Doubling has always been a part of humanity’s collective unconscious, but it’s hard not to notice the concept gaining more traction as our experience of day-to-day life becomes more fractured, easier to bifurcate—consider the common joke format of starting a hypothetical with “meanwhile, on Earth Two…” in an effort to describe the version of our world where, if you squint, everything seems to make sense. Where would we be if we had made different choices? Who would these people be, if not us? These are heavy questions, and they’re part of why, for the past few years, Parent Trap technology has been sweeping Hollywood.

Consider: James Franco played twins in The Deuce, and will apparently continue to play twins in The Deuce, even after being the subject of multiple allegations of sexual misconduct. The penultimate episode of The Leftovers featured two Justin Theroux as alternate versions of Kevin Garvey. Michael Fassbender got to play two versions of the same android in Alien: Covenant, and Kyle MacLachlan played three different versions of Special Agent Dale Cooper in Twin Peaks: The Return. Even The Good Place has explored some of this by asking its characters to become the “best” versions of themselves—and by playing omnipotent computer program Janet off her evil, gum-chewing counterpart.

Why are we drawn to these kinds of stories? There are all sorts of things one could get out of a good old-fashioned doppelgänger tale: an encounter with the darkest parts of one’s subconscious; a visible, tangible exploration of the fear that we don’t know what actually makes us us; the visceral pleasure of watching two young Lindsay Lohans have a long fencing battle before realizing that they are in fact identical twins.

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But these double stories are often primarily the prompt for an extended process of soul-searching. And in the case of Starz spy drama Counterpart, it’s an excuse for questions about everything from the nature of family to whether our memories make our identities to the fundamental question of whether we should value kindness over competence with a gun.

Counterpart stars J.K. Simmons as Howard Silk, a low-level bureaucrat in a government agency whose purpose is not entirely clear to him. He is a naive man whose whole world consists of his wife, Emily—currently in a coma. They have no children. Simmons also plays Howard Silk, an assassin with a very particular set of skills who has become deeply enmeshed in the highest levels of a secret cold war. He is estranged from his wife, Emily, and their daughter, and finds himself in the precarious position of double-crossing officials on his own side.

The spycraft in the world of Counterpart revolves around the existence of two alternate worlds—timelines that split off at the moment the rift between them was discovered, in a sort of concrete application of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. It’s not just Howard, either: Every character on Counterpart comes as a pair, and their lives have all taken drastically different turns. One version of a character is an assassin, the other a violinist. One is a devoted, yet absent, spouse; the other a ruthless operative. Most spy entertainment thrives on the question of whether you can trust anyone, but the background level of tension is literally doubled when it’s unclear whether any given character is actually themselves or an otherworldly imposter.

Counterpart is full of entertaining, carefully restrained intrigue. It traffics in cold, claustrophobic scenes of characters filling out paperwork, pushing buttons, going back and forth between the two worlds. (One of the Howards plays Go with a friend occasionally; the symbol of the board and the opposing, identical pieces recurs throughout the series and in the title sequence.) As the conflict between the two worlds expands, however, it becomes increasingly unclear what is going on and why anyone cares about any of it, beyond a general sense of paranoia and fear of the other world.

Starz

The show repeatedly teases broader questions about the split—what caused it, what each world wants—but ultimately finds them less interesting than specific character work. Rather than expanding its world by introducing new characters and situations, it simply doubles, folds over, and showcases new sides of the people we already know (or think we know). Olivia Williams plays Emily, Howard’s wife, who is in a coma in the world of the first, hapless Howard—but a very much alive and present character in the other world. The show and its cast thrive in these small moments of encounter without the threat of death looming, when each of the characters looks at their alternate and asks a version of the question: Where did it all go wrong?

Surrounded by shows that are competing for audience eyeballs in the era of Peak TV, the restraint of Counterpart, especially given its potentially outsized, ridiculous premise, is impressive. In fact, it mirrors Simmons’ performance—by far the best reason to watch the show. The Howard we are introduced to first, the one who is ultimately the show’s protagonist, is beaten down by decades of a nothing life, but contains a fiercely calibrated moral compass and a seemingly boundless capacity for kindness (if also a degree of inherent pathetic comedy and foolishness). His actions are powered by an explosive energy, formed by years of pressure with no outlet. Watching Counterpart is a similar process of waiting, extracting fuel for thought (and some great spy action) from a cool, quiet facade.

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