Yeah, I haven't heard that. I mean, it's NPR, so it's public donations, but not for this specifically.
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Serial: Season 01 Discussion - This American Life meets True Detective
- Thread starter Malyse
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Yeah, I haven't heard that. I mean, it's NPR, so it's public donations, but not for this specifically.
Thanks for the idea.
RedNalgene
Member
Agreed. But then you also think "if Jay was framing him, there's NO WAY he could be that clever".
Read a "spoiler" on the subreddit that's pretty huge if true, but I'm doubtful of given where it came from, about
Apparently
a possible motive for Jay.
Apparently
Hae was going to tell Stephanie that he was cheating on her. I wouldn't be surprised at all if he was cheating but her confronting him about it seems really far-fetched, and the source is Adnan's best friend so it's hardly iron clad.
Spectromixer
Member
I'm on episode 4 now.
This American Life is not an NPR production. TAL is a WBEZ Chicago production, distributed through the Public Radio Exchange. TAL *competes* with NPR for broadcast slots on public radio stations.
Donations to NPR cannot possibly land in the This American Life budget. If you want to fund TAL, you need to fund TAL directly and/or indirectly contribute to their success by supporting your local public radio station which itself pays fees to WBEZ in order to syndicate TAL.
In short: if you care about a show you hear on public radio you need to fund the show directly or else whatever institution produces the show. If you care about listening to public radio over the air, you need to fund your local station. Your local station uses the money to run the station and the transmitter, probably to produce some local shows, and then to syndicate national shows through NPR, PRX, PRI, etc.
Imperial Hot
Banned
Ooooh, I've named a thread!
As of Episode 05, Jay would have to be some kinda of evil genius to be framing Adnan. This case makes no sense.
They were barely friends. They had a great drug consumer, drug dealer relationship, but they were not exactly friends. Kinda like the relationship between Seth Rogen and James Franco at the beginning of Pineapple Express.
E has a point. I wouldn't let a barely friend hold five bucks, let alone my car. Could be Adnan is too trusting, but still.
Yeah you're right. I've never really thought about why Adnan would allow someone else to use his car and phone, especially a drug dealer.
Ep 5:
There has to be way more to it. Has to be. God I cannot wait for next week.
I'm guessing that the relationship progressed a bit not only because of the drug dealing and them hanging out smokin' after school, but also that Adnon's friend was dating Jay at the time too. Plus, hanging with Jay around town was an easy way to get some weed and avoid getting caught doing that stuff by his parents.
At this point I have a pretty solid feeling that Jay is hiding a bit more regarding Hae's death based on the new cell tower info, timing, and call record. It is a bit of a stretch for Jay to be that lucky with the stuff after 6pm, but because of how infamous Leakin Park was for dead bodies, Jay could have just used the path they took in the evening to make everything match up with the story he told later.
The big stuff about Jay that bothers me now is some of his story including massive chunks of time and possible fake information that the prosecution used anyway because of a lack of fact checking for the sake of it working in their favor for the case. The odd time frame during the supposed time Hae was killed and the reason for it, the possible lack of an actual pay phone at the Best Buy.
The big stuff about Jay that bothers me now is some of his story including massive chunks of time and possible fake information that the prosecution used anyway because of a lack of fact checking for the sake of it working in their favor for the case. The odd time frame during the supposed time Hae was killed and the reason for it, the possible lack of an actual pay phone at the Best Buy.
There has to be way more to it. Has to be. God I cannot wait for next week.
I'm guessing that the relationship progressed a bit not only because of the drug dealing and them hanging out smokin' after school, but also that Adnon's friend was dating Jay at the time too. Plus, hanging with Jay around town was an easy way to get some weed and avoid getting caught doing that stuff by his parents.
Right! The boyfriend of a female friend does have weight. Good call.
JimtotheHum
Member
There is a point in Episode 5 where they talk to a guy (Will) that says that Adnan would regularly get picked up by Jay, but in an earlier interview, Adnan downplayed their friendship. Feels like both of them are lying.
There's a big difference between coming out of jail a murderer, and coming out with a a huge cloud of doubt about the whole trial.
The vast majority of the evidence, the lack of motive for anyone else to commit the crime, and Occam's law, all point towards Adnan being guilty.
There's some inconsistencies in Jay's story that are troubling, but I find it hard to believe that this small-time drug dealer/adult video store clerk has the capacity to be a criminal mastermind.
