The less we know about Counterpart’s alternate universes, the better
In most alternate-universe fiction, the world is different from ours, and the audience knows why. AU stories are thought experiments, where a writer changes one piece of the world, then follows through the logical changes that result. What if the Nazis won World War II? What if the Confederacy won the Civil War? More frivolously, what if the crew of the Starship Enterprise were all bad guys? The fun of AU stories comes from the reasonable working-through of the scenario — the feeling that if one domino tips over, the rest will fall with an inevitable grace, remaking the world in a radical new form.
Initially, the new STARZ series Counterpart looks like a typical AU narrative. But as the series unfolds, it quietly undermines the basic...