Where do you want to go?

IN the final scene of Zero Dark Thirty, Kathryn Bigelow’s heart-stopping thriller about the hunt for Osama bin Laden, Maya, a CIA operative and the movie’s heroine, is strapped into a seat on a military transport plane staring into the middle distance, looking depleted.

The film’s dramatic arc follows Maya’s near-messianic quest to take out “UBL”. Intense and headstrong, she battles the weary fatalism of her bosses, suppresses all moral doubt about the use of torture to extract leads, and sticks to her theory of the case with feverish conviction.

The movie’s harrowing, climactic kill operation is Maya’s vindication. But then, having identified bin Laden’s body in a hangar at Bagram Air Base, she finds herself all alone in a cavernous cargo hold, a thousand-yard stare on her face. When a cheerful crew member tries to engage her, she looks away. “Where do you want to go?” he asks.