Good episode though.
The vast majority of the evidence, the lack of motive for anyone else to commit the crime, and Occam's law, all point towards Adnan being guilty.
There's some inconsistencies in Jay's story that are troubling, but I find it hard to believe that this small-time drug dealer/adult video store clerk has the capacity to be a criminal mastermind.
Good episode though.
Just finished episode 5. I had to laugh at Adnan's lawyer when she was questioning Jay. Sounded like something out of a comedy skit. With this episode, I'm definitely leaning toward Adnan having done it despite some inconsistencies with Jay's story. Jay is probably hiding some additional facts but that might make him more involved, but everything points to Adnan at the moment in my opinion.
Careful there, champ. Occam's *razor* (not "law"; never "law") is a heuristic useful for guiding inquiry but is not itself a method of deduction. Occam's razor would have you conclude the kid just slacked off his homework--that takes fewer assumptions than believing his story about spilling gravy on his homework and his dog eating it. But sometimes the dog does eat the homework.
Occam's razor isn't really relevant in a prosecutorial context: the goal of an investigation and subsequent trial is not to find *someone* guilty for every crime that happens; we're not trying to solve "which of these is more likely" we're trying to solve "which of these is likely to have happened in itself and beyond reasonable doubt". We don't have to pick among competing theories here, we can simply reject them all.
And to add, invoking Occam's razor requires all things being equal anyway! And in this instance we don't know all of the things.
Until they build up a more plausible argument for why Jay would be framing Adnan, it is hard for me to put much stock in the critique of his timeline. They were smoking weed at the time it went down and Jay is asked to remember the exact time of all these different phone calls six weeks later. Of course not everything is going to match up perfectly.
Motive aside, we are also asked to believe that Jay is clever enough to set up this cell tower evidence in a way that implicates Adnan, but also to believe that he is dumb enough to implicate himself as an accessory to the murder and make details of his drug dealing part of the timeline. I am just not buying it.
Motive aside, we are also asked to believe that Jay is clever enough to set up this cell tower evidence in a way that implicates Adnan, but also to believe that he is dumb enough to implicate himself as an accessory to the murder and make details of his drug dealing part of the timeline. I am just not buying it.
What about the wrong tower part?
Thanks, and yeah, Occam's razor is what I meant to say.
You are 100% correct in what you are saying with regards to a prosecution requiring evidence greater than: "this theory is the more likely of the two proposed theories."
What I really mean to say is that if you apply Occam's razor to the two competing theories that:
a) Jay's telling more or less the truth, and Adnan was the murderer
or
b) Jay committed the murder without a realistic motive, without anyone seeing Adnan and providing him an alibi, without greatly contradicting Adnan's cell phone records etc.
Then I know which one requires a lot less assumptions, and which one I think is more likely.
Of course, both of these theories could be wrong, but I'm not in the jury, I'm merely trying to weigh up the evidence as it comes through each week.
Yeah I guess the raze' is more useful for an investigator, helps decide how to prioritize which thread to pull on at any give time. The trick is to not be mislead by comparing the theories you have against one another. There's every chance the truth isn't even among the theories you're holding. "Adnan is more likely than Jay" is helpful, but if you focus all of your energy there you never turn up Chad, who actually did it.
Rejecting Jay as a suspect shouldn't make you any more confident in Adnan's guilt; the likelihood Adnan's guilt can only be considered with regard to itself.
Rejecting Jay as a suspect shouldn't make you any more confident in Adnan's guilt; the likelihood Adnan's guilt can only be considered with regard to itself.
Spectromixer
Member
Okay I'm now officially caught up on all the episodes, although I feel like I need to go back and listen again to put more thought into it. It's puzzling because Adnan's alibi with Asia seemed so definite but all of the information from Jay and the cell phone towers make it seem like they were in fact together. I get the feeling Adnan is hiding something but I don't think he did it.
Listened to the latest on the drive home. It was a little frustrating. The whole "let's retrace steps" premise seems obviously busted.
It's twenty years later! Traffic patterns haven't changed at all? All the bottlenecks and attractors are the same? The school hasn't seen any change in bus ridership, hasn't optimized pickup at all?
I guess the basic claim ("nobody's story lines up") holds. But we could have gotten there in half the time.
Really stepped up the salacious intrigue though. Dude strangled her in the totally public parking lot they used to bone in?
