Oh man. Big strategic moves/triumphs/failures at final tribal is one of my favorite things we rarely see. I think I'm rooting for a pair to make the end now just in the hopes that we'll get to see something new there.

I was mostly a Jeremy fan, but that comment got on my nerves. Have some perspective, dude! I haven't been crazy about some of the things he's said about women either, but it's been easy to give him a pass on those this season. "Women are delicate and must be protected" just can't compete with "women are fit only to…

Why was Keith so good at a challenge that favored a dance background???

Coach has done it before!

The episode conflated farting with talking down to the women in kind of a weird way. I mean, they're both socially clueless lousy game play, but they are not equally troubling nor all that related.

I was using the second letter for all the S words, not realizing that that made statue and temple both T. Maybe Josh did the same thing. Do we know if they hear the names of the symbols before they start?

It's hard to tell what's really going on, but I can see it being something where both Team Masculine Tomfoolery and Baylor are at fault. Like because Baylor is young and female, the guys order her around instead of talking to her about work like a peer, and then she reacts to it by confronting them, which they…

Missy and Jeremy were focused on the farting, but Jaclyn was responding to the fact that most of her alliance didn't seem willing to work with her, which seems like playing the game to me.

The lawyer last week finally brought in a little context, but I'm worried that we'll be back to the hemming on hawing this week. I'm so frustrated with Serial because TAL has set such a high bar.

After the lawyer brings up the possibility of assigning the case to the students, Koenig narrates, "I did think about it. I said yes, go ahead. Not that I would work with her, my job, unlike theirs, is not to figure out if or how I can exonerate Adnan, but sure, if they wanted to take a look at the case on their own,…

She says, "I said yes."

I'm a huge fan of TAL, and this story feels different to me. I think a big part of my problem is that it seems like they're forcing the story to conform to a particular narrative structure that doesn't fit very well. As Jobo said, it doesn't seem like there's much real ambiguity about Adnan.

And why oh why did Koenig act like it was her choice whether the Innocence Project folks took Adnan's case? He is a real person in real prison and she is not in charge of him because she's making a podcast.

It's not that I would expect the audience to be experts, it's that I would expect a responsible journalist to do some background research and perhaps bring an expert on the program before the 7th episode. Of course most of the audience is coming to Serial with expectations set by crime fiction. The problem is that it…

I was hopeful about Serial because TAL usually does a good job of walking that line. It has a narrative structure but rarely feels exploitative of the people involved. The drawn-out mystery structure of Serial is really throwing off that balance.

I've had reservations about Serial since the beginning and at this point it's just making me angrier every week. I feel like its entire approach blurs fiction and reality in a way that is tacky at best and deeply irresponsible at worst. Koenig worrying that Adnan is a charming psychopath and the lawyer trying to…

What is this?? I enjoyed and (mostly) understood it even though it appears to be about football.

The sheets thing did seem justified when it was in Alicia's memory, but when they used it a few weeks later in a present tense Cary/Kalinda scene I started to worry that they think it's a real thing.

Let us never speak of that Sarah Silverman episode again. I'm grinding my teeth at the memory of it.

I've found a lot of sex scenes on TGW really bizarre. It's always there in the lesbian scenes, but sometimes they do that cheesy encoding of sex thing in straight sex scenes too. We've had an Alicia/Will scene and a Cary/Kalinda scene where they're gazing at each other in that cavernous and well-lit space you get when…