‘The Sympathizer’ Can’t Have Sex Without Thinking of His Mom
After the explosions at the end of last week’s episode of The Sympathizer, Captain (Hoa Xunde) is whisked away to a hospital. He’s out like a light, but we do get to see his dreams—in them, a younger version of himself makes a blood promise to Bon (Fred Nguyen Khan) and Man (Duy Nguyen), his closest friends. They set forth into the jungle, ready to explore Vietnam.
Captain wakes up to find Bon at his side. “That asshole really fucked you up,” Bon says. Captain is so dazed that he doesn’t even know who Bon is talking about. Oh, right—it’s Niko (Robert Downey, Jr.), the director of that explosive (literally) movie Captain was working on as a Vietnam Consultant. Some of the Vietnamese extras have stopped by with a gift: part of the headstone from his mother’s prop grave.
These youthful hallucinations keep finding Captain in his sleep. Once Bon and the crew have left, Captain slips off into a slumber, where he dreams about finding a decapitated soldier’s head in the jungle with Bon and Man as a child. Captain also dreams about being teased by his pals for being mixed race, fighting back against them with the fact that his ancestry actually makes him “twice” of everything. Are these recollections? Or is Captain’s mind creating these memories based on what’s been happening in his life recently?