Counterpart: season two review – the superlative spy thriller returns

Here we go. Deep breath. Prepare yourself for the world of Counterpart (Starz Play, Amazon Prime). Thirty years ago, East German scientists opened up a crossing into a parallel universe. Go through the door, which obviously you must never do, and you are in an almost-replica of this world in which doppelgängers carry out increasingly divergent lives to our own without our knowledge. The two worlds are at war, partly because of a flu epidemic that killed millions, partly because there is always a war. Also Indigo, an illegal programme that trains sleeper cells in the art of supplanting their “others”, which means lots of spies running around in bodies that may or may not be their own, killing people who may or may not be themselves. Above all, there is JK Simmons, whose own face is so worldly and magnificent, like a mountain capable of deep crevasses of emotion, that feasting upon it twice is still not enough.

Assuming you’re still with me, welcome back to the superlative spy thriller you have never heard of, with the name you struggle to remember. (I still keep calling it Counterfeit, which is perhaps what it would be called in the other world.) The first episode of the second season of Justin Marks’s fiendishly complex series, which happily continues to be like a cocktail made up of equal parts John le Carré and Philip K Dick then shaken not stirred by JJ Abrams, stays put in our universe (known as Alpha), though don’t be fooled into thinking this makes things any less twisty.

Alpha is the world where Howard Silk (Simmons) is a Willy Loman-ish clerk whose wife Emily (Olivia Williams) has long been in a coma. Except now Howard has been replaced by his suave spy twin from the other (Prime) world, while meek Howard Alpha is locked in some creepy black site known as Echo. And Emily, following a failed assassination attempt (because – keep up – she was also a spy back in the day, though poor Howard Alpha never knew) has woken up. Got it? Good.

“What’s that word when everything’s a bit off?” Emily asks after being discharged. “Strange?” offers Howard. Well, quite, considering he is not even her husband. The scenes between them, with Emily looking set to occupy a much meatier role in this series, are sublime. Ostensibly married for 30 years, they remain fundamentally unknowable to one another, which, even when your partner hasn’t been switched with their daredevil twin from a parallel realm, is pretty relatable. Emily recognises little of her old secret life and when it does start to filter back, she doesn’t like what she sees. “I don’t understand the woman who chose this picture,” she mutters, plucking a landscape from the wall. Later, to Howard: “Did you even like me … before? You didn’t know me.”

This is when Counterpart is at its best: when it rises above the stylish but sometimes formulaic sub-genre of spy-fi to scale the heights of existential meditation. This is, after all, why we can’t get enough of parallel universes; we get to imagine what might have been. The questions raised are the big ones. Who are we? How much are we shaped by our choices and circumstances? How capable are we of change? And how much acting can one man do with his eyebrows? If the philosophical arc of season one was about the stark differences between the two Howards, season two explores their similarities.

Elsewhere, Counterpart is in danger of getting a bit snagged in its own web. Which is another pitfall of the genre: to overspin the plot until you no longer care that you trust no one and the mind begins to wander instead. In the opening episode alone there is a healthy body count, one note slipped under a door, two sham marriages and three bewildering encounters in dank underpasses. By the time Clare Quayle (Nazanin Boniadi), the wife of agent Peter Quayle who is his source and a mole from the other world (so, keep up, not actually his wife), was saying: “I’m the one who has to listen to stories about my childhood from the face of a man who looks like my father,” I was lost.

Nevertheless, if you’re really good at spy-fi, and it is an actual contemporary skill worthy of being lied about on CVs to follow these labyrinthine series to their bitter ends, you’ll love Counterpart. And though the premise is as far-fetched as they come, the threat feels uncomfortably real. “It could be the end of diplomacy between our worlds,” warns Emily in her days as a secret agent negotiating between universes. Considering this genre is supposed to be an allegory for the cold war, it is grimly prescient stuff.