Serial - the podcast *spoilers*

He was. But Serial got him a new trial. Journalism!

http://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/serial-season-two-is-here

reading this and listening to the first ep, its not really intended to be another whodunit and instead just a super long TAL episode, which i'm fine with

regardless of his guilt, he definitely deserved a new trial given how shady his lawyer was.

Idk. Really I think sentences are too long and he should be out by now anyway. But seemed guilty to me.

After listening to some of undisclosed my theory is that the Adnan did it but the police totally botched the theory. Jays story got tucked up because he was trying to match is hazy memories to an incorrect theory ( and also wanted to do what the police wanted from him since he was implicated and scared), and Adnan maintained his innocence because he saw the police had the story all wrong and thought he could exploit it.

txt convo with my wife:

wife
I actually don't really think
this story they're doing for
serial is very interesting

jim
It's not a whodunit this time
around eh?

wife
No not at all it's more like
a why'd they do it

And the guy that did it is
telling them why he did
it :/

TBF that's what the first serial season should have been too.

I feel like the main draw of the first season was that it was an irl whodunit, that there was definite dubiety about adnan's conviction, yet not enough for it to be just a straight up, egregious, make-you-mad miscarriage of justice (e.g. the case against him seemed somewhat flimsy to me, though i think he's guilty). i found it somewhat compelling at the time, but also somewhat troubling - because of the voyeurism regarding a young girl's murder, and the slapdash, possibly irresponsible nature of them digging up clues and broadcasting them to a large audience, and because of the gross online stalking of the protagonists on reddit etc. - and in hindsight i feel like it was like a morally dubious "my stories" for the university educated.

and this season seems morally dubious because of the fact that the bergdahl case is still ongoing. and the justification they gave that "oh this won't influence the case because the facts are not in dispute" seems naïve or disingenuous

Yeah I mean I'm half joking, but I also rarely felt like it was really a whodunit because most of the season I felt pretty sure Adnan was the murderer. And I had a lot of the problems you had with it, only moreso, as I think I expressed a bunch of times ITT.

Guessing this story will uncover something larger about the military in Afghanistan than just the search for this guy. Not My Lai, but something.

maybe Bergdahl found the mountain Gog and Magog were shut in by Alexanfer the Great

Listening to s2e1. This is boring and bergdahl sounds like a dumbass.

5 years to work on his story, and Boal & Koenig willing listeners eager to be told a story. idk. Dubious... but somewhat interested to see where it goes.

seems like w/o being able to talk to Bergdahl, Koenig's role might be more limited. None of the Night Listener phone calls with Adnan, little chance of Nancy Drew stuff like ambushing Jay at his home. But then again they made sure to end with "Hello, the Taliban speaking" thing to make everyone excited.

I will give it a little more time -- I was too tired to finish the first episode but I also didn't find it particularly compelling so far, and I was kind of let down by "yeah so we spent all this time developing a show where we are basically piggy-backing off someone else's work."

S1 at least had the teaser of "maybe we'll find out Adnan didn't really do it/someone else did," which made for great listening, for a while, as much as I criticized the show. This one I'm just not sure I should care.

Finished e1 and e2 -- it's sort of interesting just as a story about the military and Afghanistan, but goddamn Berghdal sounds like such a stupid and self-absorbed jerk. I actually do understand why he was so hated now.

I do enjoy the humanizing portrait of afghanis and even of the local Taliban. The anecdote about them performing a dance to try to cheer him up was wonderful, just one of those absurd details that throws a wrench into any simplistic telling of the story.

Yeah my biggest problem with this so far is definitely I really do not care about Berghdal's motivations.

I mean if there were some possible intrigue angle or something maybe (what if he's actually CIA? what if he's actually a defector?), but it seems like most of those have already been discredited, and I also just kind of wouldn't believe it after hearing him talk. This is part of the problem with a story dealing with an already widely reported subject.

He seems very naive/deluded or...idk. Assuming what he says is true & not just a polished turd 5 years in the making

Not gonna lie, I was not surprised/shocked to hear fellow soldiers wishing pain and/or death upon him...they seem pretty otm

And hearing his explanations now must be enraging for anyone who was on that search

I'm glad the theme song got an upgrade, that plinky/tinny piano needed to go. Wasn't expecting a Morricone trumpet line though.

I realized about halfway through e2 of this season that I don't give a shit about this story at all.

