Like anyone else, radicals will fail.-- Alfred Kazin
A little research indicates Justin Marks adapted Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book for Disney’s reboot against its animated film version, which may be considered a classical rendition of sentiment, and provides a bit of a brace to explain “Counterpart” and the essential weight JK Simmons carries in it. What Marks role was over that of Amy Berg, who was the series writer for season one, mystifies those of us not paying into guild dues to understand how to meld original narratives into contemporary molds, but as the man with the key responsibility for the concept, Marks clearly knows how to bring fabulism to life on television, a fabulism with an inherent allegorical bent; as crisp as critics found Counterpart to be, its dramaturgic roots reside in Medieval morality plays, where the characters are direct symbols. The Iago of the curled mustache being the Vice, or Falstaff as the fool of Appetite, most of Counterpart’s characters are archetypes of this sort. Some are more complex than others, like Howard and Emily Silk, and how their choices define them, or James Cromwell as Yanek, yet another master manipulator whose misguided focus impacts the entire species. Others are easier, like Stephen Rea as Alexander Pope, the mission oriented creator of black mirror assassins, very clever compact irony there, to name a rogue agency manager after the most renown British poet of mock epics. In and of itself, the twenty episode allegory isn’t complicated. The writers sprinkle a bunch of clues, Karl Marx and the pernicious attraction of his political philosophy, the mention of a Prime world Holocaust survivor, obvious allusions to the Berlin Wall, a weaponized biological agent injected into what we might consider to be the “Eastern bloc,” which the “original” Western world denies occurred, but what Marks ultimately wanted transfixed viewers to take away from all this is more elusive. I ate the convoluted story line up like candy, right up to the implied black widow sex and death associations, particularly as it related to the marginally drawn homosexual composites, but the intensity of this melodrama isn’t for everyone, and it rarely takes its foot off the gas pedal. A rare exception, toward the denouement, is when the FBI agent Temple’s husband says raising a disabled child is akin to a detour in Holland, and Clare’s more tortured spouse rejoins with, “Italy has too many tourists.” Touche, in the same vein, the disabled community has too many fractal patterns to succeed. Setting aside my excoriation of the integration models of my generation, Jimmi’s obituary to his partner lacks the balanced restraint most trained journalists know to offer readers. When Jimmi writes Erik came to University of Pennsylvania to seek treatment for numbness in his hands, this is a tell. A better way to phrase it: Dr. von Schmetterling was unable to complete his internship due to illness. Such reticence offers the decedent just that much more respect, something poor Mr. Shrode cannot affix to his own person. Despite his claims of advocacy for the meek and enslaved of the passive with spittle in the crevices of their lips, Jimmi buckles when the going gets rough. He caves, fearful of righteous anger, transformative, much like Clare as “Shadow,” as her admirers point out, she eliminates a more effervescent Other to run a crew with as much ruthlessness as Emily Silk, on the other Housekeeping end. That Mr. Marks seems more linear minded in his progressive sensibilities disappoints me. I expected a less binary perspective, especially as the left has scored all its major victories. Eradication of divergent views isn’t going to change how adversity inflicts itself on the acknowledged dread of the expendable.
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