I think they said something about it in the Yanek episode - freezing the tech at the point where the worlds diverged (or at least, when they were no longer working together as allies) so as to limit inadvertent exposure of the differences.
I’m pretty sure Peter guessed exactly what happened to the original Clare the moment he realized the one he married was Shadow. He just didn’t want her to confirm it and make him actually confront it directly or have it explicitly confirmed. And he didn’t give her a free pass on it - his emotions around her were very complicated and still are to a significant extent. But honestly, the woman he loves? That’s her. He’s spent way, way more time with her than her other. And sure, part of that was a performance, but…it’s awfully hard to say how much of it. Certainly I believe that Clare not having known the full extent of the plans or Mira’s manipulations is meant to be genuine, and I don’t think she was prepared to release a global pandemic.
Just caught up with the final episode…generally, really like the way they finished it off. The series is at a very comfortable spot where they can leave it as is, continue along with the current story in a number of ways, or have a great stepping stone to reuse the premise they’ve established (seriously, how long would it take any one side to break through both welds, lol - ah, shit, this door is welded, guess no use thinking what’s behind that because nothing gets through a welded door.) Even when it was drawing to a close, i was thinking ‘how the hell are they gonna close the portal’? Even collapsing the tunnel might have no impact, as unless the energy of the portal is actually destroyed, it’s just debris in front/behind it that can just be cleared.
The only things i didn’t like/get were:
Thing 1 wtf was up with Ethel.Was that just her programming snapping back into place at the last second? And even that tripwire itself makes little sense. If you want to destroy the evidence, you destroy it. If you want to lay a trap, then you lay a trap, but in doing so you want to be sure you get your prey and not a postman, squirrel or any other random thing that can be blowing through the driveway. Likewise, you’d put your charges on the inside where they cant be seen, with perhaps some buried munitions in the driveway all triggered by something on the door. For a series so absolutely devious about traps, this one was pretty stupid.
Thing two was the killing of Yanek Alpha. I think Mira killing him makes all the sense in the world - afterall, he’s the chief architect of all this misery, and having him pay for his transgressions right at that moment when he’s finally reunited is both apt and well inline with Mira. However, being killed with the virus is…just too cute. He’s a bad vector(stationary old man). The flu is, i guess, totally not transmissive for all the time he was in the prime world, otherwise she’d be infecting her world at the same time. If you’d really wanted to create a deadly virus, you’d look for something that spread all the while the vector was asymptomatic, but this one doesn’t look like it was, so now Alpha side would have a good idea this person was infected, and with the risk of contagion, i guess they’d be pretty quick and efficient at shutting this down.
Anyways, on the whole, good season and series and recommend it
Ethel didn’t kill herself. It’s strongly implied there was another operative there that triggered the explosives.
And Yanek Alpha being infected wasn’t about making him the main vector for the plague - he might well end up as a backup - but infecting her other and their family. Remember, she explicitly tells him to go spend time with them.
Finished this up yesterday and highly recommend it too.
I watched it because of JK Simmons at first, and was not disappointed at all. His performance in the first season was excellent. The world building & other characters had me hooked in the 2nd.
I was confused with the Ethel thing as well. I thought that was one of the few really dumb moments in the show, but I guess I just missed whatever malkav noticed.
Was it ever explained how the interface areas go between both worlds? I had trouble understanding that, compared to the heavily guarded doors in the basement.
Canada - The whole thing is on Crave, and now available on their free month trial.
If you freezeframe at the right moment, you can see that the trousers correspond to hers and also the clothes of the person next to her correspond to Emily.
What I am a little confused about and where you might get your idea is what was the burst of radio chatter (as described by subtitles) that Peter heard in his earpiece right before it happened? That seems too kind of random.
No, Ethel has some dialogue to the effect that “she” wouldn’t let her stand down, and there are camera shots from an unidentified perspective watching from another angle. And just because there’s a tripwire doesn’t necessarily mean the explosives don’t have a remote trigger as well.
I thought the other perspective belonged to Howard Prime & Peter who were left at the vehicles. We were shown the view from that perspective 6 times and each time it was prefaced by Peter & Howard looking, which heavily suggests that that was their perspective, although I suppose that is not absolutely conclusive.
