Gettin' My Eps In: The Sympathizer E7

We come to an ending, and if it's not a satisfactory one, maybe that's the point.

The Sympathizer
Episode 7: “Endings Are Hard, Aren’t They?”
Written by Park Chan-Wook and Don McKellar
Directed by Marc Munden
Streaming on Max

The title of this episode is kind of on the nose, but it’s definitely a true sentiment. Some stories are more about the journey than the destination, and they may struggle a bit to wrap things up in a satisfying manner. That does seem to be somewhat true here, although it’s part of the nature of the story being told. Much of what has been so enjoyable about the series has been watching our main character, The Captain (Hoa Xuande), struggle to maintain his identity while serving as an undercover spy in the United States. He’s spent the whole story wanting to get out of the situation and go back to his homeland, where he can live out his Communist ideals. So what happens when he actually gets the chance to do so?

As we’ve seen from flash-forwards in previous episodes, he would eventually end up in a Communist prison camp in Vietnam, being interrogated about his time as a spy and questioned about his loyalties. We learn that this happened pretty quickly; after he lands in Thailand along with the other members of the small group sent on a reconnaissance mission, they meet up with The Captain’s CIA contact, Claude (Robert Downey, Jr.), who takes them to a local strip club, possibly to give them one last bit of enjoyment before sending them to their likely deaths. Claude reveals that he knows The Captain is a spy; turns out he was listening in when The Captain confessed to Sonny in the last episode. He gives The Captain the opportunity to sit out the mission and presumably keep his position as an informant back in the United States, but The Captain declines, apparently preferring the possibility of death to the inevitably of being under someone else’s control.

And sure enough, almost the entire group is killed almost immediately after entering Vietnam. The Captain’s friend Bon (Fred Nguyen Khan), who has had a death wish since his family was killed during the escape from Vietnam, is ready to charge into enemy fire and welcome death, but The Captain convinces him to surrender, landing them both in a prison camp where they can be “reeducated” by the Communist regime.

So that’s where we spend the rest of the episode, with, as we’ve already seen, The Captain trying to craft his narrative in a way that’s acceptable to a Commandant, who has been complaining about the diversions his story has been taking and telling him to edit out whatever is unnecessary (including violence by the camp’s guards, since that makes Communists look bad). The Captain has spent a year in solitary confinement as he relates his story multiple times over, and when he finally catches up to the present, he gets an audience with the camp’s Commissar, a guy who was badly wounded in the war and now wears a burlap sack over his head and speaks haltingly due to damage to his vocal cords. It seems obvious that there’s going to be a reveal about the Commissar’s identity, and sure enough, it’s The Captain’s friend Man (Duy Nguyen), who was wounded by napalm on the last day of the war.

It’s possible that Man is lashing out at everyone else in his misery or has been driven insane by everything that he’s experienced, but he doesn’t seem to be too happy to see The Captain, and he’s unsatisfied with the narrative he’s received. Actually, while he believes The Captain was telling the truth, Man thinks there are some details that have been left out, perhaps unconsciously. So he goes about torturing The Captain using drugs and electric shocks, trying to get him into a mental state where he can relate details that he didn’t even realize he had forgotten.

These interrogation tactics apparently work, but they don’t exactly reveal anything crucial. First, The Captain flashes back to his childhood and remembers the identity of his father, a French Catholic priest who occasionally visited his village. The priest is played, yet again, by Robert Downey, Jr., and when The Captain remembers his face, it’s superimposed with the faces of the other characters Downey played during the series (CIA agent Claude, Congressman Ned Godwin, Professor Hammer, and film director Nicos Damianos). It’s like every white authority figure that has dominated The Captain’s life are all the same person, with The Captain being afraid of them and wanting to please them, but still bristling at their unreasonable demands and struggling with the hold they have over him. That may be something of an eye-opening realization, but it’s definitely not usable intelligence.

The other revelation involves what happened during the interrogation of a fellow Communist spy, which we saw back in the first episode of the series. That spy was a young woman who The Captain passed information to and then was forced to apprehend to maintain his cover. We saw that he was uncomfortable when witnessing the interrogation alongside Claude and The General, but he didn’t reveal the full details of what happened to his Communist captors or the audience. After being broken down, he’s finally ready to admit his complicity in some truly awful torture. With a group of men trying to force a woman to give a confession, you can imagine the methods they used (the show skirts around it a little bit rather than depicting it in horrifying detail, but it’s still pretty disturbing). While The Captain initially protested, he eventually gave up and just watched as someone he considered a compatriot was violated, to no apparent end other than to inflict pain and suffering.

This revelation isn’t exactly usable intelligence either, but Man seems to consider it a victory that he managed to get to the information The Captain was concealing and caused him to realize that despite his high-minded ideals, he’s been involved in some pretty terrible shit, with no real benefit to anyone. This prompts Man to let The Captain know what he believes to be the purpose behind everything that has happened, but it’s as unsatisfying as all of the other revelations that have been uncovered. Is there any point to anything the characters have gone through? Did the war actually achieve anything? Is the new regime any different from what came before? Nope, it’s all meaningless!

At this point, it becomes clear that there’s nothing left for The Captain in Vietnam, and it would be better if he and Bon manage to get out of the situation and hopefully move on to something better. There’s a little bit of hopefulness, but of the sort that applies to many other Vietnamese refugees who may or may not be able to get to a point where they can live in an environment of safety and freedom.

This isn’t especially satisfying, but like the title says, endings are hard. I don’t think that’s an admission of failure on the part of the show’s creators, but more of a recognition that the ends people seek may not live up to their expectations. The Captain has professed his dedication to Communism throughout the series (although that was part of the narrative he told to the Commandant, so it could be taken with a grain of salt), and he believed that returning to Vietnam would be preferable to living as a perpetual outsider among both white people and Vietnamese people in the United States. But all he gets once he returns is confinement, torture, and empty slogans from authority figures who don’t seem to have any intention of improving people’s lives or making the country a place that’s worth living in. He’s reached the end of his story, but he’s as unsatisfied with this ending as the viewer. All he can do is try to start a new story and hope he’ll be able to do better in the future. Maybe by caring about others, as he sees Bon do by comforting a crying baby on a refugee ship, he can start down that road. And maybe by following his example, recognizing and owning up to the mistakes of the past, we can too.