Tanya Basu, Conor Friedersdorf, Adrienne LaFrance, and Katie Kilkenny discuss the latest episode of WBEZ Chicago's popular non-fiction podcast Serial.

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Friedersdorf: Eight episodes into the Serial podcast, there still isn't any certainty about who killed Hae Min Lee. Certainly nothing aired so far exonerates Adnan Syed, the man convicted of the crime. But if Serial listeners haven't yet figured out if a miscarriage of justice was perpetrated, we have at least gotten a glimpse at how the criminal justice system works. This case seemed weak enough at the outset for Sarah Koenig to spend months delving into it. Past episodes have chronicled a number of discrepancies in the prosecution's narrative. Last week, lawyers from the Innocence Project looked at the case and felt sufficiently strong doubts about its outcome to dedicate scarce resources to their own investigation.

So what struck me most about "The Deal With Jay," this week's episode, was the statement of the retired detective who the podcast hired for his expertise on the subject of false confessions. He declared that the investigation was better than most of the ones that he's seen. We all know life isn't like CSI. But Serial doesn't have a fancy crime lab either, and Koenig talked in this episode to a friend of Jay that the police knew about and never interviewed, but who gave details 15 years later that contradicts Jay's story.

Why didn't the police interview him at the time?

We heard from jurors in this episode too. Though instructed, per the usual rules in a murder trial, to disregard the fact that Adnan didn't testify in his own defense, they clearly held it against his credibility, and one juror noted that she believed Jay in part because she felt that he wouldn’t tell a lie that would send him to jail. But Jay never went to jail.

Despite all that, this felt like one of the episodes that cuts against Adnan's innocence, rather than like one of the episodes that makes him seem more innocent. That observation may not be rational. No new fact tilted the balance. I think it's just that while we'd already heard lots of times from Adnan, we'd never before heard from Jay. He was just this mysterious figure. But this week, he was cast as the protagonist and that humanized him even if we never heard his voice. Now consider that the jury got to hear Jay tell his story in his own voice.

And they never heard from Adnan at all.

Had you been on the jury, would that have swayed you at all, despite the instructions to disregard it?

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Basu: That's funny that you say that previous to this episode, you thought of Jay as a "mysterious figure," because by the end of an episode solely devoted to understanding Jay, I feel like he has become even more enigmatic. He seems like such a study in contrasts—at times polite, gentlemanly, reserved; at others, a rambunctious prankster with weird ideas for how to have fun (see: attempting to stab a friend because the friend had never been stabbed before).

Inconsistencies and reasons for doubt continue to surface. The revelation of a three-hour pre-interview reminds us of how much we don’t know about the context for Jay’s testimony. The fact that Stephanie, Jay's girlfriend, doesn't comment to anyone about the case seems like it could be a cause for supsicion. That Jay himself doesn't agree to an interview makes us wonder if he's just media-shy or if he's afraid he'll blurt something. The trial tape raises the possibility that Jay was "stepping out" on Jen, potentially giving him a motive. These things don't make us believe more or less in Adnan's innocence or guilt, but rather point our questions about the investigation, highlighted further by the detective.

At the end, we hear Jay break down and cry at his sentencing. It’s a moment that complicates the portrait that has been painted of him by his coldly polite demeanor at the trial, by the casual recollections of his friends and classmates, by Koenig and her colleague Julie Snyder. This version of Jay purports to be raw and authentic, and he begs the world to not judge him by a single act. Which makes me wonder: Can we judge him by this single episode? Of course not. But Serial’s format makes us want to try.

I also wonder if Koenig didn't talk about interviewing Jay sooner because she was afraid he would color our view of the case. Critics of the show have said that Koenig is a bit gushing and attached to Adnan, who himself comes across as a likeable, bad-boy-you-kind-of-like kind of guy. But the episode's focus on Jay did little to assuage the confusion that swirls around this case, even though every person Koenig talked to, from the detective to former classmates to Jay himself, were steadfast in their belief that Jay was honest and innocent of the crime. I'm pretty sure that I'm like that one friend near the end who stutters, stammers, and finally sputters, "But who the fuck did it then?"

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LaFrance: Finally, finally, finally we meet Jay. Only we don't really.

But we do hear Sarah Koenig try to answer the question: "What is the deal with Jay?" Which, let's be honest, is only one unsaid step away from asking who really killed Hae Min Lee.