Lessons in the surreal

The new season of the Serial podcast (produced by the same team who make This American Life) was launched last month, releasing one episode a week as the investigative reporter Sarah Koenig looks this time into the strange story of Bowe Bergdahl. He’s the US army soldier who walked out on his platoon in 2009 while stationed on a remote outpost in Afghanistan, close to the Pakistani border. Unsurprisingly, he was captured by the Taliban and held captive for five years before being released, in a prisoner exchange with those held in Guantanamo Bay. At first it looked as though he would be given a hero’s welcome (his release announced by President Obama in the Rose Garden at the White House) but very soon such celebrations were damped down as questions were raised about what Bergdahl had done. Technically, he had deserted. Or had he? That’s the question Koenig wants to answer.

Unlike the first season of Serial, though, there’s been no huge Twitter storm about it, no massive worldwide audience, no hurry by the BBC to buy into this podcast experience. Which is perhaps explained by Koenig herself when she writes in the initial publicity that Bergdahl’s story ‘extends far out into the world’ and will take listeners into ‘the swathes of the military, the peace talks to end the war …our Guantanamo policy’. The questions Koenig says it raises are ‘what it means to be loyal, to be resilient, to be used, to be punished’. None of which is half as sexy, or as black and white, as the story told in the first series about the murder of a teenager in Baltimore, and the plight of Adnan Syed, convicted at 19 and imprisoned for life.