So much this. You really have to give this show your full attention.
Hope the ending of S2 isn’t a cliffhanger cause there’s not gonna be a season 3. Cancelled by Starz. :(
S2 wraps up most of the plots and pretty much answers any world mysteries (what’s up with Management, etc). If the show has to end here it’s a decent place.
Hope another network rescues this show. It deserves to be seen by more people!
Wow, just watched a critical couple of scenes:
What changed young Ethel’s mind and made her step on the tripwire after all? Also in the Westbahnhof, Howard Prime handled that shit like a BOSS. But as to the last scene, Fuuuu…
It’s so frustrating that a show that’s this smart is most likely going away, but reality show bullshit goes for a decade or longer. This should have been on HBO, Netflix or Prime, maybe it would have gotten more exposure.
WRT the last scene, you need to re-examine your assumptions regarding its participants.
Man, just like Travelers, if this did get picked up, it would have to be a very different series going forward.
@Mike_O_Malley if you are suggesting Yanek knew he was infected I don’t agree.
The one thing I really had trouble with was the fact that the building was cleared of all personnel, but then they everyone is listening to the message. I guess they were interweaving footage from the following day but it made the whole thing hard to parse what was happening when. I guess that the countdown wouldn’t start until the message was read, which helps, I suppose.
Are you implying that the young people in the train station were a decoy / feint, and that the real epidemic vector was Yanek Alpha, or what?
Whoops! Not the last scene, the last Howard scene. It was early yet. I believe that the Howards switched and the Howard who went through the Crossing was “our” Howard (Howard Alpha) rather than Howard Prime. Prime’s “better deal” was Alpha getting a chance to live with an Emily who loved him rather than remaining in his original world as a widower. Prime got out of it the ability to live in “our” world completely under radar and beyond suspicion. The “last scene” I actually meant was when Naya offered her sympathies to Howard and asked him to come back to Strategy. That Howard (allegedly Alpha) was strutting around with his collar popped up, something Prime did all the time. Thus his “I’ll find a new life” bit.
Sorry about the confusion.
Wow, that is an interesting possibility!
What do you think about what I posted? Was the real patient zero Yanek Alpha, or was that just Mira’s personal revenge on him for killing her dad?
I think Mira got a twofer out of this one. She was cruel.
What surprised me is that when Mira died she did not reveal any of her plot to Emily Burton Silk. Typically evil doers brag but that I why I like the show so much, it is anything but typical.
Now I plan to watch that final Howard - Naya scene again @Mike_O_Malley. Your theory makes sense. Good eye for detail.
The title of the episode was “Better Angels” and if Howard Prime had one that he could still hear, switching with Howard Alpha so that Alpha had a second chance with Emily Burton Silk would have been the right move. And Prime would get his wish to stay on our side and gain his freedom.
Ah, I wondered if that wasn’t what you meant. I’m not so sure…
I thought at the time there was a certain gleam in Howard’s eye, especially during the latter part of that conversation. But I’d note that the Howard that went through the crossing had his collar turned up and was wearing the pea coat (orwhatever it is).
Howard who went through the crossing did have his collar up, but he walked behind the assassin, was quite hesitant and looked around a lot, including a lingering look at the closing door and nodding uncomfortably to himself
Right. Baldwin would be in on it- she likes Howard Alpha.
That is definitely Howard Alpha with Baldwin and definitely Howard Prime talking to Temple outside of his apartment. The writers spent two seasons setting up those scenes. I thought both of them were just perfect. Such a shame this show is being cancelled.
I guess I still have a few questions –
– Why the old tech in the Office of Interchange? Particularly on the Alpha side when much more advanced technology is available. They carry their own smartphones into the office but are working on ancient PCs?
– What is Interface’s job exactly? At the start of season 1 we see Howard Alpha read cryptic words to an Interface agent from the other side. And presumably the same thing is happening in ten different rooms at the same time, and this process is repeated daily for years. What was the purpose of all of that?
