Serial: S02 Episode 09: Trade Secrets
March 3, 2016 9:10 PM - Subscribe

You don't make peace with your friends.

The story of Bowe's release, and the years of political back-and-forth that preceded it.
posted by radioamy (24 comments total) 2 users marked this as a favorite
 
Welp I'm assuming that since nobody posted this episode earlier today, you're all feeling like I am...which is that this episode was a bit hard to follow and not that compelling.

That throat-clearing though.
posted by radioamy at 9:11 PM on March 3, 2016 [2 favorites]


Stepping aside from the story itself for a moment, this was a time I really felt the seams showing on this season. Also, an episode where the self-conscious unofficial, un-standard , not-your-parents'-NPR reporting style really grated. (And it must have grated after the Adnan updates which included the audience on a conference call from a closet.)

There are times I really like the "Let's be honest here" style of Serial. I like that Koenig shows emotion and I feel the resonance when she is conversationally grasping at the complex aspects of this story (or last season's story). And I'm glad that they aren't bound by even TAM's silly "we're bleeping out bad words" rules. But that throat clearing (and a few other things this season) struck me as particularly juvenile.

(Also the implied joke, in context, is a bit of a stretch.)
posted by aureliobuendia at 10:32 PM on March 3, 2016 [1 favorite]


Could someone explain the throat clearing? I wasn't listening very intently, and I heard it go by and didn't know what it was in response to.
posted by lunch at 4:29 AM on March 4, 2016


Yeah -- this one in particular is where I feel the choice to go for the Bergdahl case has hurt Serial the most. Why the fuck am I spending several minutes listening to the riveting account of some diplomat taking a picture of a sign that isn't there anymore in a country far away from Bergdahl? It felt like if Season One had run an entire episode about this one high school football game that the prosecutor on Syed's case had played in. It would be fine on a different podcast; on this one, it was glaringly out of place.
posted by Etrigan at 7:31 AM on March 4, 2016 [2 favorites]


I feel like the story in this ep would have been more compelling if it had been split across a couple eps, so we could follow it a little better and get more invested in some of the moments.

Like, I would have been interested in maybe a bit more focus on who the Gitmo guys were that we released. It's interesting to hear about how they were mostly guys who had willingly surrendered during the 2001 fighting, and that they 'd never resisted or been uncooperative in prison. Our right wing likes to say that everyone at Gitmo is evil and a massive danger to us, but the show seems to be saying that's not exactly true of these guys.

And if the background on the released prisoners had been separated, I think a clearer narrative could have been created of the negotiation ups and downs.

Why the fuck am I spending several minutes listening to the riveting account of some diplomat taking a picture of a sign that isn't there anymore

Well, I think I understand what the point was supposed to be there, though I admit maybe it wasn't as effective as it could've been given how much material was crammed into this episode. I think the idea was, with all that talking and negotiating, they HAD a deal, it was gonna happen, Bowe would've been coming home, but the Taliban went and did this one dumb thing and the whole deal collapsed. Also I think there's a point in there about the strange sorts of details that can upend years of diplomacy - "you can't call it a prisoner exchange, you have to say 'mutual release'" ... "you can have an office but you can't use the word 'emirate.''
posted by dnash at 8:06 AM on March 4, 2016 [1 favorite]


Maybe I just don't understand diplomacy/politics very well, but I did not exactly believe the Taliban that "oops we made a mistake with our sign." I call bullshit.

lunch, the throat-clearing was when SK explained "you can't call it a prisoner exchange, you have to say 'mutual release'" -- she was basically rolling her eyes verbally.
posted by radioamy at 9:30 AM on March 4, 2016


I didn't post it because I listened to it twice and I still couldn't tell you what the hell happened in it.

Interview with Sarah and Julie.

They are coming to my town on Monday night. I can report back in here. God, I hope they just don't want to focus on nothing but Bowe all night--I bought the tickets before season 2 came out.
posted by jenfullmoon at 8:14 PM on March 4, 2016 [1 favorite]


I didn't post it because I listened to it twice and I still couldn't tell you what the hell happened in it.

Yes! I was so confused.
posted by radioamy at 10:14 AM on March 5, 2016


I literally checked my podcasting app to make sure I hadn't missed an episode. It jumped right from a pretty linear narrative of Bowe's time in captivity to a much larger scope view of the whole Afghanistan peace process. I understood from the beginning of the series that that was part of the intent, but the change was too jarring here.
posted by Rock Steady at 12:08 PM on March 7, 2016


how many episodes left here? I'm hoping they're gonna wrap this up quick, learn from their sophomore slump and come out with something worth listening to for season 3. This has just been boring. I understand how tough it is to catch lightning in a bottle twice, but this has been really disappointing. I still don't see how they thought they had 10-12 hours worth of stuff to say about this whole thing. I think it would have made an okay 1-hour episode of TAL, but still why bother? What have they added to previously available public knowledge about Bergdahl?
posted by skewed at 1:04 PM on March 7, 2016 [1 favorite]


What have they added to previously available public knowledge about Bergdahl?

How many people who listen to Serial have gone out and sought that previously available public knowledge? I still have my reservations about using the Serial format on a still-developing case, but very little of that is because it's already a fairly well-known one.
posted by Etrigan at 1:08 PM on March 7, 2016


Given all the quotes that I saw out of SK around the end of season 1 that seemed to boil down to "I am really really super uncomfortable with how this took off in popularity," I honestly kinda wonder if she was subconsciously trying to pick something that would be less interesting. I don't think I would get up the nerve to ask that and I bet she'd say no anyway because nobody's going to admit that they want the heat off their super popular show, but.... I just wonder.
posted by jenfullmoon at 7:06 PM on March 7, 2016 [1 favorite]


How many people who listen to Serial have gone out and sought that previously available public knowledge? I still have my reservations about using the Serial format on a still-developing case, but very little of that is because it's already a fairly well-known one.

