The Good Whale - Ep. 2

Moms and dads, do you wish you could know where your kids' shoes are at all times?

Now you can with Skechers' newest Apple AirTag compatible sneakers, Find My Skechers.

There's a clever hidden AirTag compartment under the shoe's insole.

It's sleek, secure, and your child can't feel or see it.

Then you can check where your kids' shoes are on the Find My app.

Plus, they're available for boys and girls.

Get Find My Skechers at skechers.com, a Skecher store near you, or wherever kids' shoes are sold.

Apple AirTag sold separately.

These first two episodes of The Goodwill are free, but to hear the whole series, you'll need to subscribe to the New York Times, where you'll get access to all the serial productions and New York Times shows.

And it's super easy.

You can sign up through Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

And if you're already a Times subscriber, just link your account and you're done.

It was a Sunday morning in January 1996.

A three and a half ton orca lulled about in a shipping container full of ice, strapped to the inside of a cargo plane, flying thousands of feet above the surface of the earth.

It's the outlandish sort of magic we take for granted, the kind that only happens because we humans have scrapped the rules of the natural world and rewritten them to our whims, making the absurd, a killer whale, flying into something almost ordinary.

It was Keiko, headed to his new home at the Oregon Coast Aquarium, a relatively small regional facility in Newport, a few hours southwest of Portland.

So that day

was typical of the Oregon Coast.

It was raining, it was windy, it was cold.

This is Diane Hammond.

I don't know what my title was, but I was pretty much press secretary to the killer whale.

You were there before Keiko arrived.

I was there long before Keiko arrived.

I was there before there was an aquarium, in fact.

Diane was one of the first staff people at the Oregon Coast Aquarium.

hired by the director, Phyllis Bell, when the place was little more than an idea.

Phyllis passed away a few few years ago, but she was the one who took the call from Dave Phillips' team, the call in which they made her what must have been a pretty surprising, some might even say desperate, offer.

If we were to pay to build an enormous tank at your aquarium, would you be willing to temporarily house a killer whale?

Everybody else had said no by then.

We were definitely not the first approached.

There was the sense of, if you guys don't help us, we don't know what we're going to do with him.

And there may be nothing we can do for him, but let him die.

Those were the stakes as far as Diane remembers them, life or death.

For a small, fairly new aquarium in a town that was hardly a tourist destination, this was a huge opportunity, the kind you don't turn down, even if it was only temporary.

It was the chance to tell an irresistible story, the sort anyone could get behind.

Sick whale gets a new home.

Captive whale moves a step closer to freedom.

Phyllis took it to her board, they signed off, and within a couple of months, construction crews were breaking ground on Keiko's multi-million dollar home, putting the finishing touches on it just days before Keiko landed.

And now the big day had arrived.

There were 125 news organizations from around the world there to cover the event.

And the bad weather hadn't stopped the crowds from coming.

They lined the highway to watch Keiko being pulled slowly in what was basically a giant dumpster full of ice water.

People were cheering, people had signs, welcome Keiko, and little kids were along the highway waving.

And then the truck arrived, and the box was on the flatbed, pulled up to the facility.

And Keiko was lifted by Crane out of the box in a sling, a big canvas sling.

It was the first time I had seen him.

He hung in the air for what seemed like forever.

It was probably only 20 seconds, but he let out a piercing call.

People were crying.

The media was crying.

I don't think I was crying.

I think I was too tired.

You hadn't ever seen an orc before.

What was your impression of

Keiko as a specimen, as a creature?

Well,

it sounds so stupid, but he's really big.

He's really big.

And even underweight and sick.

He was huge.

And that something about that cry in the dark, in the rain, and the wind was

very

overwhelming.

It was so moving and disturbing at the same time.

Diane told me she was struck by a deep, almost apologetic sadness, awed by the scale of what was owed to this animal, at the hubris of what was being attempted, the presumption of it.

We played God at that point, and I felt committed to the project and absolutely certain that we would make his life better no matter what the outcome, just by getting him there.

The story we were telling was a beautiful story of things going right, a simple story about illness and suffering and rehabilitation.

But he was so other.

He's so not human.

And

it,

for me anyway, gave me an overwhelming sense of responsibility to do the right thing for this animal.

That January day in Oregon, when Keiko arrived, everyone agreed what the right thing was, to get Keiko healthy.

But as it happened, just when the goal was in sight, the consensus around that simple story would begin to fracture.

