Nothing About 'The Copenhagen Test' Makes Sense

This was going to be another one of those “ending explained” posts, because I like writing them and they inexplicably do well. But honestly, I don’t know how to properly explain the ending of Peacock’s The Copenhagen Test. It’s not that the series is complicated or especially challenging. It’s really not. It just doesn’t make much sense. Very little about this show does, and on top of that, it’s mostly dull, despite the presence of Simu Liu and Melissa Barrera, two actors I very much like.

But here’s my attempt. Let’s start with the Copenhagen Test itself, because that part at least makes some sense. The series opens three years prior to the present day in Belarus, where Alexander Hale (Liu) is on a generic mission to rescue hostages and kill a bunch of bad guys. After he secures the area, the hostages are loaded onto a helicopter. Alexander is told there’s only room for one more person and that he should prioritize an American. Instead, Alexander first spots a Belarusian child and decides to rescue him. On the way back to the helicopter, an American woman, covered in blood, pleads to be saved. Alexander refuses and saves the child instead.

The mission, it turns out, was a test of Alexander’s moral character, and that split-second decision colors the rest of the series. Was Alexander insufficiently loyal to the United States by saving the Belarusian child? And if he’d saved the American woman, would it have been morally wrong to sacrifice a kid? As we learn by the end of the series, Alexander was only partially right. The best answer would have been to give up his own seat on the helicopter and save both.

That same kind of moral puzzle comes back around in the finale. Alexander works for The Orphanage, a shadowy, made-up organization that essentially functions as internal affairs for intelligence agencies. At some point, someone hacks Alexander’s brain, allowing them to see and hear everything he does, with the goal of using that access to steal government secrets.

The Orphanage discovers the hack but can’t determine whether Alexander is complicit or an unwitting victim. Either way, they decide to exploit the situation by feeding carefully selected intelligence through Alexander to the enemy. It’s meant to be a controlled misdirection.

At the same time, because they don’t fully trust Alexander, The Orphanage launches a parallel operation to investigate him. Another agent, Michelle (Melissa Barrera), is assigned to pose as Alexander’s girlfriend, both to maintain appearances for whoever is spying on him and to monitor Alexander up close. There’s also an intelligence analyst, Parker (Sinclair Daniel), brought in to model and predict Alexander’s behavior.

What follows is a series of convoluted missions designed to trap the presumed antagonist, a shadowy intermediary named Schiff (Adam Godley). Eventually, Alexander is forced into a familiar dilemma that mirrors the original Copenhagen Test: does he save his parents by selling out The Orphanage, or does he remain loyal to the organization and sacrifice them? Alexander’s solution is to pretend to betray The Orphanage in order to save his parents, while secretly remaining loyal. In other words, he does what he failed to do in Belarus: he finds a way to save both.

The final twist, however, is that Schiff isn’t the real mastermind behind the brain hack. He’s just someone who knew about it and tried to leverage it for his own ends. The actual architect is Victor (Saul Rubinek), a longtime mentor and friend of Alexander’s. Alexander is not Victor’s only subject, either. Victor is revealed to be an early influence on the thinking that eventually led to the creation of The Orphanage, but one who became disillusioned with it. Now he’s effectively running his own rogue version of the Copenhagen Test, using people like Alexander to probe the limits of The Orphanage itself.

It’s all incredibly muddled and far less interesting than it might sound on paper. Maybe it would have worked better as a movie, or even a tight four-episode series instead of eight. As it is, the show is bloated to the point where it’s hard not to zone out. And when you do, you start to wonder whether you missed something important — only to realize, if you go back and rewatch the parts where you drifted, that you didn’t actually miss anything at all.