Reply All: #108 The Skip Tracer, Part II

October 19, 2017 9:10 AM

Continued: Sruthi Pinnamaneni follows the world's best bounty hunter on a peculiar case.
posted by Tevin (6 comments total)

So I was mixed on this one/happy to hear the twist about the immigration status, but disappointed that everything kind of fizzled at the end. I wanted resolution, dammit!
posted by purenitrous at 7:17 PM on October 20, 2017 [1 favorite]

Yeah, it's frustrating when an episode doesn't have a tight resolution. I mean, it's real life, so I realize it doesn't always wrap up in a neat bow, but it did feel like the story sorta trailed off.
posted by radioamy at 9:59 AM on October 23, 2017

I'm glad these episodes exist and can be heard. But, a podcast where there's not a single person (aside from the reporter) with whom one can sympathize sure isn't much fun. The take-home message is that America is an awful place full of horrible people.

Here's hoping Michelle and her taser-happy friends wind up in jail for legitimate CFAA abuses or police impersonation before she accidentally kills someone. I'd have expected more self-awareness from a media-savvy sociopath.
posted by eotvos at 10:57 AM on October 23, 2017

Hmmm.. I thought Michelle was like, a nice person with a moral center. I don't share her moral center (which seems to be: people should go to jail if they break the law) but it's something? But yeah, I think this episode could have been edited differently, once they realized that after all the reporting, there was going to be no real resolution. It could have focused more clearly on how much detail is available on the internet, and how bounty hunters interact with that information, and how we are all basically totally findable now because of that.
posted by latkes at 6:14 PM on October 25, 2017

I thought it was interesting that the episode actually turned out to be about somebody who wasn't findable, although that sort of got lost in the touched-upon but someone underbaked theme of how entrenched American racism is now using skip traces to support a narrative of immigrant violence.
posted by maxsparber at 2:29 PM on October 26, 2017

What struck me most when they uncovered the fact that he wasn't actually undocumented was that Phia thought Chris would care. "I didn't know how she would react." Well, I haven't met the woman but I could have told you that she wasn't going to care because for her, that wasn't the point at all. Blerg.
posted by machine at 6:33 AM on October 27, 2017 [1 favorite]