Serial - the podcast *spoilers*

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.

So basically this is mostly about (1) Asia McClain and (2) the likely unreliability of the phone evidence, right? My problem with #2 is that it doesn't make him any more or less likely to be innocent it just blows up the theory of the case previously advanced. If anything, it might help explain some of the inconsistencies in Jay's testimony and the prosecution's story.

Anyway he's served a lot of time so if he gets out, innocent or guilty, I can't feel that mad about it. Sentences are too long in this country anyway.

murders last longer

lol I had this show's number from the start:

---
Finally listened to the first ep, and a thing that slightly irks me about the setup is that it's pretty much down to two possibilities right away: he did it, or Jay for some reason made up a very elaborate lie. And the second option in turn doesn't present a lot of possibilities either: Jay did it himself, he's covering up for someone else who did it, he's a psycopath who wanted to get Adnan for some reason, he's just a psycopath period. I thought starting with tracking down the library alibi was sort of a weird thing to start with, I'd start with "WHY THE FUCK WOULD JAY SAY THAT IF IT'S NOT TRUE?" Whereas the library alibi is almost certain not to be a slam dunk no matter what she finds out.

So I hope the show gets to that before this Ep 8 "The Deal With Jay" or else I'm just gonna have to skip ahead.

― my jaw left (Hurting 2), Thursday, November 20, 2014 6:35 PM (1 year ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Ugh back to annoying Bergdahl "what was he thinking" who cares eps which are this season's kryptonite.

so... that just kind of ended. I guess the interview with that military dude was the thing they began that annoying schedule for? Or maybe they were chasing down something they ended up not using.

11 years pass...

I also have to say it was REALLY fucking annoying the way they did that "We're going to cover Adnan's new hearing -- oh but shit I'm too busy so I'm not going to finish the job" bullshit. Can't they just have another reporter do it?

The lame scheduling and half-updates stuff would make more sense if this had been some normal podcast not a cultural phenomenon that took almost a year off between seasons

I can't even with this show, it's like they're trying to lose fans.

They could have said two weeks ago that the next episode will be the finale to build up a little anticipation

there are a bunch of things i know Are Bad abt this - weird decision to use some random external guy's research, extra-weirdness of this decision in light of hearing the whole thing & so knowing it didn't contain fascinating bombshell revelations, inexplicable failure to internalise universal critique that they shd finish their research before broadcasting, lapsing into missed episodes &c&c&c - but it is still just super interesting i think? any comparison w s1 just feels kinda thankless & pointless & doomed to useless negativity but it still so meaningfully vindicates the thesis that exploring anything in depth pays dividends, i think; the last few episodes of just heavy & extended vignettes from a war i don't hear about, this whole culture-dynamic portrait of what the military is like, how the veins of its philosophy stretch out & thin in real situations, the crazy infrastructure of military divisions & hierarchies & how doomed & misguided & separate from intentionality the activity is. the route this show took like as a brand is wild & seems kinda weirdly pathologically self-sabotaging & confused but that's pretty separate from what its however-many hours of actual radio time are like, i think. i guess it kinda didn't really satisfy a maybe reasonable expectation of twists & turns or reveals & resolutions but it's still super engaging to get lost in i think.

Yeah, I liked this way more at the end than when the season started out.

I felt differently - I got so tangled up trying to parse the complexities of the story they were telling that I finished with the firm conclusion that stories like this make lousy radio/podcast, that they're best served by longform journalism. I mean you can tell a story in many different ways, but three things audio journalism is amazing at are (1) putting you "inside" a place, instantly; (2) giving you the vivid sense of a person; (3) creating (almost bewilderingly instant) empathy between the listener and the subject. S2 rarely made use of these strengths.

my main memory of s1 - & it is so funny to either skim this thread or talk to somebody about s1 & realise that, beyond knowing that it somehow involved competing theories on cellphone tower functioning, i have otherwise shed all my actual, detailed memory of s1 - is the satisfaction of moving beyond well-organised & persuasive longform-journalism-style understanding & into the sort of dizzy nihilistic blankness of not knowing, a kind of herzog-colbertian ecstatic truthiness that reduced the value of facts & left you swimming in something else dislocated. i think that it's true that it wasn't any of the things you mention, which s1 was, but both feeling lost in the complexities, or distant from the ostensible narrative, have their own cute content-resembles-form dimensions with reference to this specific weird situation, i think. it doesn't have to be a credit to the show that somehow being able to spin the dial & land on some five-years-out-of-the-military guy's rued memories delivered through telephone compression would be affecting, whether or not they add up to anything. so heavy to be reminded at the end that this was about twenty year olds.

