Sarah Koenig and the rest of the Serial team pulled a Beyoncé this morning and dropped the first episode of Season 2.
As rumored, this season will be about Bowe Bergdahl, the U.S. soldier who left his post in Afghanistan in 2009 and was then captured by the Taliban. He was held for nearly five years before the U.S. government made a deal for his release with a prisoner trade.
Koenig also writes that the story takes the Serial team much farther out into the world. It involves them speaking about the military, peace talks, attempts to rescue hostages and the U.S. police on Guantanamo.
"What Bergdahl did made me wrestle with things I'd thought I more or less understood, but really didn't: what it means to be loyal, to be resilient, to be used, to be punished," Koenig writes.
Because of the expansive nature of the Season 2 story, the Serial team had to expand. Koenig teamed up with Mark Boal and his media company Page 1, which explores the intersection of reporting and entertainment. The team includes military experts and those with a deep background knowledge of covering Afghanistan.
Like Season 1, this story is on-going and the Serial team will be adding to their work as new information surfaces.
Serial is not the only group interested in the case. As Koenig points out in her email, the case is the subject of congressional investigations including a report being released by the House Armed Services Committee on the trade and it is an active case in military court.
