The HBO TV series based on Viet Thanh Nguyen’s bestseller has a lot of plot twists. But its reveal of the Commissar and Man’s fate in the end explains the show’s themes the best.
The Sympathizer is full of twists and turns — and why wouldn’t it be? It’s a show (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 life as a refugee in America as he works to secure the Viet Cong’s victory. All the while, the show wrestles with themes of self and identity, as filtered through The Captain (Hoa Xuande), said double agent; his Vietnamese community in 1970s Los Angeles; and the variety of white men he works for (all played by Robert Downey Jr.).
In the final episode, we finally catch up with The Captain’s present-day story in a reeducation camp in Vietnam, led by the shadowy Commissar, who’s been demanding the Captain’s story be written out in exacting detail. It’s no surprise that the true name of the Commissar — another figure defined by his title more than himself — would be another surprise in the plot. But, like any unveiling of true identity in The Sympathizer, it’s more a twist of the knife 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 finds out the Commissar is in fact his friend Mẫn, now scarred from napalm strikes during the fall of Saigon. Worse yet, this old friend/prison camp supervisor is still going to torture him for information.
It’s a tough way for the Captain to find out that his visions of Mẫn — alone in an office and highly decorated, leading the bright future for Vietnam — weren’t accurate. Throughout the show, the Captain’s reflections were a neat framing device and something he saw as mostly a formality, the one thing standing between him and the bright future of Communist Vietnam he had fought so hard for. Now, staring him in the face, is the cold reality of what his struggle has culminated in. It’s all in keeping with the way The Sympathizer has been using the Captain’s imaginative visions as specters of his subjective (and warped) point of view.
