The best trick of HBO’s “The Sympathizer” comes at the end

The sympathizer is full of twists and turns—and why wouldn’t it be? It’s a series (based on a book of the same name by Viet Thanh Nguyen) that follows a Viet Cong double agent from the end of the Vietnam War to his life as a refugee in America while working to ensure the Viet Cong’s victory. All the while, the series explores themes of self and identity, filtered through the Captain (Hoa Xuande), said double agent; his Vietnamese community in 1970s Los Angeles; and the multitude of white men he works for (all played by Robert Downey Jr.).

In the final episode, we finally learn more about the Captain’s current history in a re-education camp in Vietnam, run by the mysterious Commissar, who demands that the Captain’s story be written down in every detail. It is no surprise that the real name of the Commissar – another character defined more by his title than by himself – — would be another surprise in the plot. But like every revelation of the true identity in The sympathizerit’s more like a knife stab than anything else.

[Ed. note: The rest of this post contains spoilers for the end of The Sympathizer. This post also has some mentions of sexual assault.]

In the final episode, the Captain learns that the Commissar is actually his friend Mẫn, who is now scarred by the napalm attacks during the fall of Saigon. Worse still, this old friend/prison camp guard Is Despite it will torture him for information.

It’s a tough road for the Captain to find out that his visions of Mẫn – alone in an office and highly decorated, leading Vietnam’s bright future – weren’t accurate. Throughout the show, the Captain’s musings were a clever framing device and something he saw mostly as a formality, the only thing that stood between him and the bright future of communist Vietnam he fought so hard for. Now the cold reality that his struggle culminated in is staring him in the face. It all fits with the way The sympathizer used the Captain’s imaginative visions as bogeymen of his subjective (and distorted) point of view.

“The ghosts really affect his consciousness, his conscience about his actions,” Xuande told Polygon. “The captain’s journey is really about surviving, fighting his way out, trying to never be discovered, and of course maintaining the line between his loyalties.”

Viewed in this light, his vision of Mẫn is not so different from his visions of Sonny or the Major; all of them are, as Xuande puts it, an expression of “the trauma he was hiding from.” They are a startling way for the Captain to realize that his actions were more about finding a means of survival than about following his communist ideals or fighting for a better Vietnam.

“When they come back to haunt him and remind him of the very things he has neglected in his memory, it is a reminder to him that everything he believes and thought he is doing for the cause may not actually be right.”

This is an idea that The sympathizer repeatedly underlines the Captain’s character: Nothing in his life is straightforward or orderly, and nothing has gone according to his plans. Even when he apparently confesses his crimes to Sonny or carries out the General’s order to kill him, the Captain acts for his own reasons and not just for “the cause.”

Such corruption of idealistic impulses is something Mẫn knows all too well, as he simultaneously does his job and is seemingly disillusioned with the state of the country. He is, as his two character names indicate, a different man now, much tougher than he was as a spy under American imperialism. But (much like Downey Jr.’s parade of white authority figures), Duy Nguyễn wanted to make sure you could see the connective tissue between each version of Mẫn.

“To develop this character, I had to dig really deep: what is Mẫn? How does he speak? How does he move? How does he behave around his friend or alone with the captain?” says Nguyễn. “He’s the dentist, so he’s very calm; he has to be precise. And he’s intellectual, so he has to stay upright. The way he speaks is clear – those are the parts I keep.

“[In episode 7]he’s so damaged, but he still wants to be present in front of his friends. He just wants to try to be the same person his friend saw last time.”

What is crucial; the whole episode 7 – and the core of The sympathizers final move—depends on how Mẫn’s turn goes. He is the single person, the crucial vector point around which the Captain’s story is suddenly jerked back, exposing his bluffs and revealing all his gaps in perspective. Like the Captain, he is a study in dualities: a person and a rank; loyal to the cause but still cautious; a ghost from the past and a vision of the brave new fractured and corrupt world. Having filtered so much of the narrative—and with it the war, its aftershocks, and all the complexities therein—through the Captain’s identity, Mẫn is the only one who can keep up with and cut through the noise of the story the Captain has told himself.

And the truth is at once infinitely more complex and far simpler than he was prepared to believe. Through his torture, the Captain finally reconciles himself to some of the worst things he has done for the war, all the way back to one of the first scenes of the series (which we now know was actually the rape of a communist agent). He must accept who he is and where he came from. And he must accept that his trauma and suffering have not necessarily fixed his nation. All of this hardship may have only bred more pain—or, worse, indifference to pain. As the sexually abused communist agent tells him, after all her years in the war and in the camp, “nothing can disappoint her now.”

In the end, it is Mẫn who frees the captain (and Bon) from the camp and brings them back to a boat bound for the good old USA. He once again becomes a paragon of conflict; after loving (and trying to hate) this place for so many years, it might just be his salvation. When the captain looks back on Vietnam, he sees a nation full of ghosts now – more clearly than ever.