The Sympathizer’s Co-Creator Knew the Show Had to End in a Sea of Ghosts

The Sympathizer, HBO’s series adaptation of Viet Thanh Nguyen’s Pulitzer Prize–winning 2015 novel, came to a close with its seventh episode Sunday. The show—co-created by Don McKellar and famed South Korean director Park Chan-wook—has been following an unnamed narrator, the Captain (Hoa Xuande), as he struggles with identity and morality as a communist mole for North Vietnam planted among South Vietnamese officials who have fled to America during the Vietnam War. The series has been well praised, not only for its deft handling of source material full of nonstop narration and symbolism, but also for its (classic Park Chan-wook) relentless style. Robert Downey Jr. plays a number of different American roles to impart how America’s power players are all in collusion, from Hollywood bigwigs to esteemed professors and politicians; characters, once dead, form a Greek chorus of ghosts; shadows meaningfully shroud characters who are hiding their identities; and a rotary phone morphs into a spinning tire in one of many visually playful crossfades.

The final hour, aptly titled “Endings Are Hard, Aren’t They?” (after a line spoken in the episode), has to prove itself wrong. Not only does the episode complicate our understanding of the previous six, once the narrator is found to be unreliable, but it also must stick a difficult technical landing. Ahead of the finale, I spoke to co-showrunner Don McKellar about sewing together a handful of slippery conclusions on morality and the point of life, unifying a story that has always been about duality, and finding meaning in nothingness. This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Slate: I want to start with the title, because endings are hard, aren’t they? This one in particular is no small feat: It has to bring many different themes together and nail down a fairly intangible moral lesson. What was the biggest challenge in making this finale?

Don McKellar: Yeah, you said it, it was hard. The ending of the book, it encompasses many chapters and has a lot of torture and it’s quite grueling, so there’s that, too. How can we not make it so depressing and bleak that viewers give up? That was part of it, because 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. We had to tie up all the threads in a quite unconventional way because we’re in a new world, in a way. It is very unusual for a finale to start again in a whole new world. We hinted at it, but we never really dug in all the way, and so we had to establish the rules of that. Of course, it’s based on history, and reeducation camps were real, but it’s hard to explain that history. It’s quite complicated. There were a lot of problems, but I’m very proud of the way it came together.

What were some of the ways that you tried to tackle introducing an audience to a very important, but almost entirely new, location for this finale?

One of the things we did that the book didn’t do was hint at it more in advance. We tried to give clues to the Commissar’s identity as early as the first episode, and then again in the fourth and then again later. One of the problems that Chan-wook and I talked about was the many compacted revelations one after the other, and we wanted to clear the ground a little bit and allow it to breathe. I think part of the work was subtly trying to hint at it through the tone of the Captain’s confession throughout, through the little glimpses we had.

We haven’t explicitly said it, but the big reveal of the book and the show is that the Commissar is the Captain’s friend, Man (Duy Nguyen), who was his handler as a spy on the South Vietnamese plot. The Commissar, Man, has been keeping his friend in solitary confinement for a full year, forcing him to retell his confession, a confession full of stories that Man was already fully aware of because he was a part of them. Throughout the entire show, Man feels a lot like a ghost to me. He comes to the Captain in fantasized glimpses while the Captain is in America, then when we do see him in the end, donning a mask to cover scars from a napalm attack, he still feels ghostly.

Oh, that’s interesting. I hadn’t exactly thought of it that way, but you’re right that there is a sense that, at the very, very end, we have this sort of revelation that they’re surrounded by ghosts. The ghosts are more and more present in the Captain’s consciousness, and at the end he sees these wandering figures, these rootless souls. Of course, most of the population has been displaced in that way. He’s become closer to this ghost world, which is deeply rooted in the Vietnamese tradition. They see them not as vengeful spirits, but as present memories of the past living with us in this world. I think that that interpretation is interesting. That the Captain is on this edge of the liminal world is definitely something we were playing with—sometimes it’s not clear whether he’s in his head, in a ghost world, or in the real world.

Did you always know that you wanted to end the show with that shot of the many souls of Vietnam standing in the water at night as the Captain sails away?

I think the idea came fairly early. It’s not in the book. I can’t remember if it was one of our very first ideas that came up in the writers room, but the more we talked about the ghosts and the presence of the ghosts and the function of the ghosts and what they represented, the more we started forming this ghost arc and realizing that that’s where we had to end, with a sense that the Captain has to get beyond his own personal guilt and feelings of culpability and see the bigger picture. That’s really what the journey is about.

I’m glad you said that, because I’ve been sort of going back and forth on whether I find the ending to be positive or ominous.

To me it is positive in the sense that it was necessary. He learned it the hard way, this lesson. But I do feel that he’s genuinely seeing the country, the story of his people, from a bigger perspective. He’s moved beyond his personal psychological hangups and now he’s committed to the country moving forward. He’s realized that they’ve all suffered the trauma of this war and have to overcome it together. I guess in my mind it’s positive because the Vietnamese people did overcome that, the country did, and the diaspora did too. I feel that, yes, history will prove that it’s a positive ending.

I want to ask about a small change from the ending of the book, in which Man lets the Captain and their friend, Bon, go and even helps pay for their escape. But in the show, it’s a little less clear.

