Serial - the podcast *spoilers*

This is why I have my doubts about the adversarial system of justice - you have two opposing parties each with potential motives to distort the truth, and I don't buy that grinding two lies against each other is a reliable way of discovering truth.

But when did Adnan do it? And how? It seems that Hae was killed in the middle of the afternoon, and I don't buy that Adnan and Jay was together at that point.

coming to Radio 4 Extra:

http://www.theguardian.com/media/2014/dec/05/bbc-radio-4-serial-sarah-koening-hae-min-lee

url had me thinking 'ouija board excusive' or something

http://www.funnyordie.com/articles/482049ca5f/serial-ball

What keeps you from believing Jay and Adnan were together that afternoon?
Adnan has no alibi or counter-narrative - and no-one else remembers being with him (except Asia McLain - briefly, and not entirely convincingly).

I don't believe Adnan called Jay from Best Buy, and there is no other convincing narrative for when they met, and when Jay dropped him off again. The call records don't match it.

There are other phones! And other parking lots! And you already believe Jay is a liar if you think he's the killer or the accomplice to someone he met in the park (?). I don't follow your logic.

Right, but when is the next incoming call? Jay had the car, the phone, the shovels. If Adnan's involved, he would have had to call his own phone. And it would show on the call list.

He could have been with Jay the whole time. He could have set up a rendezvous point in advance that didn't require a call. His could have been one of the many calls that day. Jay's a liar for sure - that doesn't exonerate Adnan.

But if Jay lies about this - and this is a pretty fucking huge lie, and complete needless as well - there is no evidence at all for Adnan's involvement.

But we don't know it's a lie! Why is the Best Buy call a lie again? Because the shoplifter is sure there was no pay phone there 15 years ago?

And even if Jay didn't call Adnan from Best Buy, there lots of other ways it could have happened that fit the general contours of Jay's story if not every insignificant detail.

Hae's body is where Jay said it was - and Adnan's cell pinged from in or near Leakin Park at a time when he says he has own phone, which is also the time that Jay says they were burying the body.

Also there's no evidence of Adnan's involvement - but no evidence of Jay's involvement either, so it's really just one guy's story against the others. But Jay's seem to line up with a bunch of stuff we can confirm (phone records, car, body, other witnesses like not-her-real-name-Kathy and Jenn Pusateri, the Nisha call) while Adnan's story doesn't line up with anything anyone else remembers, except Asia McLain - which he doesn't remember.

Hae's body is where Jay said it was -

he knew where her car was but i dont recall that he made any statements abt her body?

he said they buried her in leakin park, described where and how deeply etc

Jays story lines up - somewhat - eventually, after several different versions.

and adnan has no story, and nothing that corroborated his non-version of non-events

Jen is jays best friend and Kathy is Jens best friend, so their stories are not exactly without issues.

That's why I tend to believe Adnan - he has had a long time to work up a story and yet he hasn't.

did you believe Shaggy cause he said "it wasn't me"?

Kathy's story does not back up Jenn and Jays. And Jenns story doesn't really back up Jay's either - she says he stayed at hers until 3:45, which is obviously untrue. And the phonerecords doesn't backup Jays story either. Nisha doesn't back up Jays story either - what she describes would have happened weeks later. So really, the only thing that backs up Jays story is that he new the location of the car and the body. And how does that incriminate Adnan?

Xp dude it's ok to have a discussion or debate without involving OTT condescension.

i don't think there's anything that incriminates adnan, just as there doesn't seem to be anything that incriminates Jay other than what he's admitted to about the car and the body.

it really comes down to two guys' stories.

I'm inclined to think they're both lying - but I think Jay has told us a lot more of the truth than Adnan has so far.

xpost
sorry was shaggy thing was meant more jokingly than condescendingly

enjoying the discussion/debate

The thing is, apart from the weird Nisha call, at all incriminating times the phone is only used to call Jays friends.

There is a long presentation of the call-log here: http://viewfromll2.com/2014/11/23/serial-a-comparison-of-adnans-cell-phone-records-and-the-witness-statements-provided-by-adnan-jay-jenn-and-cathy/

i have to check that out

but what about the pinging from Leakin Park when Adnan says he would have had his phone, when Jay says they were burying the body? Don't you find that problematic if you think Adnan is innocent?

Yes and no. Why wouldn't Adnan just lie and say Jay still had his phone? And the cell tower pings are not 100% indisputable.

Jay served no time for his involvement. I find his willingness to supposedly help Adnan cover up the murder pretty shady, and his excuses for it totally unbelievable. And jays rep as sort of a compulsive liar - people like that are really good at convincing themselves of their own stories.

I definitely don't buy the innocence project's alternate killer theories - Jay was definitely involved, and I'd believe Adnan was involved before considering an outsider.

I think the nisha call doesn't necessarily implicate Adnan: for one thing, nishas recollection of the one time she spoke to Jay was clearly well after the murder, and Jay could have just called her house and faked being a telemarketer or something, to place Adnan with his ph at that time.

also possible that she just got mixed up - she just embroidered her story with later knowledge of Jay's workplace

but yeah it kind of cancels itself out - her number definitely gets called, but her memory of the call doesn't make sense so you kind of have to discount it

I've already listened to every episode twice, but I wanna go back and listen AGAIN and take notes!

