Serial - The Good Whale - Trailer

Episode Date: November 7, 2024

After the movie “Free Willy” became a hit, word got out that the star of the film, a killer whale named Keiko, was sick and living in a tiny pool at a Mexican amusement park. Fans were outraged and pleaded for his release. “The Good Whale” tells the story of the wildly ambitious science experiment to return Keiko to the ocean — while the world watched. An epic tale that starts in Mexico and ends in Norway, the six-episode series follows Keiko as he’s transported from country to country, each time landing in the hands of well-intentioned people who believe they know what’s best for him – people who still disagree, decades later, about whether they did the right thing. To get full access to this show, and to other Serial Productions and New York Times podcasts on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, subscribe at nytimes.com/podcasts.To find out about new shows from Serial Productions, and get a look behind the scenes, sign up for our newsletter at nytimes.com/serialnewsletter.Have a story pitch, a tip, or feedback on our shows? Email us at [e-mail] 

Hello, serial listeners. Sarah Koenig here, recording this on Tuesday, election day, with the good news that we have a new show that has nothing to do with the election or politics. That's a relief to me. Maybe it is to you, too. The show is called The Good Whale, and it's about a captive orca named Keiko who became famous after starring in the kids movie Free Willy. Our story, The Good Whale, is six beautiful episodes about what happened to the real killer whale who played the Hollywood killer whale. And it's so good. It's emotional in the best way, not sappy, but it gets you right in the solar plexus.

And you're going to be newly fascinated by marine science. And it's a little genre-bending, which you'll see as the story rolls out. Daniel Alarcon is the host. He's a New Yorker writer and a novelist and the host of the Spanish language podcast, Radio Ambulante. The Good Whale comes out next week on Thursday, November 14th, and we've got a trailer here for you. But first, I want to tell you about something else new and good that's going on over here

at Serial, which is that if you subscribe to the New York Times, either an audio subscription or an all access subscription, either way, if you subscribe, you can listen to The Good Whale all at once. No waiting week to week. And I don't think you're gonna wanna wait on this one. To be clear, you don't have to subscribe to hear The Good Whale.

You can still catch new episodes every Thursday, like always. But if you do subscribe to The Times, you get the whole show right away, and you'll be able to listen to Serial's entire archive, all the past seasons of the Serial podcast, all the other shows that Serial's produced. Plus, when you subscribe,

you get the archive of all the Times shows too. It's a pretty good deal. You can subscribe through Spotify or Apple podcasts, or if you're already a Time subscriber, just link your account and you're done. You can also go to nytimes.com slash podcasts and find everything there or find the link in our show notes. So please sign up.

The fact is we need you. Your subscription makes our work possible. Okay, business complete, over and out. Here's the trailer for The Good Whale. We cannot wait for you to hear this show. His name was Keiko and everyone agreed he was a good whale. Keiko was one of a kind. Keiko had this personality completely different from any other orca. Everybody that worked with him called him the one in a million whale.

Because no matter how far my career stretches and how long I work with marine mammals, there will never be another whale like that. Keiko was good at performing, beloved by the crowds at the Mexican amusement park where he lived for more than a decade, most of his life since he was captured as a calf. He was good with his trainers

and with the kids who came to visit. I would have taken my one-year-old daughter and put him on his back without a care or concern in the world. He was that gentle. And Keiko was good when he was cast in the movie Free Willy. He played the part of Willy, of course, a captive killer whale who's befriended by a 12-year-old boy and then set free. Very good. Afterwards, when the world decided Keiko himself should be set free, that he should learn how to be a wild whale, how to hold his breath and hunt for his own food and live in the ocean,

Keiko, like always, was eager to please his humans. So everyone agreed he was good, but there were some things no one seemed to agree on. Like can good whales be wild whales? It felt like bringing your pet dog out to the forest and then running away. And the dog being hungry and scared and wanting to go home. I was furious because I could see what we had done to him. We played God at that point.

Was Wildness even something Keiko wanted? Or was it something we needed from him? A chance to redeem ourselves for the harms we'd caused, not just to Keiko, but to all captive whales. I always ask people that are the detractors, where would you have stopped it? This is the story of a high profile, high stakes science experiment whose goal

seemed almost impossible, to teach a captive orca to be wild. At the center of it all was Keiko, an orca with fears and limitations that no human could ever hope to interpret with any certainty. Not that they wouldn't try. We wanted to see how far he could go.

From Serial Productions and The New York Times, I'm Daniel Alarcon. And this is The Good Whale, coming November 14th, wherever you get your podcasts. Search for The Good Whale on your podcast app. Follow the show, and you'll be notified the minute new episodes come out.