Let’s Talk About That Squid Sex Scene in The Sympathizer

The following story contains minor spoilers for Episode 2 of The Sympathizer, “Good Little Asian.”

JUST LIKE FX’S Shōgun, HBO’s The Sympathizer is a show that simply demands your attention—even a minute of looking down at your phone or thinking about what’s happening in the NBA playoffs could leave you completely lost. Based on Viet Thanh Nguyen’s Pulitzer-winning novel of the same name, The Sympathizer tells the story of a man, known only as “The Captain,” (Hoa Xuande) whose alliances and loyalties are never entirely clear to anyone—except the viewers.

He tells us early on in the show that while he’s embedded with the armed forces of the South of Vietnam (and, thus, is aligned with the U.S.A.), he’s actually a spy loyal to the North’s army. Keeping this in mind at all times—as we see him escape Vietnam and, later, operating in the U.S.—is key to understanding what’s going on both with the show’s overarching plot, and internally inside The Captain’s psyche.

In the hands of co-creators Park Chan-wook and Don McKellar (Park’s direction of the first three episodes in particular), however, The Sympathizer is unlike any spy thriller you’ve seen before. The show jumps back and forth in time, in and out of memories, and is never afraid to get a little funny to make a point. Perhaps no better example comes during a moment in Episode 2, “Good Little Asian,” when The Captain explains to Sofia Mori (Sandra Oh) the explicit and outlandish true story of why he doesn’t like eating squid—making a larger point and setting himself on a different personal path along the way.

Sofia is the personal assistant to Professor Hammer (The Captain’s “Orientalist” professor from grad school in L.A. now helping him out, and one of Robert Downey Jr.’s many outrageous characters within the show), and, like The Captain, she doesn’t like being put into a box based just on her ethnic background (numerous quick interactions with the brash Professor Hammer make this clear in a succinct way). Sofia and The Captain establish a quick bond because of this, and when they’re alone at one of the Professor’s Japanese-themed parties, she asks him a seemingly minor question. Why doesn’t he like squid?

And with almost immediate regret, The Captain feels enough trust and kinship with Sofia that he jumps right in to a story from his teenage years, about a dinner with his late mother; she was cutting up squid for dinner, a gift from his absent father, when she realized they were missing sauce. The Captain, then, was left alone with a soft, succulent piece of round squid, and, well… he did what you might suspect he did. Men’s Health does not advise the reader to do what The Captain did. And while he marked the piece of squid with a knife so that it wouldn’t get mixed in with the rest, his mom then almost ate it—and so he then had to step in and down it himself, viscerally vomiting in his mouth. Suddenly, The Captain’s taste aversion for squid makes a whole lot of sense.

Now, of course, this is a bit of gross-out humor (and, perhaps, a subtle nod from director Park Chan-wook to his own previous work with an icky squid/octopus moment in Oldboy) meant to make us laugh; it’s a moment of levity in a show that spends a lot of time asking us to follow complicated international espionage and constantly shifting political motivations.

But it’s also here that The Captain makes a stronger point—one that would potentially reveal a bit of his own true alliance if it wasn’t so universally true. When Sofia suggests the story is “disgusting,” The General quickly snaps back. “You know what’s disgusting, is the massacre of 3,000,000 people,” he says. “Torture is disgusting. But masturbation? Sure—I fucked a squid. And I enjoyed it. I’m not ashamed. I believe the world would be a better place if we blushed at the word ‘murder’ as much as we did at the word ‘masturbation.'”

The Captain’s point only continues what was already a successful flirtation between himself and Sofia; within a few moments, the scene cuts to them together in bed. And in a sequence that doesn’t last more than a few minutes, The Sympathizer does a couple vital things all at once: makes the larger point that our culture stigmatizes sex in a way that it never does with violence, and puts on display that The General genuinely believes strongly in this. But on a character level, it also shows that The General is a smart, charismatic guy who’s able to connect and socialize with just about anyone on his level—and in relating so deeply, so quickly with Sofia, makes the early case that if he wasn’t so swept up in all of this espionage plotting, he could make a hell of a life and impact away from it all in America—or anywhere else.

As The Sympathizer continues its run, we’ll certainly continue to see the push and pull for The General as his loyalties to the North of Vietnam and his experiences in the U.S. and with his friend (Bon, who lost his wife and daughter during their escape from Vietnam, is still living with him) are tested. And we can only hope that these themes are illustrated in a way as effective, and having as much fun, as with the squid scene in Episode 2.

Stream The Sympathizer Here