Count me a fan of this show.
A big part of that is Sarah's reporting. She's wise and engaging and thorough. And her instincts about the case feel sharp to me. But there's this one thread that she has left hanging. It's been bothering me since it first came up in the early episodes, and it has changed the way I think about the afternoon that Hae goes missing.
And what bothers me is this: January 13 is Stephanie's birthday, and Jay forgot to buy her a present.
...
Is there a big reveal waiting for us in the final episode? My gut says probably not.
But if there is a twist at the end, I feel like it could only come from Stephanie. Surely, she's sitting on some insight. Stephanie is the biggest overlap between the two main players: Jay's devoted girlfriend, Adnan's close friend.
Close enough that Adnan buys her a birthday present on January 13. He even reminds Jay to get her a birthday present, too. And when Jay blows it, Adnan loans Jay his car and cell phone so he can pick up something to give her.
...
Let's play out a scene from Jay's point of view:
Be a teenager
Be dating this unbelievably cool chick.
A gorgeous, high-achieving girl.
You? You deal pot.
You live with your grandparents.
You get called "Oreo."
You forget to buy your girlfriend a b-day present.
(Or maybe you can't afford one.)
But you know who didn't forget?
The king of junior prom.
This guy your girlfriend adores.
Everybody does. Even you like him.
But you have questions.
Like how come he spends so much time around your girl?
And why's he always calling her?
And why's he buying her a birthday gift if he isn't trying to hit???
...
At some point in the series, Sarah claims that there's no "wedge" in Jay and Adnan's friendship. Nothing has poisoned the relationship.
But when I look at the birthday gift from Jay's perspective, this is exactly what I see. As high school drama goes, I would say Mr. Popular buying your girlfriend a birthday gift when you forgot ranks as pretty serious. Oh and then he loans you his car and cellie so you can go pick her up something quick, too? That just piles on the indignity of it. He's got all the stuff you don't.
For a while, I left it at that. The gift thing nagged at me as I listened, but I thought: it's just high school drama. This guy's jealous cause some other guy got his girlfriend a better gift? No biggie. Nothing that would get tied up in a murder.
...
Then I had this minor revelation.
Maybe revelation is too strong, but I realized something. There's long-standing precedent for this kind of thing. For getting pissed because someone gave a better gift than you. It's about as ancient as precedent can get. It's the case of Cain v. Abel.
I won't spend the time here to tell a Bible story you probably know. And if you don't, go google the words Cain and Abel right now and read the wikipedia account. But it boils down to this: The world's first murder (if you follow the Abrahamic tradition) occurs cause one guy is jealous that someone else gave God a better present than him.
That was the motive behind the very first murder.
...
So that's some of my thinking on this gift business.
And what it leads me to, again, is this: the birthday gift matters. To Jay, even if it hasn't registered with anyone else.
I have to assume it's weighing heavily on Jay's head as he drives around in Adnan's car, carrying Adnan's phone. He's got to be asking questions.
Why is Adnan messing with his girlfriend like this?
How can he can get Adnan back?
Maybe he should mess with Adnan's girl, Nisha. But how?
...
Now I step onto some shaky ground. Pure speculation from here on out.
So the Nisha call.
Smack in the middle of the afternoon in question, there is this two-minute-plus phone call to Adnan's girlfriend. It had to be from Adnan, right? Jay has never met the girl. So why is there this call to Adnan's girlfriend -- a call she has trouble remembering any reliable details of -- if it's not from Adnan?
Because it's Jay pranking her ass.
It's Jay getting payback with a prank call. Calling up Adnan's girlfriend the way Adnan's always calling up his girlfriend. Messing with her a little bit. Maybe he does some the classic stuff: dumb voices, tells her Adnan's cheating, tells her her refrigerator is running, who knows?
It would explain why Nisha has no reliable memory of the call (that the Jay and Adnan call she does remember appears to have come weeks later). It's because she didn't get a call from Jay or Adnan. She got a call from I. P. Freely.
(And if Nisha doesn't have voicemail, she surely doesn't have caller ID, right?)
...
In the end, it's a theory. Speculation about the call.
But this part remains: I can't get past the birthday present.
Submitted December 12, 2014 at 09:05PM by larryrivers http://ift.tt/1uwtoux serialpodcast
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