Serial, This American Life’s teen drama murder mystery for NPR people, ended its first season today. The podcast has been the Most Popular Thing Ever for the past thirteen weeks, and has gotten a population of Morning Edition fans who would never in their lives pick up an embossed cover true crime book deeply interested in the genre. It’s sparked speculation, criticism, and at least one pretty good Funny or Die sketch, and now it’s over, at least until season two, which will have a different topic.

My review of the Serial finale, and spoilers after the jump.

I expected to be a bit disappointed by the final episode of Serial. The central draw of a murder mystery is that it’s a puzzle box. At the end of Agatha Christie books or Sherlock Holmes stories there’s always the scene were the sleuth speechifies about how they’ve gathered all the clues, interviewed all the subjected, and suddenly the entire elaborate contraption of the mystery is in full view. The audience gets to see how it all worked.

Serial, though, can’t have the luxury of having a pat murder mystery ending because it involves actual, real humans who have lives that could be ruined if they were accused of murder. In the last episode, Koenig, though, went right up to the line of a classic murder mystery parlor scene, but didn’t cross it, when she introduced Ronald Lee Moore, a serial killer released from prison only days before Hae Min Lee was killed. Moore is dead now, and a convicted murder, so it’s unlikely that Koenig and her team are going to be hearing from his team of lawyers as they speculate about whether or not he killed someone fifteen years ago.

Whipping out a serial killer and then leaving everything nice and unambiguous, though, would have been out of character for Serial. This is a series that has thrived on ambiguity and uncertainty since its first episode. Ambiguity is what’s kept me and every other podcast junky in the English-speaking world coming back to this thing, and Koenig was sure to end on an ambiguous note. She made clear that she would not vote to convict Adnan on a jury, but stopped short of saying anything definitive. Anything else would have been jarringly out of character for her.

What’s made Serial interesting, though, isn’t necessarily the puzzle. Testimony about cell phone towers, telecom billing, whether or not a call was a butt dial, all of that is deeply boring. What’s made Serial interesting to listen to is that it’s a very well-constructed look into the criminal justice system. The case itself is complicated, tawdry, and unclear, and against that backdrop we’ve been able to get a glimpse into Baltimore’s police force and legal system, and also into its Muslim community.

I’ve heard more than one person quip that the podcast that’s all about murder in Baltimore is basically season six of The Wire, and that comparison is apt. The Wire was all about painting a detailed portrait of Baltimore’s more unpleasant side. Serial lacks The Wire’s sweep and scope, but it shares that show’s attention to minutiae and vivid characters. With that in mind, I was far less disappointed with the finale of Serial than I thought I would be. I still feel like I got something out of that podcast, even though I still don't really know what happened. I hardly wasted my time with the podcast. Not knowing what happened is a little bit of a downer, but it's not a Lost level downer.

The story of Serial’s first seasonis hardly over. Adnan’s case has been taken up by the Innocence Project, and in all likelihood we’re probably get an update episode or two in another year about how his case his going, and whether or not he’s been exonerated. Serial is also funded for another season, so in another few months we can all get good and obsessed with something entirely different.

In the meantime, here’s that Mail Kimp remix you’ve always wanted.