If you didn’t watch the first season of the Starz series Counterpart, don’t delude yourself that you could understand the second.
If you did watch the first season, a year ago or in a later binge, then you’ll be pleased with several of the turns in the new season, which launches Sunday at 9 p.m. ET.
You also may be able to understand it, though it remains true that Counterpart isn’t a show you can watch while doing something else. Its dense storylines require concentration.
J.K. Simmons, the heart of the show and a solid one, returns as Howard Silk, a low-level bureaucrat who for 30 years was curious as to exactly what his bureaucracy was really doing.
He finally found out last year, in one of those classic “be careful what you wish for” revelations.
The Office of Interchange (OI), where Howard works, handles travel and commerce between the Alpha World, where Howard lives, and the Prime World, a parallel universe accidentally created in 1987 by East German scientists.
And here we thought East German scientists spent all their time creating a super race of swimmers.
Short summation: Everyone in the Alpha world has a duplicate in the Prime world. Also, the Prime World has a lot of anger. So while the two worlds communicate through the Office of Interchange, and people from one world sometimes travel to the other for business or other reasons, the Alpha World is constantly on guard against rogues and moles who mean Alpha people harm.
All this has long been above Howard’s pay grade. In the first season, he got ensnared while meeting Howard Prime, and he gradually became a player in a crisis that ultimately led to a shutdown of the border between the two worlds.
This stranded a number of people on the wrong side, and most of them weren’t supposed to admit they were on the wrong side. So there’s a lot of tension, compounded for Howard by some changes in the condition of his wife Emily (Olivia Williams), who had been in a coma after being struck by a car.
Also, an assassin from the Prime World, Baldwin (Sara Serraiocco) was trying to kill her. All of which would be hard enough if there weren’t also an Emily Prime.
As Season 2 opens, the Howards – did we mention they seem very different in personality? – are trying to sort things out.
Things are also getting tenser for Howard’s boss Peter Quayle (Harry Lloyd), who must deal with the fact that his apparent wife Clare (Nazanin Boniadi) is really from the Prime World and doesn’t always have honorable intentions.
Is all that clear? Of course it isn’t. That’s been the point of Counterpart from the beginning; that nothing can be taken on face value because everyone has secrets and neither the Alpha nor Prime World is a place where people feel safe sharing too much.
It’s a dark show with no clear endpoint. But Simmons invests us in Howard surviving its minefields, and the notion of a parallel world with different versions of ourselves lends itself to an infinite number of twists. Season 2 pits an ever-smarter Howard against an ever-more-dangerous universe.