From Serial Productions and the New York Times, this is the Good Whale.

I'm Daniel Larcon.

This is a vacation with Chase Sapphire Reserve, the butler who knows your name.

This is the robe, the view, the steam from your morning coffee.

This is the complimentary breakfast on the balcony, the beach with no one else on it.

This is the Edit, a collection of hand-picked luxury hotels you can access with Chase Sapphire Reserve, and a $500 edit credit that gets you closer to all of it.

Chase Sapphire Reserve, the most rewarding card.

Learn more at chase.com/slash Sapphire Reserve.

Cards issued by J.P.

Morgan Chase Bank, NA member, FDIC, subject to credit approval.

Hi, New York Times.

I would be very interested in having separate logins for a shared subscription.

I'm 35 years old.

I still share my parents' New York Times subscription.

I think if my teenagers were to have their own logins, we could share articles.

It doesn't let us play the same game, says each other.

I play the Stoku.

I do the crossword.

I do the spelling bee.

I do the wordle.

Please help.

Having our own accounts would be amazing.

My mom could save her own recipes.

My friends could save their recipes.

I want to get the weekly newsletter, but they seem to always go to my husband and then he doesn't forward them to me.

We both love cooking.

I'm a 30-minute and under-dinner girly.

My boyfriend is very elaborate.

I think him having his own profile would be great.

We love the New York Times and we would love to love it individually.

Listeners, we heard you.

Introducing the New York Times family subscription.

One subscription, up to four separate logins for anyone in your life.

Find out more at nytimes.com/slash family.

So the plan for Keiko is rescue, rehab, release.

If getting Keiko out of Mexico had been a rescue, Oregon would be all about rehab.

To make that happen, the Freewillie Keiko Foundation assembled, at great expense, a kind of dream team of marine mammal experts, veterinarians, and trainers.

And in the beginning, they were all very clear on their goal.

When I started, the entire focus was to get Keiko well

and see if we could not let him die there at the aquarium.

That's Nolan Harvey, who was in charge of Keiko's rehabilitation.

He'd moved to Newport, Oregon from an aquarium in Tacoma, where he'd been a staff biologist working with baby walruses, raising them, feeding them by hand.

Years later, they're still his favorite.

Big dogs with big flat feet, he calls them.

He even has one tattooed on his forearm.

As for whales and dolphins, Nolan had worked with them before, too, training and rehabbing and caring for them, including for 14 years at SeaWorld.

So he was prepared for the challenge that Keiko represented.

And though he'd heard that the whale wasn't in good shape, it wasn't until Nolan met him that he understood just how dire the situation was.

This animal is not healthy.

I mean, he really, we got him out of Mexico in time.

And I don't know if you've seen any of the old footage of when we first released him into the pool, but he, his body shape is what we called a worm.

You know, he had a very fat head, a very, very, very skinny body and a tail.

And

that was not the ideal body.

And when he swam, he was so out of shape.

I mean, he really undulates.

Go watch his original footage when he's in the pool.

It looks like a worm, you know, moving through the water or a leech.

After this interview, I took another look at the footage, and it's true.

Keiko has a neck that you can see when he swims.

Orcas are not supposed to have necks, at least not visible necks.

I get that now.

So yes, Nolan and the rest of the staff had a lot of work to do.

The good news is that in Oregon at least, there was the space to do it.

Compared to his pool at Reino Ventura, Keiko's new tank was luxurious, 150 feet long, 75 feet wide, more than three times the size of his previous confines.

The new tank was filled with 2 million gallons of filtered seawater, much colder than the water in Mexico, at a temperature they hoped would help clear up the papillomavirus Keiko had developed.

The depth was important too.

At Reinoventura, Keiko hadn't been able to fully submerge vertically because the pool was too shallow.

He couldn't dive or spy hop, meaning he couldn't pop his head out of the water vertically.

But in Oregon, his tank was 25 feet deep at its deepest point, more than enough space to pop up or even flip over underwater if he wanted to.

And there was another important difference between Mexico and Oregon.

No more performances.

Visitors were still able to see Keiko, of course, and they came by the tens of thousands, but their their only view of him was from below the surface of the water, from a wall of windows running along one side of the tank.

This setup underlined the mission.

Keiko wasn't an organ for the amusement of his human fans.

It was quite the opposite, in fact.

His human team, 25 staff altogether, was there for him.

His dedicated personal trainers.

We have to get our energy level up every time we come out here to work with him.