yeah; this season was spotty, but I thought the finale was pretty good

i still have one ep left, but this definitely got more interesting towards the end. when kim first turned up, i wondered why she was bowe's emergency contact and not his parents, so i was interested in the background stuff of his life - it wasn't what i was expecting at all. some of his social anxiety and his complete black and white thinking about right and wrong initially came off as a bit ASD, but the schizoid-type personality disorder thing made a lot of sense. the stuff about how he even ended up in the army - the bureaucratic fuckups - was just as interesting.

but in contrast to that - his psych reports after he was released basically surmised that in order to survive 5 yrs in captivity he had to be very mentally sound, that there was no way he would have survived otherwise. how does that fit with his mental illness diagnosis?

this portrait of a young man who grew up isolated and had some very grand delusions of what he would accomplish in life (hey, when i was 14-15 i actually believed i was smart enough to be an astronaut or a doctor or whatever i wanted, so i can empathize), who didn't really fit in anywhere and couldn't understand the motivations of the people around him, who finds himself a POW for five excruciating years as a result - i just find that incredibly sad. maybe especially bc he seems so self-aware now, understands that it was mostly bullshit.

I still couldn't get much involved with the personal trials and travails of BB but I did find the reactions in the final episode fascinating because it's clear that the army's normal reaction to things like what BB did where it doesn't result in the person being held prisoner for 5 years and exchanged for Taliban POWs is... normal ("well anyone walking off base must be pretty crazy let's evaluate and discharge them.") And I guess this might end up being the army's reaction here too ultimately, but obv it's not before BB gets turned into an ugly right wing talking point and basically eviscerated by his fellow GIs publicly and repeatedly for what ultimately amounts to youthful fantasy.

there are a bunch of things i know Are Bad abt this - weird decision to use some random external guy's research, extra-weirdness of this decision in light of hearing the whole thing & so knowing it didn't contain fascinating bombshell revelations, inexplicable failure to internalise universal critique that they shd finish their research before broadcasting, lapsing into missed episodes &c&c&c - but it is still just super interesting i think? any comparison w s1 just feels kinda thankless & pointless & doomed to useless negativity but it still so meaningfully vindicates the thesis that exploring anything in depth pays dividends, i think; the last few episodes of just heavy & extended vignettes from a war i don't hear about, this whole culture-dynamic portrait of what the military is like, how the veins of its philosophy stretch out & thin in real situations, the crazy infrastructure of military divisions & hierarchies & how doomed & misguided & separate from intentionality the activity is. the route this show took like as a brand is wild & seems kinda weirdly pathologically self-sabotaging & confused but that's pretty separate from what its however-many hours of actual radio time are like, i think. i guess it kinda didn't really satisfy a maybe reasonable expectation of twists & turns or reveals & resolutions but it's still super engaging to get lost in i think.

― 1st Amendment absolutist in favor of the unltd publication of sextapes (schlump), Saturday, April 2, 2016 1:40 AM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

^^This

This season wound up not being so much about a "protagonist" and whether he was "crazy, guilty or w/e" but about a whole ecosystem of government and how when you (basically) throw a rogue element into that ecosystem it causes some unforeseen results, which I think is what turned people off - just a very different thing to S1.

http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/crime/bs-md-ci-adnan-syed-new-trial-20160630-story.html

dude

yeah just saw that. Feel like it's gonna be a real shitshow tbqh. I probably just shouldn't follow it. If he gets out, so be it. He served a long time.

I listened to the new Serial spin-off show "Shit Town"

a few gestures toward mystery, but mostly a character study set in among a lot of terrible people

Yeah i am listening to ep 2 now

Kinda hate these aimless gumshoe things so i dont really care that much about the "mystery," but the people are kinda interesting so i'll keep going.

Listen past ep 2. It's a whole other story and I am on board

1 episode left I'm finishing this tonight. I love it.

This is no question the best short run podcast I've ever listened to.

(S-Town, not Serial...in case there's confusion in the future.)