‘Serial’ podcast starts Season 2 with promise, potential pitfalls

There’s a moment in the first episode of the new season of the “Serial” podcast that seems potentially ominous.

Host Sarah Koenig, in the highly anticipated Season 2 opener that was posted Thursday morning, has been carefully laying out the back story and hinting at the side stories of U.S. Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl.

If you know anything about Bergdahl’s Rorschach test of a case — capture, return via prisoner swap, a charge of desertion — you’ll understand why it attracted Koenig and her crew to their concept of spinning out one narrative over a dozen or so episodes.

That notion certainly worked in the 2014-2015 run of Season 1, when “Serial’s” reinvestigation of a Baltimore high school murder case essentially proved the commercial viability of podcasting. Beyond just being gripping, intimate storytelling about, ultimately, the powers and limitations of journalism, the show demonstrated this new-ish medium could draw big enough numbers to compete with cable TV and inspire spinoff books and TV series and the like.

So now, more than a year after the first season began, there’s a lot of pressure on the second to, if not strike ratings gold again, at least hold its own as a case study worthy of such close examination.

That’s tricky when you’re examining one character’s state of mind rather than murder. But it is off to a promising start. Koenig’s familiar warm tones purr once again into our ears — the show is simply better via headphones — as she unfolds a story that she promises will resonate on personal levels and on broader-reaching ones. Not for nothing is the voice of presidential candidate Donald Trump heard intoning, about Bergdahl, “In the old days, deserters were shot.”

Koenig frames her story, sets her hook, like this: “This one idiosyncratic guy makes a radical decision at the age of 23 to walk away into Afghanistan. And the consequences of that decision, they spin out wider and wider, and at every turn you’re surprised.”

In an undeniable coup, “Serial” features Bergdahl in his own words for the first time. Filmmaker Mark Boal (“The Hurt Locker,” “Zero Dark Thirty”) taped 25 hours of phone conversations with the soldier — he’s still on active duty pending final determination in his case — and Boal brought them to “Serial.” His production company, making a movie about Bergdahl, is a partner this season with the podcast, a side project of “This American Life” that is, like “TAL,” produced in collaboration with Chicago public radio outlet WBEZ-FM 91.5. Bergdahl, in a sense, is a partner, too; he agreed to let the podcast use the tapes.

So we get to hear, right up front, Bergdahl explaining why he walked away from a military outpost in Afghanistan in June 2009 and into Taliban territory.

He felt that his unit’s leadership was incompetent to the point of being dangerous, he explains, and decided that going missing for a few days would give him enough notoriety to be able to plead his case with higher-ups.

That logic sounds loopy, which even Bergdahl acknowledges (“stupid,” he says) and which Koenig points out may well be something he cooked up during five years of captivity.

Then later, in the way “Serial” has of muddling its own narrative in order to draw listeners further in, we learn it’s more complicated: Bergdahl also saw his self-imposed mission as a “crucible,” Koenig says.

“I had this fantastic idea that I was going to prove to the world that I was the real thing,” listeners hear Bergdahl telling Boal. He mentions the movies and Jason Bourne.

How we ultimately feel about Bergdahl, what he did and how he has been used since being exchanged for five Taliban prisoners in 2014 will have a lot to do, it seems, with how we feel about the military and its protocols.

And that’s where the potentially ominous Koenig moment comes in. She is describing the discovery by Bergdahl’s comrades that he has gone missing. It starts with a guy in a vehicle he was supposed to take over for.

“So he gets down from the big truck, which he’s not technically supposed to do until he gets relieved,” Koenig says, “but whatever.”

It’s almost a throwaway, that ‘whatever,’ but it’s also stark enough to make you wonder if it implies judgment, a potentially clouding judgment, about all these rules and regulations. After all, the season will, Koenig has already said, feature many, many soldiers and an examination of whether Bergdahl was right about his bosses. In that evaluation those rules matter a lot.

Or maybe she just meant to imply that “whatever” was the thinking of the guy violating the rule.

More quibbles: “Serial” apparently will not be interviewing Bergdahl itself, leaving it reliant on questions that were asked in a very different context and before the show reported out the story.

And the show calling Bergdahl by his first name, almost from the outset, on one hand brings him closer to listeners, but it also implies almost a friendliness from the producers.

It’s an editorial choice “Serial” made with Season 1, too, where the convicted killer, Adnan Syed, was known as “Adnan.” It rankled then; it seems likely to rankle in this next run of episodes, which will appear weekly at www.serialpodcast.org, on Pandora and iTunes and in other podcasting outlets.

Bigger than that is the question of whether Bergdahl’s story, despite its complexities and all the important people who became involved, carries enough weight to be teased out at length.

For that to happen, he’ll need to be more than just the naive, deluded wannabe movie hero presented in Episode 1.

A promising sign of things getting deeper comes at the end of the episode. “Hello! This is Sarah,” listeners hear. And then: “That’s me. Calling the Taliban.”

sajohnson@tribune.com

Twitter @StevenKJohnson