Big and high!

Big and that's not big and high.

What do you call that?

Come on, pull that fluke around.

You're there.

Come on.

Come on, Cake.

Pull your tail.

You got plenty of room.

Pull your tail.

Outta, boy.

Thank you.

Keiko had work to do.

He needed to improve his muscle tone and mass, his swimming form and endurance, and of course he had to learn to hold his breath.

Whales in the wild can hold their breath for a quarter of an hour or longer, a skill they need in order to do deep foraging dives for fish.

When Keiko first arrived in Oregon, he could hold his breath for about three minutes.

And he'd come up and he was huffing and puffing, and so we started working on that.

And then we'd go, you know, a little bit longer and we'd start seeing the three-minute, five-minute, seven-minute.

To do this, they'd have Keiko swim to a diver at the bottom of the pool who would give him the command to stay, like you might do to your dog.

And Keiko would stay, in fact, until he couldn't wait any longer and had to race up to the surface for a breath.

And then there was the food.

In order to adapt to his new, healthy lifestyle, Keiko had to bulk up, new workout, new diet.

Half the aquarium's food was reserved for Keiko, which meant every morning at dawn, his care team would show up at the aquarium to chop up more than a hundred pounds of fish.

One of the guys tasked with this rather unglamorous work was a no-nonsense trainer named Mark Trim.

We introduced him to salmon

and introduced him to squid.

Mark says the goal with Keiko was to expand his diet, give him new sources of protein.

So they introduced him to different kinds of fish.

Salmon, he did okay with.

Squid, and it kind of smelt called Capelin, not so much.

In the very beginning, it was, you know, he would.

He would just spit the squid out into the water

and the Capelin.

So, and then, you know, he's watching it sink and then he'd just go and pick off the Capelin and then it would just rain squid down to the bottom.

Slowly, over time, Keiko learned to like Squid.

He was making progress and the Foundation's team of trainers and scientists were keeping track of it all.

Keiko was basically under 24-hour surveillance.

There were multiple cameras, above water and below.

They recorded the thickness of his blubber, tested his blood, measured how fast and how deep he could swim.

It's possible there has never been a more studied individual orca in the history of the world.

All that care and training yielded results.

Within several months, Keiko's appetite had nearly tripled and he'd put on about 2,000 pounds, grown about eight inches longer.

His papillomavirus had cleared up, and by the end of his first year in Oregon, he could hold his breath for 13 minutes.

Any way you looked at it, this was incredible.

More than Keiko's trainers could have imagined.

And it had happened so fast.

Keiko's remarkable transformation says a lot about the quality of care he was getting, but perhaps even more about Keiko's personality.

He was a good boy, through and through.

You are a good whale.

Very good.

Very good.

That was very nice.

That was awfully great.

Nolan says he would give him these tests in which Keiko would have to improvise, swim on his side, spy hop, splash with his flukes, anything.

Go do something, your choice.

You can do whatever you want to do, but you can't do the same thing twice, and you can't do the same thing in a row.

Some of the things he'd do, you know, you would think, well, he knows train behaviors.

He'll just do all those.

Right, he would.

But then what do you do beyond that?

You know, he'd actually have to make things up.

So to watch him start to think, I think we got up to like 38, 38 different behaviors in one training session.

He was so malleable, so eager to please, the staff even gave him nicknames to reflect that.

McFly, the cowering bullied father in Back to the Future, or the dude, the militantly laid-back protagonist of the big Lebowski.

Trainer Mark Trim, who had worked with Killer Whales for more than a decade, had never seen anything like it.

He was just the most easygoing,

just laid-back mellow.

I used to just shake my head and, you know, kind of laugh to myself.

And I'm like, I just can't believe what I'm, you know, what a cool critter he was.

I mean, everybody that worked with him called him the one in a million whale because no matter how far my career stretches before I disappear

and how long I work with marine mammals, there will never be another whale like that.

And at the end of his long, strenuous days of training, Keiko would unwind by watching television, which is, I mean, totally relatable.

Celebrity whales, they're just like us.

In Keiko's case, TV was therapeutic, prescribed by one of his veterinarians to keep Keiko stimulated after hours, on those nights when no one was around to dive with him or when he could no longer amuse himself by spy-hopping out of the water to scare the security guards, which actually used to happen, by the way.

Keiko's taste in TV was pretty middle of the road.

Black and white Andy Griffith reruns, pro wrestling, and action movies like Independence Day.