The dialogue was that “she” wouldn’t let her (Ethel) have a normal life, paint, be a Mum etc.
And while there could be a remote trigger as you suggest, that ignores the fact that Ethel did definitely stomp on the tripwire.
I think it was Ethel, because as Emily is walking her away from the building, Ethel suddenly stops short with a “what am I doing” look on her face, right before the wire is tripped.
I am pretty sure that if it were Howard and Peter they’d have just shown Howard and Peter in the shot and not had it as a mysterious untethered camera angle. And yes, “she” wouldn’t allow those things - which are being described as resulting from her standing down and not blowing herself up. And I interpreted that look as Ethel seeing the minder. It’s worth noting, also, that in real life suicide bombings it is not at all uncommon for a handler to have a secondary trigger for the bomb in case the recruit has a failure of nerve. Are you absolutely certain the wire is shown as being stepped on? I don’t think it is, just the bomb goes off and the only trigger we’ve explicitly been shown is the wire.
I’m starting it. I liked it!
The idea of spy thriller but instead between West Germany and East Germany in the Cold War, between two parallel worlds is pretty novel. Science fiction wise, I liked the concept of parallel worlds used here: it isn’t a different universe, they were one and the same, but a new “branch” appeared since the experiment 30 years ago. So the worlds were mostly identical, and it’s only now as the small changes have been piling up for years that bigger differences are appearing.
Of course, this kind of story borrows itself easily to cool ideas and speculation. For example, I was thinking that the audience is supposed to think the world they shown is our world, and the other one is the ‘different one’, but a twist they could do is to do it the other way around: maybe the world is the protagonist is the weird one, and once we see the other world we will see it’s closer to our world.
I thought that because one curious thing, the current year isn’t very clear, they said 30 years have passed since the accident that produced the gate, we know it was in the cold war before the fall of the Berlin wall, so one thinks they are in modern times (2010-15~?) however technology wise they have shown something more outdated (type writers, green phosphor terminals).
This first episode did a good job of characterizing the protagonist with small gestures and comments. I especially liked the implication between the two Howards, in how the difference between them was their relationship with the wife, the alpha Howard married her very soon and lived a happy life, and it’s implied that the spy Howard didn’t enjoy the same happy, easy marriage. That’s why our Howard was content with his job and didn’t climb up the ladder at the job like the other one. He complains, but I have the feeling he had the better life, and the other one focused on being a spy because his life sucked more, like the standard of noir/spy protagonists usually suffer.
It’s ridiculous that a show this good didn’t get picked up by some other network. I despair of the tastes of the TV viewing public sometimes, who’d rather watch reality show BS that they can follow while looking at Facebook on their phone than something smart like this.
Oh, I saw old computers in the other world, I guess that’s one less theory :P. Strangely, there are mobile phones on the setting, which is a much modern technology than what I’ve see on the office, so it raises even more concerns about what year it is.
The other side intrigues me. As they is differentiated by having more and bigger skyscrapers, my first thought was they were doing it better than this side, although it seems something wrong there, an authoritarian government in Europe, maybe? It gave that vibe with the ad showing kids to avoid and denounce sick people. It seems they had a plague.
Speaking of smartphones, they don’t have them on the other side!
Wait, I think I know why the outdated technology in the central office, it’s to not give clues of what they have to visitors from the other side!
Another thought about the setting: really, they could have located the door at any city. A door to another world would have worked the same in LA, NY or Washington, so it’s curious they have a series with American actors speaking English where the action occurs in Berlin. I guess they chose Berlin just to evoke even more the classical spy tale setting.
The episodes continue the Baldwin plotline, in a more or less logical fashion, no complaints in that regard. Having the problem of the security forces getting someone from the other side, and the headaches that could bring up is easy to understand, and it served both to show us the diplomacy between worlds and how the reach of the conspiration grows. And how they are complicating the relationships and the spycraft parts with Emily is ace.
Season 3 of Counterpart, should it occur, should show the two Howards trying to move past the events of the portal. They’ve independently become jazz bandleaders focused on bringing out the best in their students- one through inspiration and the other through perspiration.
This has suddenly turned up on Amazon Prime, for those of us who missed it the first time around. But presumably Amazon hasn’t shelled out for a third season, or they would have announced it already… right?
