s mother selling the mirror for a house-move, they find it at a sale and reside in a church, who seem willing to house them for the night due to their recent horrifying experiences. Their search for Rachel does not transpire, with Alfonso missing the moment the mirror began humming.
During the closure of Episode 3, “Magic Mirror”, the group travel further away from their town to meet an apparently skilled medium to speak to Rachel. On the way, they break the mirror by accident, and it irks the medium, who demands they pay a premium due to the danger of the spirit placing itself in one of her mirrors. They all sit round in a circle, and then a nearby TV starts changing channels aggressively – they conclude that the message from the TV is “only safe for BBA to go”, with various images of someone walking through a mirror.
Betty walks right up to the TV and touches it, and on impact, it cracks, ending Episode 3. “Magic Mirror” is a slightly slower episode, bringing us away from the new lead story, which took the wind out of the sails.
You can read the recap of the fourth episode by clicking these words.
