The Sympathizer recap: The cracks begin to show

Well, that was fast. Even for a show so eager to reconfigure and relocate itself episode by episode, it still feels like next week’s finale, and the Captain’s return to Vietnam, has suddenly snuck up on us a little, with so many dangling curiosities we for sure won’t get all the answers for. Will we ever see Lana, Sofia, or non-Claude RDJs again? It seems unlikely, some more so than others.

The big mission this week is the Captain’s relationship, if you can call it that, with Sonny. Noodling around with Lana on the guitar early in the episode, the Captain offhandedly jokes about killing his ex’s new boyfriend, then realizes that’s exactly what he actually wants to do. There are pros and cons to such a move: It would certainly help the General, who’s preparing to reinvade Vietnam with a few hundred soldiers who’ve been doing pushups in a California parking lot. (That operation obviously needs all the help it can get.) But also, using Sonny’s contacts as a journalist to expose both the General and Neil Godwin’s cozy relationship would get him out from under more than one thumb. It’s a dilemma not helped by his increasingly wobbly psyche and commitment to Bon, who’s whole-ass in on the General’s plan/suicide mission.

Alan Trong has been tremendous as Sonny throughout the show: a good-natured and inquisitive presence. Two qualities that, in real life, does make for a good reporter. He’s also prone to the odd smug smirk or aside, though how much of that is the Captain’s version of events, well, we’ll just have to make our own minds up. I said last week the ramping up of his presence and especially his relationship with Sofia probably spell trouble for the Captain’s former classmate, and so too does it come to pass that Sonny falls victim to the Captain’s conflicted violence.

Except, how conflicted is it, really? His plan is obviously a lot more finessed than Oanh’s assassination, and he makes sure to engineer a conceivably sensitive passing of information to keep Sofia out the way. The Captain seems far more guilty about his status as a killer than the actual people he murdered to truthfully call himself one. The Sympathizer posits it’s maybe a symptom of living so long as the Captain has, identity stacked inside identity like Russian dolls. Guilt can follow a man, but it’s all so abstract and solipsistic without any real viewpoint or identity. Even as he narrates the mitigating circumstances this week, it’s clear he has a choice in either killing or sparing Sonny, no matter what he may infer from the General.

We also see an outright lie for the first time: the Captain telling the reeducation camp commandant he has no idea why the L.A. Times didn’t run the story he fed Sonny, surmising the CIA may have intercepted it. Instead, we see him burning the evidence in his kitchen. Self preservation? Making sure he can go with and protect Bon? Or one last act of spite over his rival?

Sofia, obviously, figures it all out instantly and even lies to the cops for the Captain. Her last act as someone in his life is telling him she fears he’ll kill her, too. As he says goodbye to Sofia one last time, she responds, curtly, “That’s Ms. Mori.”

God only knows what will happen when the Captain and Bon (with a fresh new haircut) touch down next week, but it’s a bit of a letdown that the penultimate episode ends pretty much the same way as episode four: The Captain, seated on the plane, feels a tap on his shoulder. Oanh and Sonny smile at him and ask if they can tag along. It’s horrifying, but we already know what the Captain carries. What we don’t always know is why.

Stray observations

• Sofia isn’t the only woman in the Captain’s life to be left so crassly. His goodbye to Lana is very obviously meant to be intimate and affectionate from his perspective, but even through his eyes it’s creepy.
• The episode’s title, “The Oriental Mode Of Destruction,” is lifted from the risible book the Captain uses to code (and decode) his messages to “Man” (more on that in a sec). We find out during a fairly tedious plot diversion garden party that Professor Hammer is the author of that “racist rubbish,” writing under a pseudonym.
• Even the Captain is beginning to believe Man may not be on the other end of his communiqués. His imagined in-person argument with Man (which he’s had before) switches to the Captain taking Man’s place at one point, essentially arguing with himself. Later, Man speaks to him in the Captain’s own voice.
• “I said I didn’t want to discuss Sofia!” the Captain at one point snaps at Sonny. What he’d actually said, moments before, was that he was sick of talking about politics.