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Hello and welcome to Slate's Serial Spoiler Special.

I'm Slate's senior editor Gabriel Roth, and joining me from our DC studio is Slate's

Words correspondent, Katie Waldman. How's it going, Katie?

Hey, Gabe. How are you? I'm good. In case you're joining us for the first time, not you, Katie,

but listeners at home, this is the podcast where Katie and I discuss season two of serial episode by

episode, 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.

And this week, we have a lot of new material to discuss because Serial released a two-part episode this week.

Yesterday, Thursday, and today, as we record Friday, the episode's called Hindsight, and Sarah Koenig told us

it's her attempt to definitively answer the question of whether the decision to walk off post into the wilds of Afghanistan makes sense if your name is Bo Bergdahl.

Katie, let's start there. Do we think these episodes answered that question?

Hmm. I want to pull a Bill Clinton and say, well, it depends what the meaning of sense is. I think that in the same way that there's sort of an internal coherence to a lot of fantasy or delusional worlds that people construct for themselves, there is a logic that we saw playing out to Bergdell's decision when you learn more about his character.

And I did think both of these episodes did a really great job showing us what Bo was like growing up,

talking to his childhood friends and adoptive family, talking about his early experiences in the Coast Guard,

and then in military training. You know, I started off

part one of the first episode where Sarah was expressing her own doubts that Berkdahl was telling

the truth. And I was completely convinced that Bo had manufactured this story while he was in

captivity to make himself seem a little bit less

...