Serial finale review: a near-perfect podcast’s imperfect ending
Serial’s investigation of the case against Adnan Syed gave us the ending we expected, if not quite the closure we wanted.
The 'Serial' finale might not have tied a neat
little conclusion together for the murder of Hae Min Lee, but it should
never have been expected to.
SPOILER ALERT: Contains details from Thursday’s season finale of the Serial podcast.
“If you don’t mind me asking — you don’t have no ending?”
This is the question Adnan Syed asks Sarah Koenig early in the season finale of Serial, the podcast
that ended Thursday morning. It was a good question and one millions of
listeners were no doubt wondering before they sat down to hear the
final splash of Koenig’s deep dive into the 1999 murder of Syed’s
ex-girlfriend, 18-year-old Hae Min Lee, for which he was convicted and
sentenced to life in prison.
“I mean, do I have an ending?” asks Koenig, almost sounding like she was skimming the script to the spot-on Funny or Dieparody released this week. “Of course I have an ending. We’re going to come to an ending today.”
About 56 minutes later, this was debatable.
Of course it was. Everything about this case is debatable.
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As we’ve heard over
the previous 11 episodes, the case “was a mess.” It was tangled up with
ambiguous timelines, disputed accounts, confusing cellphone logs and
conflicting testimony. It was an audio inkblot: you listened alone and
heard what you heard, knowing someone else would hear something else.
You either believe
star prosecution witness Jay, who led police to his friend Adnan and
says he helped bury Hae’s body in Baltimore’s Leakin Park after she was
strangled in a Best Buy parking lot. Or you believe Adnan, even though
he never really offers an explanation as to where he was on the
afternoon of Jan. 13, 1999, or why he is not guilty, beyond claiming he
is innocent.
For fans of the podcast, which started with little fanfare as a spinoff of This American Life this fall and then, through word of mouth, morphed into a global phenomenon, maybe there was never any chance for closure.
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Meredith Heuer
Despite the "mess" of evidence in the case, Serial host Sarah Koenig
finally delivered her own verdict on Thursday's season finale.
Maybe this was always
going to end the way it started. Or as Koenig puts it: “I don’t believe
any of us can say what really happened to Hae.”
Fair enough. But unlike the rest of us, she tried
to say. And after spending more than a year investigating the case, I’d
be willing to bet good money Koenig and her producers are not thrilled
with the outcome.
How could they possibly be?
She says clarity
seemed so attainable at the start. She believed this was a mystery that
could be solved. Otherwise, as she also notes, the soul-searching gets a
bit uncomfortable: “Did we just spend a year applying excessive
scrutiny to a perfectly ordinary case?”
There were only a few parts in the finale that seemed vaguely fresh, if not momentous:
1. Koenig
interviewed “Don,” Hae’s boyfriend at the time of her disappearance. He
didn’t want to go on tape. So she relayed the salient bits, which turned
out to not be that salient. He didn’t know what happened to Hae. He
offered no opinion on Syed’s innocence or guilt.
2. According to 1994 architectural plans, it’s possible there was a pay phone at the Best Buy, at least in an adjoining vestibule.
3. A coworker
of Jay, who was with him the night the cops arrived, says Jay was
terrified of Adnan. He believes Jay’s account of what happened that day.
4. The
so-called “Nisha call” could still be “one of the pillars of the case
against Adnan.” Or it could be no big deal, a “butt dial,” to quote
Koenig.
5. On the weekend, Syed gave the University of Virginia’s Innocence Project
permission to file a motion requesting that DNA evidence, gathered from
the crime scene 15 years ago, be tested. They want to see if the DNA,
assuming it is still viable, matches a convicted rapist and murderer who
is now dead but was known to be in the Baltimore area in 1999.
“A long shot,” as Koenig rightly points out.
Syed is also facing an
appeal hearing in January, which his lawyer calls his last real chance
at freedom. So we’ll be hearing more about the case in the weeks ahead,
even if the podcast is over.
That was basically it.
And since that was basically it, Koenig deserves some credit for at
least taking a stand, for shrewdly turning all of this murky ambiguity
against itself. In other words: if this case is a mess of circumstantial
evidence, with no hard proof linking Adnan to the murder, should he be
in prison?
This is about reasonable doubt.
“As a juror, I vote to
acquit Adnan Syed,” Koenig says, in what we’ll have to call the series
climax. “I have to acquit. Even if in my heart of hearts I think Adnan
killed Hae, I have to acquit. That’s what the law requires of jurors.”
And that is how Serial ended, even if didn’t feel like an ending at all.
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