Summary SCREENRANT VIDEO OF THE DAY SCROLL TO CONTINUE WITH CONTENT 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.
After extensive torture sessions, Mẫn finally gets the Captain to admit 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 members and sail away from the country.
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.
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 sayingthat nothing is a more valuable concept than the concepts of freedom and independence.
"...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.