There's some interesting stuff on rabia chaudry's blog - copies of documents from police and the lawyer.

u may want to check out the reddit home page for it, linked way upthread. they have google doc transcriptions of every ep

jon ronson speaks to adnan's family in the guardian: http://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2014/dec/07/serial-adnan-syed-family-podcast-interview

I found that letter at the end a bit chilling

also, it was kind of weird to hear people going on about "psychopaths" as I kind of thought that was a bullshit term. At least that's what I remember from The Journalist and the Murderer.

Letter was definitely most compelling part of this episode. Rest didn't add much.

this was a weird episode for me

It was a very weird one. It does feel a bit like they're milking it now - maybe should have wrapped up in 10 episodes as planned, last few have gotten pretty lost in the weeds.

The stealing from the collection part could have been dealt with more quickly - I think she was just trying to make it clear that she ran down all the rumours.

I appreciated that she spent some time exploring the idea that he could be an outwardly nice normal guy and still have killed someone, etc. but it felt like common sense to me... but maybe she needed to hit the point hard since she's skated by it so far.

What did you all make of the letter exactly?

I'm biased against Adnan, I'll admit... for no really rock-solid reason, I'll also admit.

To me it felt like the letter was a hail mary. A pre-emptive admission that he's been manipulative from the start, that was in itself manipulative.

Predictions for how she wraps it all up in the last episode next week?

Adnan seems to think that SK is supposed to be part of his defense team or something, evidenced by how pissed he got when she asked him about stealing from the mosque. Why wouldn't a journalist ask about that?

The letter struck me as a panic response. He had tried his best to manipulate SK on the phone, but then, after the show started airing and he realized that she was not just going to straight-up present a defense for him, and perhaps still had some doubts about him, he began to re-think things: like, "maybe I should have said something about her father dying"

yeah - that's how it struck me too. and kind of panicked and unnecessary too, considering how sympathetic she actually is.

on the other hand, if I was innocent and I knew the sympathetic reporter was about to be doing her final show - I might be writing panicked 17-page single-spaced letters too.

I wonder what rumors about other people Adnan wanted SK to track down, and whether she didn't for legal reasons or because they were bs

yeah, it was weird - she said none of the rumours were that significant and then almost immediately afterwards talked about s one so incriminating it would have wrapped up the show if proven (which it wasn't).

I think Serial is most interesting at showing how a violent event long ago touched a lot of peripheral people, and how it lingered and transformed in their memories. Ultimately we're not getting much of value from the didhedoit? stuff, but I liked hearing that Adnan's conviction caused families to tell their sons not to give rides to girls.

The show could have been truly great if SK had been able to get the cooperation of Hae's family and Jay (and Don and etc.) and focused less on amateur sleuthin' than the aftereffects of Hae's murder.

I wonder if the show could have been different if she'd treated Jay with the same objectivity and empathy she treated Adnan. It seems now like a mistake to have just shown up on his doorstep one day already pretty thoroughly convinced of Adnan's innocence and more or less flat out telling Jay they thought he was lying. Of course Adnan had more to gain and Jay had more to lose, so maybe it wouldn't have made a difference - but it feels like she cultivated a relationship with Adnan and gained his trust in a way she didn't even consider trying to do with Jay.

i love it, but in the long run it's looking like the whole season gets the big cartoon stamp that says "unsubstantiated"

I see people are starting to get annoyed that the teaser snippet from the first episode of someone saying "Basically threatened me, like, you know what happened to Hae. This is what's going to happen to you. That's how I felt that day” has not yet come into play on the show.

The show has done a very good job of establishing that the prosecutor's timeline is basically bunk. At the same time it hasn't really uncovered any credible alternate scenario where Adnan is not involved with the crime.

yeah - exactly - and they talked about that exact point in Episode 7 with the Innocence Project lawyer. I thought this was going to be the turning point for the whole series:

Sarah Koenig
As a legal question, Deirdre says they should only have to prove Adnan isn’t their guy, he’s not the killer. But as a practical matter, she said, their chances are much better if they can go a step further, and say to the State, “not only is this not your guy, we can tell you who is your guy.”

Deirdre Enright
The truth is, when you can give the answer of who it is, it makes it a whole lot easier on everybody else to walk away and do this thing that no one ever wants to do. Usually, there is some logical explanation, right? There is a guy, there is a serial killer, there is somebody who is motivated, there is somebody who hated Hae. Usually there’s something. So, you don’t have to, but I always tell people, you have to.

Good luck to SK if the plan is to jam in a whole serial killer/alternate theory in the last episode.

Yeah the only real possibility is that Jay did it/assisted someone other than Adnan in doing it for some mundane reason and has been covering that up for 15 years. That theory would be semi credible except that at apparently at same time Jay was doing this he and Adnan were just chilling, driving round and smoking dop.

Would have been good to methodically go through every alternate suspect (streaker, Don, the serial killer they're talking about on reddit, others?) and explain exactly why they're 100% cleared in Serial's eyes. They kind of did this in a scattershot way throughout the series - but the question of "If not Adnan, who?" seems more important than big chunks of recent shows like the shoplifter's memories of the Best Buy pay phone and whether Adnan stole 60 bucks.

The problem with that though is that Jay is the big elephant in any if not Adnan scenario. So you either have to prove Adnan didn't/couldn't have done it or figure out why Jay would say he did.