But as far as as we know, not Free Willie.

Because of their celebrity resident, the small town of Newport, Oregon was suddenly a tourist destination, with people coming from all over the country and the world to see Keiko.

And he had quite an effect on his visitors.

One of the trainers told us Keiko caused intelligent adults to dissolve into a kind of baby talk version of themselves.

You can hear what he does to this CNN reporter, who's totally fangirling as she's about to record a segment by his viewing window.

Oh my god, look at this.

Look at this.

Oh my god, that's so cool.

Oh my goodness.

Diane Hammond, Keiko's press secretary, told me Keiko was known to swim right up to the window, presenting his giant eye to the crowd or to one person, a kind of staring that felt like a connection.

When people were there,

he didn't just kind of swim by the window casually and go off and do something else.

He was unusually present.

We used to say, when Keiko looked at you, you were seen.

And I think by and large, people who were in his presence believe that to be true.

Seeing and being seen by Keiko was something people were willing to travel considerable distances for.

And they did.

They came by the thousands.

Ticket sales were brisk, a great windfall for the aquarium.

But really, everyone was making money, including the town of Newport, where visitors rented cars and booked hotel rooms, ate the local restaurants, poked around the shops overflowing with Keiko paraphernalia.

It all added up.

Local TV news from the era is absolutely lousy with whale puns about Keiko's impact on the economy.

By the end of Keiko's second year in Oregon, one estimate put the figure at around $75 million.

Local businesses were just having a whale of a time.

So was the Free Willie Keiko Foundation.

They had the rights to Keiko's name and licensed it out on everything.

Stuffed animals, t-shirts, all manner of black and white plastic doodads, mystical Keiko amulets, and his own brand of root beer.

Petsmart was selling Keiko adoption kits by the thousands.

The toy company Mattel made a handsome donation to the Free Willie Keiko Foundation and in exchange was allowed to sell a special edition Keiko and Ocean Barbie.

In the commercial, Barbie dives in the water and untangles Keiko from a net.

And though no one can prove or disprove it, let's just imagine it exists.

A plastic Keiko doll bobbing somewhere in the great Pacific Ocean garbage patch.

A floating reminder of the fact that we can't shop our way out of the many environmental crises we have wrought.

Dave Phillips, the founder of the Free Willie Keiko Foundation, the guy who spearheaded the plan to move Keiko from Mexico, well, it hadn't escaped his attention that people in Newport loved this orca.

But Dave's plan had always been to get the whale to the ocean since before Keiko even left Mexico City.

Remember, it was rescue, rehab, release.

Oregon was just a way station, but Dave knew this wasn't going to be easy for the town to accept.

I said to myself, you know, when I first came, they gave me free rental cars.

They wanted a free place to stay.

I was like giving the key to the city.

And then I was like, you know what?

When it's time for Keiko to go, they're going to just be, we're going to be the most unpopular people in town.

The way Dave saw it, the healthier Keiko got, the closer he was to leaving.

Our criteria is.

When we think that he's capable of going to a sea pen, back in his home waters, if we can do that safely, that's what we want to do.

And here they were.

A year into his rehabilitation, Keiko was objectively stronger, objectively healthier.

Everyone wanted him to get better.

So great.

They'd done it.

Now what?

That's after the break.

This is Sarah Koenig, host of the serial podcast.

If you're hooked on this show, and I'm guessing you are, then I'm hoping my job here is pretty easy, to get you to subscribe to the New York Times so you can listen to the rest of it.

My father was an ad man who taught me the best ads are declarative, no puffery.

So here goes.

Serial shows are expertly reported and inventive.

Nobody makes them like we make them.

But serial's great serials aside, when you subscribe, you get all the Times shows.

The Daily, Es Recline, Wirecutter has a new podcast.

My advice though, don't just get an audio subscription.

Go big.

Subscribe to the paper, all access, the whole Magilla.

Cereal is part of the Times, so technically I work at the Times, and honestly, I'm kind of cheap, but I subscribe for the news, obviously, and the games, and the cooking, and the magazine, and cereal.

I think of the Times as a staple.

Even my kids, who are not budding journalists and who don't even really listen to cereal, they both asked me for Time subscriptions.

All the cool kids are doing it.

So please, sign up.

You can do it through Spotify or Apple Podcasts.

Or if you're already a Time subscriber, sign in.

It's worth it.

It's your headline to unpack.

It's your one story to follow week by week.

