Photo: Hopper Stone/HBO
Endings are hard to nail, and that’s especially true for a seven-episode limited series like The Sympathizer, which has, since its premiere, reliably introduced more questions than answers. Week by week, as the Captain fills us in on his past, present-day questions surrounding his imprisonment emerge: If the Captain is truly a double agent, then why does the Party insist on his capture and reeducation? What role does Man play in all of this? Who exactly is the Captain writing to? Is he still a bleeding heart Commie? The ambitious finale rushes to address these indeterminacies, some more superficially than others. This condensed pacing is not unusual to the show’s peripatetic nature. Still, it highlights how much material The Sympathizer has to winnow down into seven short hours — material that might have benefited from a second season.
After a year spent in solitary confinement, the Captain concludes his story with the exiled troop’s arrival in Thailand, where Claude welcomes them. He relays this ending to the North Vietnamese commandant with a smirk and deadpans, “Why do I have this ominous feeling that the reviews are not going to be good?” The Commandant, clearly unamused by where the Captain chooses to end things, demands him to “bring [the story] up to the present” — to the moment of his capture. Only then will the draft be considered for the Commissar, the elusive, bandaged figure who’ll determine the Captain’s fate.
The Captain begrudgingly returns to his cell to recall the Thailand operation. Just as he had predicted, it was a suicide mission, though one quietly endorsed by the CIA. Claude takes the men to a Thai strip club as a morbid send-off. But the Captain is the reason that Claude is in Thailand. The CIA had bugged Sonny’s home and had the Captain on tape admitting to Sonny that he is a Communist spy. Claude hopes to grant the Captain the equivalent of a plea bargain — “a fucking out” from the mission in exchange for a confession. The Captain refuses this last-ditch offer, even though he knows a worse fate is on the horizon. Claude pauses, and a hint of regret, or maybe anger, flashes across his face. “It’s your funeral, pal,” he says.
The next day, everyone except for Bon and the Captain is killed trying to cross into Vietnam. The Captain tackles Bon, preventing him from running out into the open gunfire, and begs him to stay alive. The two surrender and are driven to a camp, where they spend the next year undergoing “reeducation.”
Here, the Commandant interrupts the Captain to suggest he end his story with their surrender. The arrival to the camp should symbolize a “promise of redemption,” he says, to demonstrate the Captain’s renewed commitment to the Communist cause. But these words ring hollow, as there is no redemption to be found. Just the despair of indefinite imprisonment — a fate little better than death. The finale dwells in this post-revolutionary disillusionment as we learn the truth of the Captain’s detainment. The Commissar, who’s revealed to be Man, had ordered the Captain’s solitary confinement with the knowledge that his confessions will never satisfy the Party. No matter what he admits to, there will always be something more to confess. In the end, the Captain’s revolutionary sacrifices amount to nothing under the new regime, simply fodder for further torture.
When the Captain is briefly released into the camp, he finds a bedraggled Bon eating with the other prisoners in an open yard. Above them, the Commissar begins to hoarsely lecture on the danger of individualism. Bon interrupts, only to be struck down by guards and imprisoned as punishment. The Captain follows in Bon’s example, interrupting the Commissar to sing a revolutionary anthem. He raises his hand towards the bandaged figure: “All for one, and one for all!”
The interruption works. The Captain is briefly granted a private audience with the Commissar/Man in his office, where his old music records are kept unscratched. Man explains that he was burned by napalm on the Day of Liberation and injects himself with morphine daily. “That’s why I was slow to respond sometimes,” Man explains, eerily reclining his bandaged head. (Duy Nguyen does a fantastic job conveying Man’s physical transformation into the uncanny Commissar, from his mannerisms to his menacingly hoarse voice.) “Everything about our home is different than I imagined,” the Captain confesses, and Man icily responds, “I told you not to return.”
Man/Commissar can only do so much to “protect” the Captain and Bon at the camp. Though the desire to help his friends is legitimate (Man has tucked a photo of them into his head bandage), he is closely surveilled by the Party and his peers. The Captain’s solitary confinement was, in a sense, a form of purgatorial amnesty that kept him safe under Man’s watch. But now that the Captain is “freed” from the confessional, he has to undergo extensive torture by the Commandant, who wants to extract additional details: “We don’t think that you lied in your confession. It’s what you failed to confess.”
Delirious, the Captain converses with the ghosts of the Major and Sonny, oscillating between his nightmarish psyche and reality. He is repeatedly electrocuted and forced to stay awake for three days straight. In the midst of his delirium, the Captain asks the empty room, “How could you do this to me?” He hears Man respond: “Do what? Keep you alive? No one volunteers for this hellhole. But I requested the post when I heard you two were sent here.” All Man can offer is bleak sympathy to his friend. He, too, is just another cog in the Party’s machine. Man departs with a harrowing warning: All they can do is play their respective parts well.
The Captain is nearly electrocuted to death, but a power outage grants him a brief reprieve. Accompanied by his ghosts, a hallucinatory dream sequence reveals clues as to what the Captain failed to confess all along: He was complicit in the torture and rape of the female North Vietnamese spy, who was captured and interrogated in the first episode. In his confession, the Captain falsely recalls himself interfering to stop the torture, but in the female spy’s version of events, the Captain did nothing of the sort. He sat down and watched while she was raped, nervous that she would betray his identity. But this narrative correction fails to invoke great remorse from the Captain or trigger an epiphanic realization of his complicity as a spy.
Later, when the Captain asks the spy why she is in the camp, in a position much like his, she says: “I’ve been searching for an answer for the past two years.” Nothing surprises her anymore. Nothing disappoints her either, not even the Party. If no one, not even the best spy, is safe from the Party’s contempt, what’s the point of being a revolutionary? Even Man is hardened by cynicism in his commander role. He has interpreted Ho Chi Minh’s famous saying, “Nothing is more important than independence and freedom,” as a nihilistic slogan. “Nothing,” he tells the Captain, “is more important than independence and freedom.” There is no grandeur to this nothingness. It has to be learned the hard way. Independence and freedom are secondary to it.
It’s this final lesson that the Captain ultimately rejects, after years of sublimating himself for the freedom of his homeland. Disappointingly, the emotional heft of this scene, much like the other small “climaxes” scattered throughout the episode, is undermined by the finale’s unrelenting pace. This is the series’ greatest flaw — its stark imbalance in tone, rapidly shifting from satire to thriller to melodrama, leaving little space for tension or even pathos to build. The Captain hatches an escape plan to free Bon, and the two retreat to the coast to board a boat alongside a hundred other refugees. Bon cradles a crying baby as the passengers share a tender moment in song, a harmonious, wistful departure compared to the first episode’s narrow escape.
“Despite everything, in the face of nothing, I was still a revolutionary,” the Captain says as the boat drifts further out into the sea. I wished for a scene that reflected this catharsis, for the Captain to finally savor his freedom from those who’ve exploited his loyalties. Instead, the Captain’s story ends on a note of hopeful uncertainty. Surrounded by ghosts, he sails towards the promise of redemption on the horizon, towards a self-determined life.
