Chris Sheridan
The following review and analysis contains spoilers for The Copenhagen Test (created by Thomas Brandon).
I kind of stumbled across The Copenhagen Test, about a Chinese-American analyst named Alexander Hale (Simu Liu) realizing that his mind has been hacked, when I was looking into upcoming shows. It immediately caught my attention with its premise, as well as its leads, Liu and Melissa Barrera, and of course cast member Brian D’arcy James, who I fell in love with while recapping Evil. And you know what? I kind of loved it. It’s intriguing, exciting, and has so many twists and flashbacks that it’s almost dizzying.
At the outset, Alexander is part of a special forces team sent to Belarus to rescue hostages who have been taken by a local militia. Once most of the hostages have been rescued, Alexander is told, by an unknown voice, that there is one seat left on the helicopter (besides his own), and if he encounters more than one hostage, he needs to prioritize American citizens. The first hostage Alexander encounters is a young, frightened non-American boy, and after comforting him and preparing to help extract him, a disheveled woman comes running out of the forest, begging Alexander to take her instead—she’s American. Alexander decides to take the boy instead, leaving the frantic woman behind.
Three years later, Alexander is no longer part of the special forces team and is instead working for the Orphanage, which we learn in some text is a secret government oversight agency created by George H.W. Bush. Downstairs are analysts, and upstairs is mission control. We’re also told that the Orphanage has never been compromised. Uh-oh. Alexander works downstairs, and his main role is to listen to and translate conversations. Alexander’s cover story is that he works at the library. Every day, he proceeds to the lonely back of the library and glances at a statue of a woman, which scans his eyes and lets him into a secret door.
Alexander suffers from migraines and panic attacks, and is discreetly given pills to manage the anxiety by his ex-fiancée, Dr. Rachel Kasperian (Hannah Cruz). The migraines suddenly subside when the subway he uses to commute always drops the wi-fi signal at a certain point.
Alexander meets a bartender named Michelle (Melissa Barerra), and after another flashback, realizes that she is the frantic woman from Belarus. In the second episode, he is told that she is indeed an Orphanage operative. They eventually strike up a romance, but even that is a façade: nearly every time Michelle tells Alexander something seemingly genuine, we flash back to her rehearsal with the Orphanage revealing what she’s going to tell him. This is revealed very early on, but that leads to the question: how much of their connection is her playing him, and is she actually falling for him?
At his apartment, Alexander remembers the “choose one” ultimatum in Belarus and looks into one of his books to land on a field assessment called “The Copenhagen Test” in which the subject has to choose between an American citizen and a foreign child. The ultimatum was an engineered loyalty test. In a later conversation with St. George (Kathleen Chalfant), one of the highest-ranking members of the Orphanage, Alexander is faced with the truth that he could have given up his own seat to save both of the hostages, and that missed decision is what has been tearing him up inside.
Back at the upstairs, Alexander is heavily on guard. In his office, he turns down the lights, obscuring himself, and begins digging. He first searches for surveillance programs, and after many dead ends, lands on one under the category “Bio-Hacking.” As he reads through the file, he finds that subjects have experienced migraines just as he has, and that the program sends a data stream from the subject’s eyes and ears so that what they see and hear can be monitored. He realizes he’s a subject of the project, and from there has to maintain a façade and be extremely careful where he looks and what he sees and hears to avoid the hacker getting information, as well as reveal that he knows he’s compromised. He utilizes multiple signal disruptions, such as the area in the subway station, as well as other areas to have discreet conversations and help piece things together, particularly with Director Moira (Brian D’arcy James).
A pivotal character is Parker (Sinclair Daniel), working for the Orphanage, who is uncannily good at predicting scenarios and is able to put together what Alexander might do next. She’s almost too good, which occasionally feels like a cheap way to for the writers to propel the plot forward. Nearly every step of the way, she knows what Alexander is going to do next, and I was torn between being interested in what she can predict and waiting for her to be stumped. And eventually she is, but not for long, as she pieces together that Alexander has been playing the long game to support the Orphanage.
Everyone is smart here; it’s about who is smart enough to outsmart everyone else. And here I am, trying to outsmart all of them (I didn’t).
The Copenhagen Test does get a little “predictable” in the first half of the season when pretty much every interaction between Alexander and Michelle ends with a flashback to Michelle talking to the Orphanage and revealing that that interaction was a carefully planned component of manipulating Alexander, so it becomes easy to distrust her in the present. It’s so easy to distrust anyone and everyone, that there’s a chance that viewers are probably right in doing so. Luckily, this becomes less of a sure thing in the second half of the season, when things become less obvious. The question of Alexander’s loyalty to the Orphanage becomes murkier, and his quest for answers begins to run counter to the Orphanage’s directives.
By Episode 7, things are really heating up. Michelle receives a text from Parker to take out Alexander, resulting in a satisfying knock-down, drag-out fight in his apartment ending in him cracking her across the head with a brick, and multiple other action sequences as Alexander continues to evade Orphanage. All the while, he is slowly succumbing to the hack as he suffers from the waves of disorientation, as well as eventual bleeding from his eyes and ears, signaling the endgame of the fatal effects of the hack. The finale is a race against the clock for Alexander to finally get all of the answers he seeks, with everything coming to a head via multiple reveals and flashbacks satisfyingly starting to tie everything together with who ultimately is involved on both sides of the conflict, and how. This finale asks further questions (along with a frustratingly hand-waved solution to the lethal hack) and opens the possibility of a hopeful Season 2. I would be remiss to not mention Alexander’s good friend and former Orphanage operative Victor (Saul Rubinek), whose presence as a father figure and reliable mentor to Alexander is pivotal in helping and protecting him.
Occasionally uneven, I nevertheless really enjoyed The Copenhagen Test. It’s very entertaining in its sense of paranoia instead of mindless action, extremely bingeable, and never loses momentum. Is suspension of disbelief vital to enjoy the show? Absolutely (but at same time, it might be a terrifying examination of what we face with technology and surveillance). Does it make it less fun? Not at all. And it’s a lot of fun. It’s packed to the gills with twists, and most of the fun is trying to keep up and keep ahead. This is a great post-Christmas treat to knock out over the weekend.
The Copenhagen Test is streaming on Peacock.
