Conor Friedersdorf, Lenika Cruz, and Katie Kilkenny discuss the latest episode of WBEZ Chicago's popular non-fiction podcast Serial.

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Friedersdorf: Episode 9 of Serial, "To Be Suspected," begins with new reasons to believe that the state's explanation of Hae's murder is off. A person who regularly shoplifted at the Best Buy where Adnan is alleged to have called Jay after the murder insists there were no pay phones there. Another person, a friend of Hae, feels certain she saw her on the day of the murder at a time that messes up the state's timeline. Neither detail exonerates Adnan. But unlike last week's episode, they nudge the undecided listener back toward thinking that there is reasonable doubt about Adnan's guilt, as does hearing from the man himself for extended interviews about his story.

Those nudges aside, we get little useful information that advances our notion of what really happened. But that's okay, or at least it doesn't bother me, because what we get instead, via Adnan, is a service that Serial provides: It gives us a peek at parts of the criminal justice system that just aren't portrayed in many other places, even in procedurals like Law and Order. Invisible aspects of the system come across partly in the course of Adnan describing what he went through and partly from his description of what that felt like. For example, he explained how standing trial meant many, many hours just sitting in holding pens, doing nothing, waiting. It's something that isn't conveyed on television crime dramas, for obvious reasons, and it turns behavior that would've seemed inexplicable—like writing a casual letter when he was about to be sentenced to life in prison—into an understandable thing.

Listening to accounts of Adnan's behavior during the investigation and trial, I naturally kept thinking, "Is that how a guilty person would act? Is that how an innocent person would act?" For the most part, I think such speculation is best avoided, that committing a murder or being wrongly accused of one is a circumstance so unusual that we can't reliably say that a given reaction means anything.

I try to avoid the temptation to accord them any import.

The one I can't help but seize upon is Adnan's apparent failure, despite repeated opportunities, to angrily denounce Jay, the man who told the cops that he killed Hae. I get his ability to speak fondly of other friends who testified for the prosecution about some little piece of the story they knew, like, "Oh, I heard Adnan ask Hae for a ride that day." Lots of wrongly accused people could forgive that. But I don't get the even keel about the guy who accused him of murder. I feel like if I were wrongly jailed based on one person's accusation, my hate for them would burn, at least in the moments when I was discussing my feelings before and at my trial.

One of my feelings would be, "That *%$%^#* Jay!!!!!"

It seems like Adnan would be furious at Jay if he were innocent—but then again, it also seems like he would feign furiousness at him if he were trying to mislead us about his innocence.

One last thought. This isn't the space to flesh this out here, but amid a mini-backlash against Serial, accusing it of tone-deafness and cultural tourism in immigrant communities, I just wanted to register my own opinion, which is that Sarah Koenig has done as good a job as I can imagine anyone doing of treating everyone she interviews and portrays with fairness, and as complicated, fleshed-out individuals. As I see it, careful journalists digging into cases where there's a nontrivial chance of a wrongfully convicted person is an unalloyed good, especially in minority communities with comparatively less financial and cultural capital to navigate a system with bias problems.

But back to this episode. Am I alone in being perplexed that Adnan expresses more anger at himself for loaning out his car, smoking weed and otherwise being "a bad Muslim" than he does at the guy, Jay, who ostensibly killed his friend and framed him for it?

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Cruz: Now that we're at episode 9, I think as Serial listeners, we've learned what to expect (and not expect) from the show. We should expect plenty of meta-investigative investigations, lots of asides, pieces that don't fit together just right, and more than a little bit of frustration. We should not expect pure objectivity, a projected path from A to B in the traditional narrative sense, and above all, an Answer. At this point, I've disabused myself of the notion that I'm listening to a murder mystery, where there'll be a great reveal at the end or even—to borrow Linda Holmes's phrasing—"meaningful uncertainty" when the seasons wraps.

So, without the subtle promise of this Answer, as listeners where does our satisfaction, our sense of enjoyment, come from?

For me, the true entertainment—for lack of a better word—value of Serial has been largely cerebral. Yes, Koenig is a great radio storyteller, but it's fascinating as a listener to have to do a lot of the heavy lifting on my own. Rather than sitting back and letting Koenig feed me pre-chewed pieces of information to swallow unquestioningly, I instead have to consider how much weight to give each piece of evidence presented, how much to trust her. Its exhilarating in its own way to not have to think about the possibility of an answer, because it frees me to focus on the complexities of the questions themselves.