Counterpart 2.2 was a relative rarity: tight as a drum. It took place on the other side, and focused on their Emily aka Emily Prime.
Her interactions with our Howard, held prisoner there, started off the hour with some excellent touches. I especially like how she explained to Howard why his Emily kept denying him his much sought-after promotion: to protect him, just as she had done to and for her Howard.
The hour ended with the jolt that Emily Silk—Emily from our side—was not only a spy but a far more pervasive and important one than we may have thought. I can't recall if I realized and thought much about this in the first season, but it seems pretty clear now that if there are good and bad people in the the two worlds, the good would be Howard Silk and Emily Prime, and the bad would be Howard Prime and Emily Silk. This is of course a bit too simplistic, all four are a lot more complex than just good and bad, but the categorization has some value: it vividly makes the point that we can't just assume our side is good, and the flu-ravaged other side bad.
Which is not say that the other side doesn't have some irredeemable villains. Certainly Mira is one of those, coolly killing an elderly couple motivated mainly to see their son, thought to be lost in the 1990s to that flu. (I'll tell you one thing: after watching Counterpart season 1, I got my flu shot earlier this year than ever before.)
One thing I'd like to see in the series, by the way: more of the rest of the worlds, outside of Germany. Have we seen anything of this at all? Surely, there's a rest of the world on the other side, just as there is one on our side. I wonder if Trump is President in their United States? If not, that might be one of the few advantages of being on the other side.
But enough idle political speculation. I'll see you here next week with another review. In the meantime, enjoy "Samantha," my alternate worlds love song, to be released on Old Bear Records this coming Spring. ("Samantha" is about love between people from parallel worlds.)
About the Creator
Paul Levinson
Novels The Silk Code & The Plot To Save Socrates; LPs Twice Upon A Rhyme & Welcome Up; nonfiction The Soft Edge & Digital McLuhan, translated into 15 languages. Best-known short story: The Chronology Protection Case; Prof, Fordham Univ.
Keep reading
More stories from Paul Levinson and writers in Futurism and other communities.
Review of 'Project Blue Book' 1.1
Project Blue Book, the docudrama on the History Channel about Dr. Allen Hynek and his research into UFOs, couldn't have come at a better time. I mean, a better time for me. I read and reviewed Alec Nevala-Lee's Astounding, about John W. Campbell and the golden age of science fiction, And Hynek's story—at least, as it begins on Project Blue Book—begins in 1952, which many people, including me, would regard as the peak of that golden age. Asimov's Foundation trilogy, which had first been published as a series of stories in Astounding (the magazine), was smack dab in the middle of being published as three books. Robert Heinlein had just published, a year earlier, his Puppet Masters, to this day one the very best books about an extraterrestrial invasion... But I digress.
By Paul Levinson5 years ago in Futurism
Comments
There are no comments for this story
Be the first to respond and start the conversation.