We don’t see it, but when the Captain, in his last meeting with Man, says, “We have to take action, we have to do something,” I think the sense is that together, they come up with this plan. It’s in the book, so you’d have to talk to Viet about it, but I see Man as a kind of reclamation of the Kurtz character from Apocalypse Now, which always had slightly Victorian, racist overtones of this good soldier in the savage land overcome by the white man’s burden. But here it’s more like the Vietnamese character who has gone mad seeing that his idealism and everything he’s fought for has been dashed. They both go through this trauma, this existential crisis, and I believe that the friendship does endure, which is part of the story. Part of that is Man finally saving his friends. Though, in his deluded way, that’s what he thought he was doing all along.

There’s a line in the finale that really sticks with me; it’s where Man tells the Captain that the female communist agent we see getting tortured in Episode 1 was a better spy. At the end of the day, would you say that the narrator was a good spy?

I love that moment too, because there’s something tragic about it. I don’t want to say that we made this spy show about a bad spy, but the Captain is the perfect spy, psychologically, because he saw everything from both sides. Naturally, in his mind, he saw himself as a born double agent, but that was also his tragedy, that he was cursed. He says in the book that he is cursed to see everything from both sides. He can’t, in the end, be a good spy. His humanity is too strong. His humanism, his love for his friends. In Episodes 5 and 6, he was slowly coming at loggerheads with his instruction. He couldn’t be a good spy on either side. Ultimately I think he learned that he had to let his humanity and let his consciousness free himself from his chosen job as a spy. Which had always been imposed on him in the first place.

Yes! That’s even somewhat reflected in the repeated mantra about him being “half of something” versus “twice of everything.” Obviously, no one wants to be half of anything, no one wants to be told that. But I also don’t want to be twice of everything. That seems like a lot to bear.

It’s a burden, yeah. And it’s a false burden that’s been imposed upon him because of prejudice and preconceptions. He internalized it, but it’s not fair or realistic. It’s a dualism that he deals with through the whole show. It’s kind of bullshit. That’s what we were trying to say with the Prof. Hammer (Robert Downey Jr.) character. This East, West, all of that is—there’s bigger things, more basic humanity and basic truths, beyond that.

Speaking of basic truths, I feel like a lot of the work of this episode is sort of debunking the myth of the narrator throughout the earlier episodes. We find out that the Captain had blocked some key, devastating moments out of his memory. How do you break that façade and depict an unreliable narrator when we’ve been relying on his narration for so long?

You’re absolutely right. The thing is, we catch up with his narration, so, at that point, he’s no longer the narrator. For the first time, we’re in a way freed from that and can see the full picture because he’s not telling it anymore. We’re still inside his mind because we’re in and out of his mind, but for the first time, we’re allowed to see beyond it because he no longer has control of the story. I think that questioning the narrator is what the Captain himself has to do. That’s his lesson, learning that he has been hiding the truth from himself and suppressing the parts that he couldn’t face. We, the audience, have to learn that same lesson.

For six episodes, we’ve been dealing with all of the different characters Robert Downey Jr. plays, as well as the General and his family, and all of these significant figures whose stories take place in America. But they’re barely present in the final episode, even in flashbacks. Was that intentional, this sort of shift in focus?

That’s one of the unusual things about this finale, but also one of the fun things. We’re in another world. We don’t see the General, really, we don’t see Lana, all the characters we’ve been seeing throughout are gone and we’re stuck with the Captain. At the beginning, Claude is there, but basically the Captain chooses to refuse his help, and Claude says, “OK, you’re on your own,” and so we are too. Of course, he still carries all of that weight with him, and that’s what his final revelation is, that he’s been carrying the psychological weight of this colonial presence that Claude and all those characters represent. Maybe he’s projecting that that’s part of him, literally part of his heritage, because of his father, so he can’t avoid it. All those things are contained within him now.

This quote in the finale from the Commissar before he’s revealed as Man—“Write truthfully, for what proves favorable or unfavorable to your fortune might be different than you think. Write precisely, for we have nothing but time.” I think that’s maybe a perfect tagline for the entire story. What were you trying to say about truth with adapting The Sympathizer?

Well, that’s a great choice of a quote. I guess what I’m trying to say, and what I’m thinking about when I think about the wars today, is partly that what the show is trying to say is that we have to get beyond ideology. That sometimes the thing we believe most passionately, and sometimes the justified side, the democratic side, the humane side, ends up doing the worst things because wars just suck everyone in. Once they start, the mechanism is merciless, right? To me, that quote is about saying, “Don’t be so sure your side is right.”

I think this show is really about getting beyond that binary and having this deeper empathy for the other sides. At his best, the Captain does have that, because he can see both sides.
That’s what redeems him. That’s what he’s saying, like, “Even though you might try and tell your story your way, the holes, the gaps, the lapses are always there.”

And they can be felt, too.

That’s right, and we can feel them. The time part is important too, because he’s saying, “This is a big picture now. This is history. This is our people. This isn’t about your little battles and your guilt.”

It’s also another reason why I love the quote, because it gives us the importance of the concept of “nothing” before we get the actual final lesson about how nothing is the thing that is more important than independence and freedom.

He’s giving him a hint, right? Because “nothing” is the answer.