It's your Wordle to work through.

It's your team to track.

It's your 36 hours to explore.

It's your marinade to master.

It's your opinion to figure out.

It's your mattress to upgrade.

It's your day to know what else you need to know today.

The New York Times.

It's your world to understand.

Find out more at nytimes.com/slash your world.

Keiko hadn't been in Oregon all that long when two of his main trainers started to interpret his progress differently.

Mark Trim saw Keiko's progress and, yeah, was definitely impressed, but he was not convinced it meant that Keiko was ready for the ocean.

During Keiko's first six months in Oregon, the LA Times came to visit Newport.

They talked to Keiko's press secretary, Diane, to Nolan, who led rehab, to Mark, and the article they eventually published called Willie Went Free, But Will Keiko, raised serious concerns about the viability of Keiko's return.

One of the key quotes in the piece was from Mark.

The way he tells it, the reporter took a look at Keiko, how energetic he was, how vocal, and said,

He looks great.

When's he going?

Like, going where?

And they said, well, back to the wild.

And my comment was, that's not a killer whale.

That's a golden retriever.

And you wouldn't exactly abandon the family dog in the wilderness and expect him to thrive.

It just doesn't make sense.

But beyond Keiko's demeanor, Mark had other doubts.

The two years I was working with him in Oregon,

he must have been sick six times.

Five, six times.

Not something you want to see in an animal that's going to, you know, is going to spend every single day trying to find, you know, swim far enough, swim fast enough to try and find enough food to eat.

Not everyone remembers Keiko getting sick this much, but that wasn't the only thing that concerned Mark about Keiko in the wild.

It was also unclear to him if Keiko would be able to look after his most basic needs, like being able to hunt and eat live fish.

Keiko had had frozen fish dropped in his mouth basically his entire life.

He just wasn't used to having to work for it.

His trainers knew that, and so to accommodate, they made things a little easier.

They'd smack the fish on the surface of the pool and then toss them in, alive but dazed, moving just slowly enough to be caught by Keiko, apex predator of his tank.

That seemed to work sometimes, but not always.

A frontline documentary released around this time shows his trainers watching from the window, cheering on Keiko like overeager parents at a little league game, desperate for their child not to strike out.

Okay, there's a guy right on the bottom there.

Come on, Keiko, do it.

Do it, Keiko.

Here he goes.

Here he goes.

There.

Little late.

Little lane.

This is it, buddy.

Come on, come on.

Come on, come on, come on, come on, come on, come on, come on.

Keiko's mouth is huge and powerful, and to be fair, he does come pretty close to catching the fish, but not quite.

So according to Mark Trim, this is Keiko after his first year in Oregon.

A killer whale who's unable to consistently catch fish even after they've been slapped against the water.

Who's, yes, stronger and healthier, but still gets sick with worrisome regularity.

A good boy, eager to please his humans, a jokester, a one in a million killer whale whose very uniqueness is more of a liability than an asset.

He was the absolute worst candidate selected for a project like that.

He was the worst out of all the killer whales in the world.

You could just statistically line them up, look at them, and he is dead last.

The ocean, the actual ocean, is nothing like an aquarium with trained staff attending to your every need.

The ocean is a cruel place.

Every day in the wild is a fight for survival in dangerous, increasingly contaminated waters.

Being free is not the same thing as being safe.

If he's doing so well in Oregon, is it cruel to push him further?

If Mark had made up his mind one way, Nolan was coming to the opposite conclusion.

He felt that Keiko was essentially ready to go.

That first year, yeah, okay, sure, the golden retriever thing made some sense.

Nolan even told me a story about Keiko misbehaving.

He bit through a metal pole attached to a vacuum, snapping it in half.

And after Nolan reprimanded him, Keiko swam to a corner of the pool and put himself in timeout.

Timeout.

The aggression, one could argue, is good for a whale who may need to fend for himself in the wild.

The contrition, not so much.

But a year later, Nolan was feeling more positive about the idea of Keiko going back to the ocean.

Keiko was in the best shape of his life, able to hold his breath about as long as an orca at sea might.

On top of that, he was beginning to sound like a whale.

I know that might seem like a small thing, but back in Mexico, Keiko wasn't very vocal.

If he vocalized at all, he wouldn't make orca sounds, but would sometimes imitate the calls his dolphin friends made.

Sometimes he seemed seemed to mimic Mexican ambulance sirens.

