One day in May 2017, Jake Haendel was pulled over for driving dangerously. Rightfully so, as he was high on heroin. But it wasn’t the drugs that had been having this strange effect on his body, as if he was losing control of it completely.
Days after his arrest, things got so bad that he wound up in the emergency room. He was diagnosed with toxic progressive leukoencephalopathy, a rare disease that eats away at the white matter of your brain. No one had ever recovered from that diagnosis; he was given six months to live. Eventually, he’d deteriorated to the point where his doctors considered him virtually brain-dead.
But he was awake in there the whole time. And he recovered. In Blink: The Jake Haendel Story, he tells us what it was like for him.
In an early episode, Corinne Vien – who hosts the podcast and co-created it with Haendel – ponders why, given how incredible his story is, Haendel hasn’t become a ubiquitous presence across the media landscape. She lands on the answer herself: although what happened to him is staggering in all sorts of ways, it’s also very complicated.
Haendel’s past made him a difficult hero. The timeline is hard to follow. The story needed to be treated patiently and diligently, in a way that connected the many moving parts clearly. For the most part, Vien succeeds.
Nevertheless, by far the most important thing about Blink is that Haendel is an active participant in both its presentation and production. Vien is mostly very sensitive in her approach, but there are moments when her delivery could seem as if she was relishing the drama a little too much, considering the horror involved. The fact that Haendel has created this podcast with her puts those fears to rest. While his voice is still audibly affected by all he has been through, his sense of humor is well and truly intact. We get the sense that it’s the one thing that kept him going. He is, of course, all too aware of the dramatic nature of his tale, though sometimes he seems in disbelief that he experienced what he did.
Throughout the story, Haendel’s ex-wife Elle emerges as a villain. As his condition worsens, she cuts him off from friends and family, and – as detailed in an episode that’s particularly hard to listen to – steals his sperm while he’s paralyzed by locked-in syndrome, and unable to consent.
Despite the awfulness of these actions, it’s to Vien’s credit that at almost every juncture, she tries to empathise with Elle anyway. Before all of this, Haendel was a serious drug addict and dealer who introduced his wife to heroin. That doesn’t excuse what she later did to him, but it adds necessary context — especially since Elle never appears to speak for herself.
Still, the podcast’s treatment of Elle has led to the one issue with Blink that, while not yet ruinous, is hard to fathom. We are told in the very first episode that she whispered an admission in Haendel’s ear while he was in the midst of locked-in syndrome — an admission that, given her later behavior, strongly implies she was responsible for his condition. Ten episodes into the fourteen-part series, we still haven’t heard whatever that admission actually was.
It’s easy enough to understand why you would want to tease your audience with that juicy detail, and encourage them to keep listening. But with so much else to explore in this fascinating story, it’s a strange choice to introduce such a major plot point early on, only to all but ignore it for weeks, with only a teaser at the end of the most recent episode suggesting we may finally be getting close. You can hardly blame a listener for feeling strung along.
If indeed the implication proves to have been purposefully misleading, this will be a more dubious matter altogether. All through the show, and most recently during the week episode eleven was due, there have been unexpected pauses in the release schedule and hints from Vien that something significant is going on behind the scenes. Considering how long the promised denouement is taking to transpire, it wouldn’t be surprising to learn that some kind of legal proceedings have been unfolding in the background, requiring a change in approach or even jettisoning the original ambitions of the series entirely.
But hey, it’s not over yet. With all the twists and turns so far, it’s nearly impossible to guess how Blink will all wrap up – and the fact that the wait for the end is proving so frustrating is, perhaps more than anything else, a real testament to Vien and Haendel’s storytelling prowess.
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Chloe Walker is a writer based in the UK. You can find her work at Culturefly, the BFI, Paste, and her Letterboxd page.