Usually, movies are inspired by real-life events. The Good Whale — the latest podcast from Serial Productions, hosted by Daniel Alarcón — tells the story of a time it went the other way around.
Keiko the killer whale was already a beloved figure in Mexico before he splashed his way to global fame as the titular orca in the 1993 classic Free Willy. While adored by his keepers at Reino Aventura, the Mexican amusement park where he lived, Keiko’s sub-par facilities led to a variety of health problems. Not long after Free Willy’s release, news broke that he was dying. Driven by the movie’s popularity, what followed was a massive, mind-bogglingly complex operation to do what the film had taught everyone to believe was possible: free Keiko.
As life is, in fact, not a movie, the journey to freedom was far trickier for Keiko than it had been for Willy.
For one of the most famous creatures of the 1990s, Keiko sits at the heart of The Good Whale as a surprisingly enigmatic figure. Many of the people featured in the show had their lives affected by the legendary orca, with more than one moved to tears by their recollections of time spent with him. Yet even if he were still alive, Keiko, of course, would not be able to comment. As such, the show is more about the way people project feelings onto animals than it is about animals themselves — although the effect all of that projection had on Keiko is certainly explored.
While the people involved in Keiko’s story often vehemently disagreed with each other both logistically and philosophically, the show takes at face value that each genuinely wanted what was best for Keiko. In the first episode, the main interviewee is Renata Fernandez, one of Keiko’s trainers at Reino Aventura. Even though his shockingly cramped conditions there drove the campaign to ‘Free Keiko,’ host Alarcón refrains from being combative with Fernandez. She was young, and she wasn’t the one that captured him. She and her colleagues at the park were doing what they could with the resources they had.
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As teams worked to prepare Keiko for release, a persistent question loomed: was it actually the best thing for him? Keiko was first taken from the ocean at about two years old, fifteen years before Free Willy made him a global superstar. He was far more used to captivity, to the company of humans, than the open ocean. Was it even possible to get him strong enough to swim alongside wild orcas? And, like so much else in his story, was the effort really about Keiko? Or was it more about human guilt over the state we had put him in? Those questions float along throughout the narrative, coloring everything, but are never definitively answered. There are some things we can’t know, and that ambiguity makes the show all the richer.
The first four episodes of The Good Whale and its final, sixth episode follow this story straightforwardly. Episode five is a little different. To cover the four weeks between when Keiko escaped surveillance in Iceland and ended up in a fishing village in Norway — when no one really knows what happened to him — The Good Whale commissioned the EGOT-winning composers Benj Pasek and Justin Paul to write a song that ruminates on the possibilities. After four episodes of diligent, traditional reporting, it initially felt tonally jarring. Upon further reflection, it seems like the perfect choice.
Beyond just being a lovely, sea-shanty-tinged song (Pasek and Paul know what they’re doing, after all) it beautifully underlines the podcast’s key theme. The Good Whale spends considerable runtime talking about all the thoughts and hopes and dreams that people assigned to Keiko (as if a whale thinks in the same way as a person… ) and then falls prey to that trap itself. Because the show has never condemned the people who do the same, this doesn’t land as hypocrisy, but as a subtextual admission that we are all susceptible to those flaws in our thinking, however much we may imagine ourselves above such things. It’s simply in our nature.
That nonjudgmental acknowledgment of human fallibility in the face of even the best intentions, combined with one hell of a central story, is what makes The Good Whale such a compulsive listen.
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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.