Good stuff! Your spirited analysis is helping me keep a groove until next Thursday. I’m thinking how it is crucial not only to consider passage of time but passage of life stages. Since the time of the murder the characters haven’t only grown older, they’ve grown up. As in previous episodes, Serial episode 5 plays a brief phonecall with a witness Koenig has tracked down in the present day, and by now there’s a pattern: they chuckle together over how ridiculous it would be to expect to remember (oh please remember!) small details from one day in 1999. How could they remember? Not only have 15 years passed, but a couple of life stages have too. As a middle age man myself, remembering (and not remembering) high school, I find the phonecalls poignant. I’m hearing thirty-something middle age voices, maybe weary with concerns of jobs, children and more, peering back to a day in the life of their adolescent selves. In the calls from prison, Adnan himself sounds tempered by early middle age, reflective. I think this makes it easier to be sympathetic, to consider he might be innocent. Only Hae and Jay remain pinned in adolescence. Like you say, we know nothing of what has happened to Jay since the trial – the story hasn’t let him grow up yet. Why? It is one of the big mysteries of this case as of episode 5.