Summary

• The Sympathizer finale is filled with twists, leading to a reveal of the Captain's repressed memories and true identity of his father.
• The Captain's confession is questioned, revealing him as an unreliable narrator with distorted perspectives on events in the series.
• The show explores the theme of being a revolutionary, with the Captain realizing his deluded idealism and making a decision to fight for justice.

The Sympathizer has finally concluded, and here is the ending of the critically acclaimed HBO miniseries, explained. HBO's The Sympathizer is based on author Viet Thanh Nguyen's book of the same name, with it following a communist sympathizer named the Captain as he moves to Los Angeles with a group of North Vietnamese refugees and continues to spy on the group and report back to his home country. The Sympathizer was met with fantastic reviews upon its release, and now that the tense war series has concluded, here's what the ending of The Sympathizer actually means.

The Sympathizer finale picks up right where episode 6 left off, with it opening as the Captain and the group of North Vietnamese soldiers are making their way to Vietnam. It is revealed that Claude knows that the Captain is a spy as well as the one behind Sonny's death, with Claude giving the Captain a way out. However, the Captain chooses to reject this olive branch and fights alongside the other soldiers. Things go poorly and the Captain and Bốn are the only survivors, with them being transported to a reeducation camp and having to figure out how to escape.

What Happened In The Sympathizer's Ending

There Are A Lot Of Twists

The Sympathizer ends with a bunch of twists, making the ending a bit confusing. Upon finding themselves at the reeducation camp, the Captain has a change of heart and stands up to the commissar of the camp. This leads to the masked commissar sending the Captain away to be tortured in an attempt to bring out his suppressed memories. Eventually, the Captain learns that the commissioner is actually his childhood friend Mẫn, who was badly scarred shortly after the Captain left Vietnam. Thus, the Captain discovers some of his repressed memories, including the true identity of his father.

After extensive torture sessions, Mẫn finally gets the Captain to it that "nothing is more precious than freedom and independence," quoting the words of Ho Chi Minh. After this, Mẫn lets the Captain go, with the Captain taking Mẫn's mask as well as the outfit of another soldier and using them to get himself and Bốn out of the camp. The duo gets on a boat alongside a group of other The Sympathizer cast and sail away from the country. As they make their escape, the episode ends with the Captain looking back at the coast and seeing a large crowd of Vietnamese souls.

How True Was The Captain's Confession?

The Captain Is An Unreliable Narrator

Throughout The Sympathizer, a confession made by the Captain is used as a framing device, with the series constantly cutting back to his time at the reeducation camp. However, the series finale revealed that the Captain may have been an unreliable narrator. The torture sessions get the Captain to reveal that some of his stories were lies. For example, rather than stepping up and attempting to save a woman who was being tortured by having a Coke bottle shoved down her throat, it turns out that in reality, the Captain sat by as she was sexually assaulted with the bottle.

This calls into question some of the other details of the Captain's confession, with his portrayal of the Vietnamese reeducation camp even being questioned by the reeducator. It seems that throughout the story the Captain may have painted himself in a more positive light than was warranted, or that he left out important details that could have changed the viewer's perspective. After all, the series is filled with moments in which the Captain its that he is speculating, that he forgot something, or that he was in and out of consciousness.

Why Robert Downey Jr. Played 5 Different Characters In The Sympathizer

He Represents Systems Of Power

Throughout The Sympathizer, Robert Downey Jr. plays five different characters, with his fifth role as a priest being revealed in the finale. In the world of The Sympathizer, these five characters are not literally meant to all look like Robert Downey Jr. Instead, their visual similarities parallel their thematic similarities. Each of these characters are white authority figures that the Captain looks up to in one way or another, although each one ends up betraying him and reinforcing the horrendous power dynamics that the Captain is fighting against.

The Meaning Of "Nothing" Being More Precious Than Freedom & Independence

The Answer Hides Within The Quote

Much of The Sympathizer's finale is focused on the idea that "Nothing is more precious than freedom and independence," a quote from Ho Chi Minh that the Captain reinterprets throughout the episode. The true meaning of the Captain's revelation is left intentionally vague, although a meaning can be interpreted through the episode. Initially, it seems as if this quote is saying that freedom and independence are the most valuable things in existence, with this being the version that Mẫn is trying to rid the Americanized Captain of.

Instead, the Captain is only allowed to leave the reeducation camp when he realizes that the opposite is true. Rather than freedom and independence being the most valuable things, this quote is saying that nothing is a more valuable concept than the concepts of freedom and independence. The Captain learns that Mẫn and the other Vietnamese revolutionaries have taken this idea to heart, leading to the establishment of these reeducation camps that do nothing but strip freedom and independence away from their prisoners.

The Real Meaning Of The Sympathizer's Ending

What Is A Revolutionary?

The Sympathizer is a deeply layered show that explores a lot of themes and topics, but the most important has to do with the idea of being a revolutionary. Despite the Captain's allegiance completely flipping by the end of The Sympathizer, he still calls himself a revolutionary, as he is still determined to fight for those who are being stomped on by the state. The Captain realizes that he has lost his way in ing a cause that lost its way, leading to him finally making the decision to turn things around. Here's how co-creator Don McKellar puts it in an interview with Slate:

"...the lesson is disillusionment. It’s about him, the Captain, realizing that he was deluded in his idealism and that he’d been suppressing his humanity for the sake of a cause that couldn’t fulfill its promise. That’s sort of a depressing lesson. But of course it’s liberating, too. That’s the other side, that facing the nothingness is a sort of precondition to his consciousness and learning that there’s a future ahead for him and his people."

The Captain seeing the spirits at the end of the episode is a further reinforcement of these ideas. Rather than being scared of the Major and Sonny as he has throughout the previous episode, the Captain now stands beside them, as well as the spirits that are seen standing on the beach. These are the spirits that the Captain is now fighting to avenge, with the ending of The Sympathizer only being the beginning of the Captain's true story.