The Sympathizer finale: HBO's miniseries comes to an appropriately wild end

Let’s get the superlatives out the way early: Whether or not a lot of people loved, or even watched, The Sympathizer, it should go down as one of HBO’s more out-there punts in the Zaslav era. The episodic structure of TV storytelling made a great template for adapting the fractured, unreliable voice of the Captain from the novel. Creators Park Chan-wook and Don McKellar, both known for their singular styles and legends in their own right, made for good collaborators. The Sympathizer didn’t come close to making all its shots, but the ambition, style, and weirdness of the endeavor has been fun to explore.

So let’s dive into the frantic, dark, occasionally straight-up unpleasant final hour, which begins with the Captain and Bon touching down in a “newly red Laos,” greeted by Claude and treated to a night in a strip club before being sent on a mission to the border tomorrow that’s pretty much designed to kill them all immediately. The Captain knows it, and Claude knows he knows it. With the other members of the General’s sad-sack troop occupied, Claude pulls out a roll of tape and he and the Captain, sharing headphones teens-on-a-bus style, listen to a recording of the Captain’s manic confession to Sonny moments before his murder.

Of course Sonny’s place was bugged. It’s poetically fitting that the Captain’s most honest moment (in the time we’ve known him) would be his undoing. Claude pours some white powder into a beer and slides it to the Captain. It’ll make him sick enough to skip the mission tomorrow without raising suspicions, then he and Claude can hash this thing out once and for all with the Captain as his prisoner. The Captain refuses Claude for the first time in their relationship, though it’s not much skin off the American’s back, who reasons the Captain will be dead tomorrow anyway. Well, dead with an outside chance of surviving and living in Vietnam which, from a CIA operative’s viewpoint, may as well be the same thing. Summarily, most of the General’s men die the next day as they push north. The Captain and Bon are captured (not before Bon tries to goad the opposing soldiers into killing him) and carted to the reeducation camp we’ve been seeing in the “present” all series.

We finally get a lot of color filled in on what life at the camp has been like: The Captain’s been writing and rewriting his confession for a year(!), with the commandant still obstinately finding it insufficient to pass to the commissar, who watches over the camp from behind a horror-movie-style burlap mask covering everything but his left eye.

Let’s be generous and say it’s probably not meant to be much of a surprise at all when the commissar is revealed to be Man, disfigured by a direct napalm blast the same night the Captain left. The three musketeers are back together geographically, but war has weakened and embittered each of them in uniquely grotesque ways. Man simply wears part of his damage on the outside. Even between Man and the Captain, ostensibly comrades the entire time, there is a hierarchy of trauma and punishment now. Man as the commissar tells the Captain there’s still more of his confession to tell; the Captain insists there isn’t. “It’s what you’ve failed to confess. You must remember what you’ve forgotten,” Man tells him. Again, the concept of the Captain repressing or lying to us isn’t much of a shock, but watching him endure sleep deprivation and electroshock torture as Man and the commandant try to get him to “remember” is every bit as uncomfortable as it’s supposed to be.

The Captain’s already fragile psyche now all but fried, he hallucinates a healthy Man watching a film reel of The Hamlet, and we get two important flashbacks. The first is probably one a lot of us saw coming: The Captain actually met his father as a child. The man, of course, is played by Robert Downey Jr.. It adds a neater thematic reason for the show to have pulled the four-roles-by-one-actor thing and explains the Captain’s aversion to those cookies Oanh’s mom liked. How heartbreaking that the Captain fell under the mentorship of four men who reminded him so viscerally of his mother (and country’s) violator that he gave them the same face.

The second is so unpleasant we don’t even see the true version. That familiar old tape rewinding sound effect kicks in and suddenly we’re back at the very beginning of the story: the General, the Captain, and Claude sitting in the Saigon movie theater watching the “interrogation” of the communist agent the Captain let get captured in the first place. Only this time there’s no cutting to the next scene. The Captain watches as she refuses to talk, staring daggers at him the entire time. Up on the stage, Oanh pulls a glass coke bottle from a cooler, takes a sip, and passes it to the four men surrounding the spy. They each take a sip before one pushes it into her mouth and keeps pushing. “I was terrified my name would spill from her broken lip,” the Captain finally confesses as his greatest shame, only to be told he is once again indulging in selective memory and that “It wasn’t her mouth, was it?”

The commandant then brings in the spy, who’s been writing her own confessions at the camp. The Captain is given hers to read and vice versa. She sees how easily the Captain simply edited out her suffering as a convenience. He sees she never once spoke of him, voluntarily keeping the secrets of a man who sat and watched the worst moment of her life. “It’s not necessary,” Claude agreed with the Captain all those years ago in the theater, “but it does have to happen.” Approaching her to apologize, the Captain tells the spy he can understand her disappointment in him. She almost looks past him. “Nothing can disappoint me now.”

The grand finale can’t match up to the rest of the episode’s reframing of the series, which does become much more appealing to watch a second time with the benefit of context. In fact, the action movie-sleekness and neatness of Man helping the Captain and Bon escape feels just like that: a movie. We’ve already learned to trust little of what we see and none of what we hear from the Captain. Whether he’s really on a boat heading for destination unknown or still rotting in a solitary cell doesn’t matter much. It was never his story, anyway.

Stray observations

• Kayli Tran plays the communist spy, by the way, who never gets a name. Her scenes with Hoa Xuande are easily the best moments of the episode and boast some of the best acting in the series as she somehow infuses her exhausted apathy with righteous fury and heartbreak.
• I could sit here all day and talk about this show’s obsession with faces and masks re: identity but I fear I’d just sound stoned. Anyway, all that thematic stuff really hit the mark for me.
• Man’s lesson about “nothing” being more precious than “independence and freedom” was some middle-school-riddle shit. We all know that one!
• “You speak our language like it’s been translated from English” is one hell of an insult. The Captain really ate shit for pretty much the entire episode, huh?
• That’ll do it for recaps of The Sympathizer! Like I said up top, it tried things it didn’t always get away with, particularly when it wanted to be a comedy. Still, I’m grateful to have been given a reason to watch this very weird show with all of you.