‘The Copenhagen Test’ Review: Simu Liu in Espionage Drama

The fifth episode of Peacock‘s The Copenhagen Test begins with an extended “Previously On…” sequence. After a brief flashback, the main character has his own series of memories related to things that happened previously on the show. Said main character next records a video in which he tells a then-unknown figure everything that happened previously on the show.

The Copenhagen Test, created by Thomas Brandon and executive produced by James Wan, is a somewhat complicated show. But it isn’t nearly as complicated as it thinks it is throughout a first half in which characters are constantly repeating the premise, monologuing expositional info to each other and sitting in blandly designed rooms bringing outside characters up-to-speed on the most basic of details.

The sci-fi espionage thriller is determined to be a smart show, while at the same time existing in a media landscape in which executives have decided that audiences are, at best, generally distracted and, at worst, kinda dumb. “Be grateful for all the things you don’t know,” a character instructs one of our heroes. “Ambiguity is a wonderful sleep aid, because once you know, there’s no going back.”

Unfortunately, through its first four episodes, The Copenhagen Test is also a wonderful sleep aid — a whole lot of leaden dialogue and convoluted plotting, with very little intensity or momentum.

It does get better, mind you. The fifth episode, directed by Vincenzo Natali, features the series’ first two semi-memorable set-pieces, while the seventh episode, directed by Nima Nourizadeh, features its first two semi-memorable fight sequences. The last two episodes give the first real indications that the show is capable of being smartly tricky with its structure and timeline, rather than just annoyingly evasive.

Throw in a strong ensemble of character actors doing solid work and hinting at depths that ostensible leads Simu Liu and Melissa Barrera struggle to convey, and The Copenhagen Test in its second half becomes a show I could potentially follow.

So perhaps the triple recap at the top of episode five is the show’s tacit blessing to skip over the first half of the series entirely? The place the show reaches after the eighth episode is probably where it should have been after, say, a two-part pilot. An eight-episode season that could be watched in four and probably should have been two?

That, friends, is iffy math.

What are the basics you need to know? Liu plays Alexander Hale, an analyst with an intelligence subagency known as “The Orphanage.” It’s a two-tier organization. Analysts work on the bottom floor; operatives work on the top floor, which is basically internal affairs for the CIA, FBI, NSA and whatnot.

Alexander dreams of moving to the top floor. He interviews for a job upstairs. The job goes to his colleague Cobb (Mark O’Brien). Sad.

In addition to feeling unfulfilled, Alexander is getting headaches. They seem like migraines, but they’re not. They’re REALLY not. They’re evidence of a unique problem: Alexander has been hacked. Somehow, an unknown entity has the ability to see what Alexander sees and hear what Alexander hears, which is especially bad if you work with potentially sensitive information.

Even though audiences are never given any reason to suspect that Alexander might be anything other than a perplexed victim of this “hacking” thing — which involves a secret government program and “nanites” — higher-ups at the Orphanage are less convinced. Consequently, they bring Alexander upstairs with one of two goals: Either they’ll discover that Alexander turned rogue of his own volition or else they’ll be able to uncover the mysterious forces who put nanites in his head without his permission.

There are a lot of people involved in this process, starting with Michelle (Barrera), a bartender who isn’t really a bartender. Her past with Alexander relates to the titular test, which the series forgets about entirely for hours at a time before a finale in which absolutely everything ties back to the lessons of that test in the most heavy-handed way.

That’s the way the writing in The Copenhagen Test goes: When there’s a theme the show wants you to get, three consecutive scenes will make the identical point, which will then vanish entirely once you know to look for it.

It’s hard to do a show about ephemeral concepts like “choices” and “acts of conscience,” but the creative team has very little faith in the audience’s ability to get what they’re going for. Honestly, given the initial execution, their approach is wrong-headed even if they’re not wrong.

Back to the machinations of the plot, though… There’s the enigmatic founder of the Orphanage, known only as “St. George” (Kathleen Chalfant); the dour and dapper head of the Orphanage, Moira (Brian D’Arcy James); young recruit Parker (Sinclair Daniel); a stern woman who IMDb tells me is named Marlowe (Adina Porter); Alexander’s mentor-turned-restaurateur Victor (Saul Rubinek); and a shadowy guy named Henry (Adam Godley).

Confused yet? Really all you need to know about The Copenhagen Test is: Alexander Hale is an intelligence service analyst with no upward mobility until the day unknown adversaries hack his brain. Can he take down the bad guys before the good guys begin to think he’s the bad guy and take him down? Think second-tier Philip K. Dick, only without the actual Dick to fall back on. Hmm… Phrasing. Sorry.

The first four episodes are all unremarkable Spycraft 101. Think Showtime’s The Agency without the geopolitical specificity or punchy dialogue. It’s very dull, the sort of thing that, were this not my job, I’d probably stop watching. This extends to the style, or lack thereof, in the early episodes, which suffer from limp doubling of Toronto for Washington and Generic Intelligence Agency sets that had to have been purchased in bulk. A lot of the action takes place in the dark and loses nothing from the lack of visibility.

But even then, there are hints of the flesh that could embellish this emaciated skeleton. The character of Parker, in particular, has a backstory that I found both intriguing and amusing in a way that left me frequently wishing she and Daniel, so good in the underrated The Other Black Girl, were more consistently at the story’s center.

In what long ago became a prestige television trope, each episode begins with a pre-credits snippet of backstory. I rather reliably felt that those backstory details were better than the front story and too often failed to inform the main story in immediately evident ways.

You wait a long time, for example, for the show to get real value out of Alexander’s parents being refugees from China and the tenuous sense of belonging that fuels his entire personality (because we learn nothing else about his upbringing at all).

In the end, there are moments that somewhat pay off on that information, but not in time to give Liu anything real to play, leading to a flat, if never “bad” performance.

As the primary love interest who can never actually be a love interest since the show is more invested in misdirection than relationships, Barrera gets to be a little more interesting, but not a lot, especially since Michelle’s backstory hints at a torment that’s rarely spotted in her placid exterior.

So many of the supporting players, thankfully, get more to do. Godley, one of those great scene-stealers who feels like he’s great in everything and yet sufficiently featured only rarely — see Down Cemetery Road for a recent example — keeps you guessing for the duration regarding whether Henry is hero, villain or hybrid.

James, a New York theater icon whose screen performances can tend toward the broad, has rarely been so subtle and quietly intriguing. Another acclaimed stage vet, Chalfant alternates between menace and maternal in unsettling ways. Porter is always a source of instant intensity, but I’m not sure the season takes her character anywhere good, in contrast to Rubinek who, if you wait long enough here, eventually gets to do some fun stuff far beyond what he’s normally offered.

At the end of the eight-episode season, The Copenhagen Test has seemingly set up what, in broadcast TV terms, ought to be a versatile and resilient engine with a decently established team and the opportunity to use Alexander’s predicament in various, almost procedural, ways.

Of course, a broadcast series would have established the identical foundation in 44 minutes and what viewers lost in “unfolding characterizations” would be made up for in not needing to wade through four hours of bad TV in order to get to four episodes of sometimes entertaining TV.