It's twenty years later! Traffic patterns haven't changed at all? All the bottlenecks and attractors are the same? The school hasn't seen any change in bus ridership, hasn't optimized pickup at all?
I guess the basic claim ("nobody's story lines up") holds. But we could have gotten there in half the time.
Really stepped up the salacious intrigue though. Dude strangled her in the totally public parking lot they used to bone in?
Yeah this episode was pretty frustrating. I'll post my complete thoughts when I give it a relisten tomorrow evening.
Has anyone else been relistening to episodes? I started doing it after Ep. 4 since it was chock full of information and educated speculation. Ep. 4 seemed very important at the time and I immediately relistened to it.
blainethemono
Member
This kinda sounds more Paradise Lost/West Memphis 3 than True Detective...which is up my alley, so i'll check this out ASAP. Thanks for the thread, might not have heard about this otherwise
Spider from Mars
tap that thorax
I have many acquaintances like Jay.
Shady motherfuckers.
Shady motherfuckers.
PassiveObserver
Member
This jumped out at me too when I was listening. Of course things would've gotten streamlined in the past 20 years and the buses may have become more efficient. It really meant nothing that they were *theoretically* able to complete the murder in the 21 minutes, and Sarah says so herself.
Also, Sarah did an interview with Slate's The Gist and they talk about how the season might end, which doesn't spell anything out but might be spoiley in that it points to how the
ending may be contingent on new information/happenings.
Welp, didn't see that coming. Slate now has a spoiler recap podcast about Serial. I've heard Serial come up on almost every movie and TV podcast I sub this week.
http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat...cast_recap_discuss_and_debate_the_latest.html
Its pretty decent.
http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat...cast_recap_discuss_and_debate_the_latest.html
Its pretty decent.
backflip10019
Member
Only listened to one and a half episodes, but I'm in hook, line and sinker.
Damn, this is quality storytelling.
Damn, this is quality storytelling.
haha yeah; wtf.. does that person even care? I would've lost my cool there for a bit.
Jay was recounting that story 6 weeks later, and he was smoking pot the day it happened. I think this is one point that could have been stressed more in the episode. People who are high can very easily mistake time durations or misremember events.
It seems very plausible to me that he could be mistaken about some details in the route they took or when certain events happened. The tower evidence supports the most important parts of the timeline. If the evidence supports the phone being in the park where Hae's body was buried at the time Jay says they were burying her, does it really matter if he is wrong about where they were during an hour where he says they smoked and went to McDonald's?
If Adnan's guilt depending on Jay remembering everything accurately, then I would have serious doubts. However, Adnan's guilt depends on whether Jay is straight-out lying about everything. I have yet to hear any believable explanation for why Jay would do that. Especially when - despite Adnan's claims - all the evidence seems to suggest that Jay and Adnan were friends.
Yeah, that part was really dumb. They cap it all off by concluding that it doesn't seem feasible because it took them 22 minutes to do something the prosecution claimed took 21 minutes. All it would take would be for the school's clock to be a few minutes fast!
The phone only matters insofar as we can put Adnan in possession of it at any give time. There was a pretty unclear "well here's a call that must have been Adnan and not Jay" that happened in this episode. Overall this episode was super weak. They spent a lot of words and time jumbling up what would have been much more clear as a map. Which, happily, they've furnished:
http://serialpodcast.org/maps/cell-tower-map
The blog is stepping up its game.
http://serialpodcast.org/maps/who-what-when
Now with handy timeline!
http://serialpodcast.org/maps/who-what-when
Now with handy timeline!
They stated that Adnan does not dispute having the phone at the time of the alleged burying of the body in the park.
It really is my number one thing of the week.Thank you to the OP. I would have never heard about this. What an amazing podcast
Lumpy Onion
Member
Almost done listening to all that's out. Really fascinating stuff! Will probably listen again soon. As someone who loved things like True Detective, Rectify, and Zodiac this is right up my alley.
backflip10019
Member
Uh, what? Don't you mean it is fiction?
I think he's saying he went into it thinking it was fiction and then realized it wasn't.
backflip10019
Member
Wait. WHAT.
Holy fuck, this is real shit? God damn. Mind blown. I've listened to all 5 episodes so first and thought it was fiction. Why didn't they say it was real ever?
They said it was real in episode one.
backflip10019
Member
Wow. No idea how I missed that. I thought they just mocked up the interviews super well. The tagline "one story told week by week" must have made me think it was fiction.
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