“It's not about nihilism": "The Sympathizer" boss decodes the series' ending revelations

Endings are hard, aren’t they? This question doesn’t come up in my conversation with Don McKellar about the finale of “The Sympathizer.” But it is one he and his co-showrunner Park Chan-wook thought out carefully, striking a balance between accurately interpreting Viet Thanh Nguyen's 2016 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel and appropriately rendering certain turns for a visual medium. Torture unearths previously undisclosed memories, which The Captain endures out of loyalty to his and Bon’s other “blood brother” Man. You and Director Park changed a few plot details from the book – a common practice – but a significant one is leaving the reveal of who The Captain's father is to the very end. To me, the Man character is kind of a reclamation of the Kurtz character in “Apocalypse Now,” which always had this sort of romantic, Victorian White Man's Burden kind of racism to it because of its history, because of its source in “The Heart of Darkness.” This good soldier lost in a savage land facing the weight of the White Man's Burden, that kind of thing.