In Oregon, he was vocalizing more, sometimes even echolocating, using sound to map the space around him, a skill orcas often used to find prey.

But the thing that gave Nolan the most confidence was Keiko's willingness to rise to every challenge.

Yeah, he surprised the hell out of me.

I mean, he really, he

did things that I never expected him to do and didn't think was possible.

Everything I threw at him, he not only took it, he took it further.

I did my damnedest and he responded.

In this way, the same quality that worried Mark Trim, Keiko's agreeable, down-for-whatever attitude, Nolan saw it as an asset.

It made him confident that with the right guidance, Keiko could do anything, including live in the wild.

Diane Hammond agreed.

By the way, she and Nolan were now a couple, had fallen in love telling the story of Keiko's rehabilitation together, the story of his progress.

The Keiko they knew was not only ready to move on, but had to move on.

He had moments of aggression.

He beat the hell out of some of his toys, for instance.

He was bored.

You know, bored animals get into trouble.

I felt, I could see that some of his needs weren't being adequately met in that pool, and he was no longer a golden retriever.

He was a killer whale.

I mean, from the outside, it looks like, why didn't you just keep him there?

Then you end up with another full-size killer whale alone in the world

with nothing,

you know, no companions, because nobody else is going to give you a killer whale to put in with him.

There actually was an effort to find another orca to live with Keiko, but it didn't pan out.

And I suppose that's the other version of this argument.

Not safety versus freedom, but boredom versus freedom.

One pool can be better than another, but a big tank is still a tank, and an enormous tank is still not the ocean.

So if you're going to condemn an orca to live alone in a pool for the rest of his life, you better be damn sure there's no other option.

By the spring of 1997, the rift between those who thought Keiko was ready to go to the ocean and those who thought he might never be ready was widening.

On one side was the aquarium's director, Phyllis Bell, who was unsurprisingly arguing Keiko needed more time at the aquarium.

On the other side, you had Dave Phillips and the Free Willie Keiko Foundation, saying they wanted to release Keiko back to his home waters in Iceland.

Up until now, the two institutions had shared responsibility for Keiko's care, but in June 1997, the Foundation sent a memo to the aquarium.

From that moment forward, they would no longer need aquarium staff.

Anyone who wanted to work with Keiko had to come work for them.

The lines were clear now.

It was the foundation versus the aquarium.

Diane and Nolan made their choice.

They defected from the aquarium to accept positions at the foundation.

The problem was everyone on all sides of this conflict still worked in the same physical space.

Only now some of them had a different boss.

That's really where I felt that the tide turned.

That seemed to be the setoff for Phyllis.

It's like, how dare we go on our own type of thing.

And was there beef like people wouldn't sit at the lunch table with each other anymore?

Or was the...

Oh, we never even really spoke to each other after a while.

By early fall, Phyllis Bell, the aquarium's director, had all but declared war against the foundation.

She announced to the press that Keiko was sick, too sick, the implication was, to be moved to Iceland.

All we're asking for is an independent medical evaluation.

We'd like to see somebody come in and do it, a team of scientists and vets that aren't affiliated with either organization.

And that would satisfy our needs to say whether or or not Keiko is healthy or not.

The foundation was appalled.

To them this was a thinly veiled plot to keep Keiko right where he was.

In an attempt to wrest control of the narrative back from the aquarium, Dave Phillips shot back with his own presser.

In our view, the aquarium has made unsubstantiated and false claims that Keiko is not well, when in reality, the evidence shows that Keiko is well.

And

it appears to us, it certainly appears to me, that this

is

part of an effort to undermine our activities and prevent Keiko from being released.

All the whale people I've talked to are disarmingly nice.

So the tape you just heard from Dave, it's the whale people equivalent of flipping over a table.

Make no mistake.

This is a fight now.

Because yeah, it's true that Keiko had been sick, the foundation was saying, but he was better now.

And in any case, they argued Keiko's health problems were squarely the aquarium's fault.

They were the ones who hadn't been keeping up with the water quality in his tank.

Some people even implied this was intentional sabotage, meant to make Keiko too sick to leave.

The water quality went to hell, and it went to hell in a pretty simple way.

It would have been very easy to fix.

I believe it was deliberate.

I can't give you a date and a how,

but the

Oregon Coast Aquarium always had control of the water quality and the filtration of the pool.

No, not the people I knew, and I knew everybody there.

Mark Trim, golden retriever guy, he'd left the project altogether by that point, but he stayed in touch with the people who still worked at the aquarium, and he found allegations like these absurd.

