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Hello and welcome to Slate's Serial Spoiler Special. I'm Slate's senior editor Gabriel Roth.

Katie Waldman was supposed to be with us today, but she's experiencing Christmas Eve travel nightmares.

And so she was unable to make it for this week's podcast.

Fortunately, I have two guests ably filling in.

Jacob Brogan, who writes for Slate about technology and culture. Hi, Jacob. Hi, Gabe. And June Thomas, the editor of Slate's LGBT blog Outward. Thanks for being with us, Jim. Hey, Gabe. What's up? What's up, indeed. So every week, this is the podcast where we discuss season two of the Uber Popular Podcast serial, going deeper into the show's themes, exploring its characters and situations, and looking at the ways in which the podcast reverberates in the world.

Jacob, let's start with the bigger picture.

What are you thinking of this second season of Serial so far?

What this season has really drawn out for me is to some extent that serial as a whole might be called uncertainty. We're spending so much time questioning the veracity of everyone's stories. And we got a lot in this episode about these fragments of intelligence that might tell us something, might tell us nothing, might lead somewhere dangerous,

might lead to something true. And it seems like that's really been the kind of master

trope of both seasons of serial, is that it's these little details and our interrogation of them

that may be matter most. And June, how is season two matching up for you? I'm not quite as engaged with it

as I was with season one. I think that anticlimactic response was inevitable after the giant that it was

last year. But I guess I'm not really quite sure even what serial is trying to do. I'm not sure what it's trying to evoke in me.

It seemed that the first season was all about unraveling a true crime, maybe even, as unlikely

as it seemed, finding a true killer, or perhaps even, you know, showing that Adnan's imprisonment

was unjust.

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