Review: 'The Copenhagen Test' twists itself into knots answering a question: Who can you trust?

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Most things in this world have their good points and their not-so-good points, and this is certainly true of “The Copenhagen Test,” a science-fiction spy story about a man whose brain has been hacked.Without his knowing it, everything he sees and hears is uploaded to an unknown party, in an unknown place, as if he were a living pair of smart glasses.

Created by Thomas Brandon and premiering Saturday on Peacock, its conceit is dramatically clever, if, of course, impossible.What do you watch when you learn that what you’re watching is being watched?In a preamble, we meet our hero, Andrew Hale (Simu Liu, “Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings”), a first-generation Chinese American Green Beret, rescuing hostages in Belarus.

A voice in his headset instructs him that there is enough room for one on a departing helicopter and that he must prioritize an American citizen.Instead he picks a foreign child.

This, we will learn, is the less-preferred choice.Three years later, Hale is working for the Orphanage, a shadowy American intelligence agency that spies on all the less-shadowy American intelligence agencies — watching the watchers.(So much watching!) Its proud boast is that, since its inception in the Bush I administration, it has never been compromised.

(Until someone started looking through Hale’s eyes, that is.) There is a secret entrance to their giant complex, accessed by locking eyes with a statue in a library — it’s thematically appropriate, but also very “Get Smart!” That is a compliment, obviously.The lower floor is where the analysts toil; entry to the upper floor, where the action is, is by the sort of fancy key that might have been used to open an executive washroom in 1895.(The decor is better there, too, with something of the air of an 1895 executive washroom.) Hale, who has been been listening to and translating Korean and Chinese chatter, dr...