Nobody at that facility that I knew of would sanction or condone or any ever

intentionally reduce the water quality

just because they wanted to make a point on something like that.

I mean, that animal was prone to getting sick anyway.

I mean, all you're doing is inviting disaster.

So, with the state of Keiko's health in dispute, the relationship between the two organizations was tense, dysfunctional, even petty.

Eventually, the aquarium changed the locks and took away the foundation's keys so that Keiko's staff could only access their whale during normal business hours and otherwise had to fetch someone to let them inside.

By the fall, the feud was national news, getting coverage in the Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and USA Today, where it was described as a, quote, big money power struggle.

How exactly you might explain all this bickering to children, Keiko's first and most devoted fans, is unclear, but it's no longer the same story it once was.

We're far now from the simplistic but effective emotional punch of the movie's climax.

far from Mexico's noble sacrifice in search of the sick whale they loved, far even from the consensus of just a few months prior, when everyone was united in the goal of making Keiko well again.

It's not surprising that in the midst of all this disagreement, someone would try asking Keiko directly what he wanted.

Bonnie Norton was an animal communicator, one of several who claimed to speak with Keiko regularly.

She transcribed their conversations, which she later published in a book called Keiko Speaks by Bonnie Norton and Keiko.

According to Bonnie, Keiko seemed to side with the aquarium, saying, quote, I love it here.

I am happy here.

They know in their hearts I am better off here.

They want me to be something I am not.

I am not a wild whale.

I am Keiko.

And Bonnie didn't sit on this knowledge.

As Keiko's departure from Oregon began to seem imminent, She organized a protest outside the aquarium.

She carried a sign that on one side read, Keiko plus plus Iceland equals too risky.

On the other, it read, Keiko loves the children.

A local news station covered the event.

Hi, can I give you some information as to why it's risky for Keiko to go to Iceland?

Most doubt her animal connections, but some don't disregard Norton's notion.

Maybe Keiko should stay.

The people of Newport may have sympathized with her cause, but no one else joined the protest that day.

Literally no one.

Maybe they understood it was simply too late.

As far as Keiko's health was concerned, ultimately a blue ribbon panel made up of eight consulting veterinarians was convened to make an assessment.

They gave Keiko the all-clear.

He was healthy.

And now, someone had to make a choice.

Had to decide once more what was best for Keiko.

Legally, that was the foundation.

They owned the whale, and they chose home.

It was where the story was always leading anyway, what they'd been preparing for since Keiko had boarded the plane from Mexico.

He was never going to stay in Oregon.

He was going to Iceland, whether he wanted to or not.

That's on the next episode of The Goodwill.

We would take him out into the path of the wild whale.

Why should he surf like a dolphin?

We're gonna see how this goes and how he does, and we'll be guided by that.

It just was a disaster.

Dr.

Pornell was saying, you know, I think he's dead.

I think he's dead.

His eyes were just bugged out of his head.

I have never,

never before and never since seen a killer whale's eyes that big.

New York Times all access and audio subscribers can binge all episodes of The Good Whale right now on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

Just head to the link in our show notes and subscribe, or if you're already a subscriber to The Times, link your account.

Be sure to sign up for our newsletter to see photos of The Good Whale himself.

This week, you can see Keiko in his new tank in Oregon.

Go to nytimes.com/slash serial newsletter.

The Goodwill is written by me, Daniel Alarcon, and reported by me and Katie Mingle.

The show is produced by Katie and Alyssa Schipp.

Jen Guerra is our editor, additional editing from Julie Snyder and Ira Glass.

Sound design, music supervision, and mixing by Phoebe Wang.

The original score for The Goodwill comes from Lachica and Osman.

Our theme music is by Nick Thorburn and additional music from Matt McGinley.

Research and fact-checking by Jane Ackerman with help from Ben Phelan.

Tracking direction by Elna Baker.

Susan Wesling is our standards editor.

Legal review from Alamin Sumar and Simone Prokas.

Carlos Lopez Estrada is a contributing editor on the series.

The supervising producer for Serial Productions is Inde Chubu.

Mac Miller is the executive assistant for Serial.

Liz Davis Moore is the Senior Operations Manager.

Special thanks this week to Peter Noah, Beverly Hughes, Mark Coulson, Bob Ratliff, Craig McCaw, and Dahlia Kozlowski.

The Goodwill is from Serial Productions and the New York Times.