What’s so fun about this discovery is that we know something Howard Prime and Aldrich don’t. We saw Clare visit Heinrich in his butcher shop last week, but we didn’t know then that she was Quayle’s wife and the Diplomacy director’s daughter. Meanwhile, Baldwin has learned her lesson about being vulnerable around women like Clare and brings a gun to bed with Greta, and who can blame her? And that’s just a couple of examples of character complexity in this show. Clare, then, becomes an enigmatic figure in that she seems to sympathize with Baldwin even though she was forced to order her death, yet her pivotal role in passing the documents from her husband’s floor to the School would seem to preclude such feelings. The assassin wants to disappear (and perhaps travel with Greta), but she can’t do that unless she is paid for a completed job.
The same dangers are then transferred to both Baldwin and Clare. The fact that the “Ringleader,” as Lotte Verbeek’s character is billed on IMDb, dispatches her colleague for his indiscretion also shows how dangerous these temptations are. His experience with more populated streets, fancier camera phones, and care-free kisses reminds us of the differences between the two worlds and perhaps how seductive this one can be. The vignette with the sleeper agent who is kept awake by street noise really reveals the brutality the conspirators are willing to indulge to keep their mission secret.
When the cloud of mistrust around Quayle is presented together with Baldwin’s suspicion of her new friend, Greta, it’s enough to make everyone paranoid, whether character or viewer. The ending of “Act Like You’ve Been Here Before” arrives like the apocryphal fable of the frog placed in warm water slowly rising to a boil who doesn’t notice the danger until he’s cooked.
Counterpart Season 1 Episode 6Īn interesting side effect to the slower pacing of the story in Counterpart is that when there’s a big reveal, it has a ton of impact without changing the rhythm significantly. This Counterpart review contains spoilers.