The Sympathizer recap: This very good TV show is so damn exhausting

“This is the last moment I remember with any clarity,” the Captain narrates over a freeze-frame of him in midair as the movie-set graveyard gets blown to smithereens. Well, shit, Captain. Your memory already wasn’t great. Now we have to second guess you even more? This very good TV show is fucking exhausting.

Waking in a hospital back in L.A., the Captain realizes his career in the film industry is already over. It’s a shame to say goodbye to all the psychos on the Hamlet set so soon. Some of those characters were magnificent. But, as a point this show so often likes to drive home, there is no escape, geographically or spiritually, for the Captain. His life is secrets, deception, and war. And there’s more coming.

The first visitors he receives are some of the refugees he flew over with and who worked on the film, gifting him a pewter buffalo made out of the remnant of his mother’s fake tombstone. Other gifts come from Ned Godwin (flowers with an aggressively patriotic color scheme) and Sofia (a cactus with a curt, pointed note attached: “Glad to hear you’re still alive. X.”).

Sofia, who did in fairness tell the Captain she’s into free love, is pretty much over his shit, taking up with Sonny during the Captain’s six-month absence. “Four months and three weeks!” he shoots back, as if that’s the point at all. As for why she sent him a cactus? It doesn’t care if you water it or not. Sofia’s wonderful foil for the Captain, and it’s great to have Sandra Oh back in the “big role” fold this episode. While the Captain spins his story of spiraling lies, secret allegiances within secret allegiances, and the inescapable trauma of his past, Sofia just wants to see him as the person he is right now. He can’t give her that, since he hasn’t known himself in a long, long time.

While still on the mend, the Captain gets a visit from Claude in what must be the most well-tended, verdant rec room in the history of hospitals. Claude tells the Captain to check in on the General, who last we heard was planning something “big.” He also gives the Captain tickets to something called “FantASIA” for a little taste of home. Later, at the show with Bon, he sees Lana commanding the stage and singing under the fucked-up stage name Que-Linh. Backstage she cozies up with Jamie Johnson (that’s still going on), slips on a revealing crop top, and generally just seems to be having a ball after estranging herself from her parents.

Amidst the catching up and intrigue of the episode, we get consistent flashbacks to the first day Bon, Man, and the Captain all met each other as kids. They find a decapitated soldier’s head, bury it, then swear a blood oath to look out for each other like the three musketeers, chanting “all for one and one for all!” It’s one of the more straightforward looks into the Captain’s distant past, and for that reason it makes me nervous. Man’s conspicuous absence feels more and more like a snare that’s going to catch around the Captain’s ankle at some point. Even when we flash forward to the reeducation camp, it seems Man is nowhere to be found to vouch for the Captain’s loyalties. Something is off here.

Making the most of his return to L.A. and the living world, the Captain next pays a visit to Nico, setting the tone by releasing an alligator into the pool while the sleaze-ball auteur does laps. Initially looking for an apology, the Captain updates his terms and says he and Nico are even if Nico promises to include every line of dialogue the Captain fed to the extras in the movie. Nico says he’ll try but rebuffs the Captain’s assumptions it’s that easy. “Editing isn’t about clarifying the story,” he tells the Captain (and may as well be looking straight down the camera at us, too). “It’s about rhythm. Sex. Better yet, jazz.”

And it’s true. While The Sympathizer demonstrably gets off on repeatedly displacing us in time, the story itself remains deceptively uncluttered. It’s being inside the Captain’s mind that wrong-foots us occasionally, and “All For One” stakes its claim as the best episode of the season so far in merging both story and perception. It doesn’t hurt that some of the better supporting players like Sofia, the General, and Sonny all have bigger presences than we’ve seen in weeks. Sure, examining closeups of the Captain’s inscrutable face is well and good, but this episode has the General constructing a Pepe Sylvia-ass battle plan on the walls of the back room of his wife’s pho restaurant. What more could you want?

Stray observations

• Okay, calling it. Man’s definitely dead, right? Or…a triple agent? Maybe he just has a smaller office than the Captain imagines. Christ, look what this show has done to me.
• This is the most I’ve enjoyed Robert Downey Jr.’s work on the show. Nico’s talk with the Captain, free from polite or passive-aggressive airs, is the first time one of RDJ’s characters has felt honest, I think.
• Oanh’s guilt ghost can talk now?
• Sonny, perhaps with the benefit of knowing the Captain before he put up his walls, seems to figure the Captain may have a little communist leaning deep down. I also like that Sonny is showing up more heading into the final stretch, but do think that cuts his death odds considerably, too. Sorry, Sonny.