I'm sure that most people didn't know that much about the story (including myself), but that's not to say it's a worthwhile story to tell. Lots of people don't know that much about the life of Abraham Lincoln, but if Serial had decided to do a season-long biography of his life, my reaction would have been the same. The story is out there, why does it need to be covered again? Why not just read one of the 8,000 previous biographies? You really gotta bring something new to the analysis, or what's the point? So far this season, I'm not sure what I'm supposed to have gotten out of this season beyond what

That being said, Serial can be whatever it wants to be, and if they want to be something I don't like, that's no tragedy.

I honestly kinda wonder if she was subconsciously trying to pick something that would be less interesting.

It seems plausible to me that she wanted to pick something that could not possibly recreate the problems that season one had (creating a spectacle out of a woman's death, unintentionally inviting people to intrude into the privacy of people who had moved on with their lives, etc.), which made it also extremely unlikely that it would recreate the success either. So maybe that's almost the same thing.
posted by skewed at 7:37 PM on March 7, 2016


This is interesting. I didn't know a third of this stuff, about the Taliban and Pakistan and Afghanistan and US foreign policy, so I liked this episode, but the exposition was the weakness for me. If you have to do this much explaining, then you're not doing story telling anymore. It's thoughtful, intelligent, informative, but not exciting and compelling.

I will happily keep listening, but it's playing in the background while I clean the kitchen.
posted by latkes at 9:10 PM on March 7, 2016


skewed: I have just returned from the Sarah Koenig/Julie Snyder presentation in my area, and yes, it did sound like they were trying to avoid certain problems that they had in season one, such as the people snooping through others' private lives on Reddit. They wanted to go with something where everything was already exposed, and that she didn't have that intense relationship with Bowe that she does (still, I think, sounds like they still talk) with Adnan.

I want to write the whole thing up when I can, but (thankfully for me) the presentation almost entirely focused on Adnan's story and how things went while they were creating it, and they didn't talk much about season 2 except for when someone asked during the Q&A. So I dunno if reporting on that is appropriate in the Bowe Bergdahl discussions.
posted by jenfullmoon at 10:02 PM on March 7, 2016 [3 favorites]


jenfullmoon, I'd love to hear more about the presentation you went to! The one near me was sold out before I even heard about it.
posted by radioamy at 10:59 AM on March 8, 2016


I have to confess I really liked this episode - but I have a weakness for the machinations of getting things done and how miserably hard that can be.

The big take away was that Bowe was part of a bigger, or other, or more complex, deal. A line-item. It evoked the huge disparity of one person in the gargantuan process of the waging of war.

I walked the dog an extra block to hear it through to the end. (And jenfullmoon please link to any longer break-down/write-up about the presentation.)
posted by From Bklyn at 2:25 AM on March 9, 2016 [3 favorites]


I also really liked this episode. It was good long-form journalism on the details of how diplomacy and foreign policy work. I loved the crazy detailed story about the Taliban office with the sign and the flag. I think it's great that Serial has taken the Bergdahl story as a foil to report on broader themes. What it's like for military in Afghanistan. How the US handles prisoner recovery. The awkward details of diplomacy with the Taliban. Great stuff!

This episode is a total stylistic shift from what the first season of Serial was like. But I like it.
posted by Nelson at 6:58 AM on March 9, 2016 [4 favorites]




Thanks Jen! I think you've likely also revealed the subject of the third season: Sarah and Adnan's relationship - because is some complicated shit right there.
posted by From Bklyn at 5:49 AM on March 10, 2016


jen, you've got a bad URL on "Sarah's husband". Looks like some of the lacrosse URL snuck in there.
posted by Etrigan at 6:09 AM on March 10, 2016


I think you've likely also revealed the subject of the third season: Sarah and Adnan's relationship - because is some complicated shit right there.

Oh, great. And then the podcasts about Serial start up again, and I am not looking forward to the Pop Culture Happy Hour when they discuss that they're on a podcast talking about podcasts that are talking about a podcast that's about a podcast.
posted by Etrigan at 6:13 AM on March 10, 2016


It's possible I'm just not the target audience for Serial, but I'm quite surprised at the comments here. (And more so in the Serial Serial podcast, to which I've now unsubscribed. Life's too short.)

I thought this episode was great. It was full of information I'd never heard before, on a thoroughly fascinating topic. The subtleties of political negotiation undertaken by a state waging a very public war against an enemy they refuse to acknowledge as a state is an amazing thing to consider, and the random historical events that can derail plans of global import are endlessly interesting. Sure, it's all trivia - but it's fascinating trivia.

I wish we could get a 12 hour Serial about stuff like this, rather than spending hours tediously examining the navel of Bowe Bergdahl. (Or, for that matter, Adnan Sayed.) For the first time, it feels like Serial has taken on a story large enough that it genuinely requires more than an hour long radio program.
posted by eotvos at 7:46 PM on March 10, 2016 [1 favorite]


Thanks, links are fixed.

It's interesting how Sarah really coldly describes it all as mutually assured manipulation between her and Adnan. "I'm not his friend, I'm not in love, I have no effing idea if he did it, I am the queen of neutrality" seems to be her metamessage. And yet apparently they're still communicating and I wouldn't have expected her to still want to do that after the season ended. Hmmmmm. I'd be really curious to see what becomes of their relationship if/when Adnan is out of prison.
posted by jenfullmoon at 7:52 PM on March 11, 2016


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