The Copenhagen Test Season 1 Episode 1 recap: A covert mission reveals Hale as the perfect surveillance tool

The Copenhagen Test Season 1 Episode 1 is titled Copenhagen. It dropped on December 27, 2025.

The show is a spy thriller starring Simu Liu as Alexander Hale. He is a former Special Forces sniper who now works as an intelligence analyst. Melissa Barrera plays Michelle. She is a bartender who is a lot more than she seems and, as it turns out, has ties to Hale’s past.

At the center of the story is The Orphanage, a shadowy government group that acts as an internal watchdog for America’s intelligence agencies.

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The Copenhagen Test Season 1 Episode 1 recap: Copenhagen

The Copenhagen Test Season 1 Episode 1 opens with a brutal moral dilemma that haunts everything after.

So, rewind three years. Somewhere in Belarus, it’s chaos: night, guns, and yelling. U.S. Special Forces are trying to pull hostages out of a militia compound. You see Alexander Hale up high as sniper backup, but then everything goes sideways. Communications go dead. Bullets start flying. Hale bails on his post, bolts down to help drag people out.

Most of the hostages pile into a truck and actually make it out. Not Hale, though. He is stuck hoofing it through the woods solo, aiming for the extraction chopper. And he gets fresh orders in his ear: more hostages are hiding out, but the chopper has only one seat left. He is instructed to prioritize American citizens.

He stumbles on a little Belarusian kid first. He carries the boy, makes a break for the rendezvous. Then, a terrified American woman comes out of the trees, begging him to save her instead. Time is almost up. Hale has to pick, and fast. He goes with the kid. Leaves the woman behind, telling her another chopper is coming. That one call ends the mission, but it doesn’t even come close to ending the fallout.

In The Copenhagen Test Season 1 Episode 1, we cut to Washington, D.C., the land of endless suits and even more secrets. Hale is working as an analyst at a hush-hush intelligence oversight spot called the Orphanage. It’s buried under a public library. The place is split into two zones: “Downstairs” for the worker bees (that’s where Hale sits), and “Upstairs,” which is where the shot-callers operate.

Hale gets assigned a North Korea surveillance program called Tachyon. He is a first-gen American of Asian descent. His parents changed their last name to blend in. He always feels like he has to prove he is on Team America. His parents are over the moon about his military record, but they have zero clue about the real stuff he is mixed up in.

So, he shoots his shot for a promotion, as he wants to move Upstairs for a big mission called Poseidon. During the interview, they dug up an old panic attack he had after a stint in Belarus. Hale tries to play it cool, says it was a one-off, and he is back to normal. And that’s a total lie. He is still wrestling with anxiety and migraines, just shoving it all under the rug.

Anyway, he doesn’t land the promotion in The Copenhagen Test Season 1 Episode 1.

Hale’s migraines are getting out of hand. One minute, he is fine, next the lights are exploding behind his eyes, usually right when his phone loses signal, or he is stuck in a government bunker with zero bars. On the train after one of these episodes, he is so out of it that he doesn’t even notice some guy eyeing him from across the car.

In personal life, most of his friends ditched him for Rachel, his ex-fiancée. She is a doctor, but is secretly slipping him anti-anxiety meds on the side. At this painfully awkward dinner, Hale bails early, just stands in the shadows watching Rachel laugh with his old crew. Later, she corners him, pissed that he keeps dodging questions about his work. She hands him his medication and cuts off contact.

So, Hale starts spending time at a neighborhood bar. Michelle, the bartender, is actually easy to talk to. They swap stories about messed-up families and dead dreams. Turns out, her dad was a relentless homicide detective.

Back at the Orphanage, in The Copenhagen Test Season 1 Episode 1, things go downhill: Three agents in North Korea are dead, blown up in the last few months. They shut down the Tachyon project, and an internal review begins. The suits upstairs swoop in. Then someone reveals that Hale touched all three cases. The only analyst connecting them.

A signals technician gives a very discreet alert to Hale to assume that he is already being investigated. This thought makes him go down the spiral, bringing back memories of Belarus and another panic attack.

