TV Review: Counterpart Episode 2: “Birds of a Feather”

Counterpart – Episode 2: “Birds of a Feather”

Staring: J.K. Simmons, Sara Serraiocco, Olivia Williams
Director: Stephen Williams
Writer: Justin Marks
Creator: Justin Marks

A review by Brooke Ali

While Howard A’s wife, Emily (Olivia Williams), is in a coma in our universe, Emily B is a hard ass agent for the same agency as the Howards (J.K. Simmons), and she doesn’t like her Howard very much, at all. She also doesn’t like the fact that Howard B has been crossing over more than usual and the secrecy surrounding his visits. Of course, we know that he’s trailing the assassin, Baldwin (Sara Serraiocco). His intelligence contacts have discovered her real name, Nadia Fierro, which Howard B plans to use to find where Baldwin is hiding in our universe; since they share a childhood, the more he learns about Nadia the more he’ll know about Baldwin, including where she might go to hide out. Meanwhile, Baldwin finds out about this and must kill her counterpart before the agents can use her.

It’s interesting to see an antagonist’s backstory so early in the game. It does a good job of setting up sympathy for Baldwin; she’s not just a mysterious killer now, but someone with an abusive childhood that helped form who she is today. That seems to be the identity theme for this episode: childhood. Both Nadias experienced the same drunken, abusive father, the same pivotal moment, and ended up with very different lives; Nadia is not an assassin, she’s a concert violinist. There are moments when you can see Baldwin contemplating this other possible life and what could have been. Nadia says at one point, “we can’t escape who we are,” but when she meets Baldwin she says, “you are my true face.” With two such very different lives, who is she, really?

Howard A is also facing a similar question. Howard B receives a lot of animosity from the agents on our side and Howard A is getting a taste of that, by association. “You know that Howard,” he says to the agents, “but I’m not him. You don’t know me.” But the agents don’t buy it, how can they be anything but the same person, to their mind. Nadia was only a child when the alternate universe split off from ours, while Howard would have been an adult; that means the Howards spent much more time as the same person than the Nadias. Are they birds of a feather, or have they all become too far apart? Howard A even tells Howard B to “stop trying to make me in your image,” as he feels a need to assert his individuality from his doppelgänger.

We’re also being carefully fed tidbits of information about life in the other world, making this show one that will reward watching multiple times to pick up on the background details. Why do so many people on the other side wear face masks? Who is trying to sabotage Emily B? What does the mysterious elder statesman mean when he wonders “if there will ever be a reckoning for what they did to us”?

As usual, excellent performances all around. Serraicco, a relative newcomer to the screen, especially compared to seasoned veterans like Simmons and Williams, is definitely a talent to watch.

Verdict
Watch it! Counterpart is continuing strong with this second episode that once again plays with questions of self and how we become who we are. The use of flashbacks was tight: just enough to tell us what we needed to know without becoming an info dump. I look forward to getting more backgrounds to the characters, both shared and divergent, and getting more details about life on the other side.