It's almost hilarious how clueless and selfabsorbed Berghdahl is. It's brilliant that he still hasn't learned his lesson, still think he can fix everything, and therefore won't take a plea deal because he then won't be able to tell his side of the story. Bowe, the biggest podcast in the world is telling your story, about a million times better then you ever will, because you're not that good at anything. Please take the deal for your own sake...

I'm down for Season 2, but not so much because I care whether Bowe is guilty/innocent. It's all the surrounding fallout - what the searching soldiers are going through, what the Taliban has to say, the geopolitics, the generals gritting their teeth, etc. Fascinating.

it does feel like a really long, interesting TAL episode than something I'm going to be waiting for week by week--but that's what I assumed a TAL spin-off would be in the first place

Yes it may turn out Season One is a seat gripping WHAT HAPPENS NEXT WEEK aberration.

As much shit as I talked about S1 it was extremely addictive.

I'm actually enjoying this one, it's just that Bergdahl is the least interesting part. Want more about the Hakhanis, waziristan and pakistans complex relationship w various taliban groups.

the glancing reference to muslim dost's innocence was so frustrating!, like this whole implicit saga

Also I really wish Koenig would drop the NPRish verbal tics, those almost forced informalisms "So he kinda just like...spaced out" that sort of thing.

I think the tics are kind of appropriate for profiling dumbass subjects like Adnan and Bergdahl

lol true. It bothers me more when she's interviewing Afghanis and it seems unnecessary and also odd to do with someone who is not a native speaker.

stop telling women how to talk

and go back to springing their killers from jail

i'm only two episodes in and i know virtually nothing about the story bc i didn't/haven't paid much attention to it in the media, but i totally feel for this guy. and i admire how he just straight up says that a big motivating factor was trying to prove he was someone like 'jason bourne'. that's gotta be hard to admit to. he was 23, young and stupid, clearly didn't think through all the consequences of creating a DUSTWUN. he only thought about the consequences for himself.

what other theories are there for why he went AWOL? plain old desertion makes no sense, given the timing and location; traitor/defector makes no sense as he would have had little to no useful information. did he want to join the taliban? that makes no sense either. he was young and naive, but did he really think that's how it would work?

as for sounding dumb - in the first ep, i think, SK mentions that his captors for the most part didn't speak english and he didn't speak their language. did he have books or any kind of intellectual stimulation over those five years?

what i'm most interested in knowing is: if his claims about the leadership are true, are there any other members of his platoon who can/will support this?

i agree serial is def piggybacking off this filmmaker dude, but they're also doing a lot of their own research and interviews eg the taliban phone call (otm, the story about the dance in the vineyard was kind of adorable, but what caught my ear was that same guy talking about how after the way he was treated while detained for two years, there was no way he was going to treat a POW like that).

it will get into some of your questions more in the coming episodes, but so far I generally don't get the sense that there's another likely explanation for what he did, and I don't really think the mystery is the point this time.

i don't care about his reasons, dude seems like a narcissist.
leaving your post is a dick move and from
a purely military standpoint I kinda hate this guy

I think I am pretty much with what seems to have become the standard line on him, which is that he was a supreme dickhead and moron, but that he probably suffered more than enough as a result.

why is he a narcissist? is there more personal stuff about him in the next two episodes?

all that jason bourne shit, thinking that he could singlehandedly change whatever needed to be changed by having the ENTIRE military basically shut down to find his ass

if that's not thr definition of narcissism i dont know what is

it's all Jay's fault

xp but he admitted to it, didn't try and pretend like he had no ulterior motives. and for all his thoughtless actions and the damage he caused, i feel like 5 years as a POW is probably punishment enough. oh, that and forever looking over his shoulder bc there'll always be people who want him to pay more.

I think the one thing we can all agree on is five years as a POW is punishment enough for virtually any form of idiocy.

This story has definitely gotten more interesting as it's moved away from the "what was Bowe thinking" stuff.

Agreed

The escape stuff was nuts

Two stories, told every two weeks

I can't get my energy up to listen to another epsiode somehow, stopped feeling addictive, started feeling like work.

the change to every other week definitely dulls my interest level.

also the return to the Hae Min Lee case makes me kind of angry

But Serial's worst legacy is all of these new podcasts that drop a few episodes and then go on break for 6-12 months-- Invisibilia, Mystery Show, etc.

OIC, are they bringing that back because of the new hearing?

Man, one thing I hate about courtroom reporting is how hard it is to just find a single summary of everything that has happened so far in a hearing. Too many snippets. News sites should really maintain a rolling "this is everything that happened so far" article/thread.