He is desperate now, so he tracks down Victor, an old Orphanage operative who now runs a restaurant. Victor doesn’t sugarcoat it. He says that even a whiff of suspicion can get you killed. If the Orphanage thinks you are dirty, that’s it. Victor’s advice is get out while you can.

In The Copenhagen Test Season 1 Episode 1, Hale takes Victor’s advice seriously. He FaceTimes his parents, feeds them some story about a work trip, but they don’t suspect a thing. Then he hides his gun and passport, tucked away in a hollowed-out book, shoved up on a library shelf above the Orphanage.

Then the agency pipes up and claims they have nailed the leak: some North Korean asset allegedly turned on the others before being killed. Hale is not buying it, not for a second. The whole thing stinks, but when he tries to push, he gets the hand wave. “Drop it.”

Next thing he knows, he gets a promotion. He is sent upstairs, suddenly in charge of a new op called Claymore. It’s not a reward. It’s a setup, and he knows it. The timing is too perfect. It feels like they are moving him around the chessboard in The Copenhagen Test Season 1 Episode 1.

Later, he is at the bar, probably half-listening to Michelle ramble, when she says something that snaps a wire loose in his brain. He heads home, dives into old military manuals and spy-craft guides, obsessing over every detail. Then the penny drops. Belarus wasn’t even a mission. It was a Copenhagen Test, the kinda thing that jams you up with no-win choices just to see where your loyalties really are.

Back at HQ, he is all poker face, but under the surface, he is digging through classified stuff he shouldn’t even know exists. That’s when he stumbles onto Cassandra RU-258. It’s a dormant biohacking gig, all hush-hush. The details line up a little too well. Nanotech, slipped into a person, turns them into a walking surveillance rig. All his senses live-stream straight to whoever is watching. It hits him: he is the leak. And he never had a clue.

Meanwhile, panic is spreading in the surveillance room in The Copenhagen Test Season 1 Episode 1. Someone realizes Hale just pulled up a file he really shouldn’t have. Snipers get the green light, and orders start flying. But Hale doesn’t bolt. He plays it straight, shreds the docs just like the handbook says, grabs his secret stash from the library, and then walks right back inside. Just like they expected.

Hale gets dragged into a room they call the Cage. It’s a digital black hole, zero signals getting in or out. For the first time in ages, he is actually alone. Then the grilling starts. They throw the treason card at him, dump out all their evidence: the gun, the dodgy passport, and his online rabbit holes. And then the hammer drops: his brain has been hacked. Someone has been riding shotgun in his head, seeing everything he sees, using him as a walking livestream.

So Hale just plays it cool in The Copenhagen Test Season 1 Episode 1. Acts normal, keeps his poker face on, hoping whoever is pulling the strings doesn’t catch a whiff he is onto them.

Then in walks Director Moira, all business. She fills in the last blanks. That Copenhagen Test thing in Belarus was real, but the Orphanage had nothing to do with it. Turns out, some Defense Department suit pulled the trigger. And Michelle, the woman Hale walked away from, was in the middle of it.

Moira admits the Orphanage planned to use Hale without his knowledge.

And now she is laying out his options. Door number one: brain surgery, hack gone, but say goodbye to his job and probably his whole life as he knows it. Door number two: leave the hack, play double agent, feed the enemy whatever the Orphanage wants them to eat. Also, he gets half an hour to pick.

But before he answers, Hale has one condition. If he dies, he wants his parents to know the truth that he was deep in the spy game, and he died for real, not just some random accident. Hale picks the mask. He stays in the game in The Copenhagen Test Season 1 Episode 1.

He walks out of the Cage, flips the switch to ‘business as usual,’ lies to Victor, puts on a show for the rest of the team, and slides right into his new gig on Claymore as if nothing had happened. Meanwhile, the enemy is still camped out in his head, trying to figure out if the Orphanage is onto them or if they are still pulling all the strings.

Last shot of The Copenhagen Test Season 1 Episode 1 shows Hale is in Victor’s restaurant, doing his best chef impression, acting like the world is back to normal, while he is still under the microscope.

Alexander Hale isn’t just some desk jockey anymore. Now, he is a weapon.

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