– Yanek Alpha makes a reference to getting Peter Alpha “when he was young” into Echo. How on earth did they know they should get him when he was young?
– I guess I don’t get why Clare gets a pass on murdering her other. Except makes a nice ending. How dumb is Peter supposed to be? He knows the sleeper agents need to have their other removed. He just doesn’t care? I thought the ending scene where they are talking about baby names was weird. He wants to change the baby’s name? Uh, dude, this lady murdered your fiancee. You know she’s Shadow, and you think she had nothing to do with her other disappearing?
It’s the one area that didn’t quite ring right with me – Clare’s conversion. She doesn’t love Peter. She thinks he is stupid and easy to manipulate. Which he is. She loves her baby not Peter. The plan was to release the virus and then she can take the baby back to her world. Maybe she is still faking it and he is too dumb to get it. But if this was supposed to be a genuine conversion, it needed to be sold a little harder to me.
Still a wonderful series with great actors. Deserves at least couple of more seasons. Season 3 would need a new villain. I’d pick Clare/Shadow. Her “father” figures out the murder that Shadow killed his daughter and that accusation/flight from persecution relights all of her old fanatical worldview.
At a guess, interface are passing encrypted information that’s based off real world events to try monitor deviations between both worlds.
The weather is 6.7c in Berlin Templehof today; read line 5. Weather is 7.5c; read line 18. Dow Jones is down 100 points, read whatever. Something along those lines.
At a guess, old tech is to keep stuff non-networked from the wider world in a much more secure way. Running encryption on very old software+hardware to keep it as isolated as possible.
How young was Peter when Echo got him?
Clare gets something of a pass because Prime Clare had left Peter and was never going to return to him. She gets a pass because he chose their child over his career and his loyalty. She gets a pass because… it’s hard to explain, but I never felt like it was forced. For me, it fit with the decisions Peter had ultimately made.
Clare does love Peter, it’s just not the sort of romantic love she had for Spencer. She loves him for choosing her. She loves him for choosing Spencer-baby. She loves him for not letting her be alone. Don’t underestimate those things!
…why aren’t my spoiler tags working
Spoiler tags don’t carry over paragraphs.
An officer and a gentleman
I really like Counterpart but part of maintaining a great show is knowing not to outstay your premise. The end of this season is a perfect place to leave those characters; another season wouldn’t necessarily add much except busy work (even if it’s fate-of-the-world busywork.)
Where do things stand now with the search for a new home for the show?
Marks: Well, we are looking for a new home, and we’re sitting down over the next few weeks with some interested parties and talking about it. A lot of it really is a chance to be a part of the show as it moves forward into, as we call it, “a second series” of Counterpart .
Now, there will be a lot of continuation from what we see. Characters, cast members, plot threads, obviously. I think that the release of the flu into our world by means of Yanek — which was sort of Mira’s final stroke, her insurance plan — definitely has some story implications moving forward. But I would say that we never wanted to be a Cold War allegory forever. We wanted to have an espionage allegory, and a science-fiction espionage allegory at that, but moving forward into a next season, we take the spy world a little forward into the future, towards — if the allegory of the first two years was the Cold War, maybe we’re getting a little more now into an espionage allegory as it relates to lawless countries, areas where borders have less meaning, and, in a lot of ways, a Wild West of espionage. That’s part of the fun of where we move forward. We love having our two worlds to play with, but the Berlin Wall portion of it is definitely finished. Now we take our characters to a new place.
Can you tell me what place physically that would be, what city or cities the third season would take place in?
Marks: I will stay mum on that, except to stay — and this goes back to the very beginning from when I first pitched the show — the movie that stays near and dear to my heart and always excites me when thinking about it in the context of Counterpart is Casablanca . […] That’s a whole other kind of border that exists in that story, and I would love to see that applied to our show and our characters.
From a recent Q&A.