Ian Urbina's The Outlaw Ocean Season 2 – A Bingeworthy Review

Bingeworthy sits down with Ian Urbina, the creator of the shockingly original series, and perhaps the only journalist to spend this much time in the most lawless parts of the ocean

For someone who has spent as much time on ships—ugly and dark fishing trawlers, shady ocean liners in the middle of the often lawless ocean—you might expect that Ian Urbina was born on the ocean, or to a family of seafarers…or at a minimum, raised in a coastal town, adjacent to the salt air and the tall tales of the longshoremen.

But that wasn’t the case. “I never knew whether I would be well suited for time on vessels,” he admits. In fact, he didn’t set foot on a ship until 2014, when he began the reporting that would carry him into the stern of his 17-year journey with The New York Times.

This trip, which began in Songkhla, Thailand, would be the start of this reporting journey, his first book, and also the start of the next chapter of his career, after he decided to leave the tenured comforts of The New York Times, after 17 years as an Investigative Reporter. Season 1 from 2022 follows the chapter spread from this book.

But the reporting wasn’t over. And, as I learned in our interview (which I will feature soon in full in another post), a new phase of his career was about to begin with The Outlaw Ocean Project, which is a non-profit journalism enterprise that publishes his investigations, across multiple platforms, from print to podcast, to music and video games. It’s also a Substack.

This week, all eight episodes of Season 2 of the The Outlaw Ocean are available for a good binge listen, available on CBC Listen, or wherever you get your podcas.

Urbina is a consummate raconteur, who turns maritime mayhem into gripping narratives

Season 2 opens in Libya, and follows an investigation into the death of Aliou Candé, a young farmer and father from Guinea-Bissau, a small country in West Africa, who tried to follow older family members that had migrated to Europe to support their families.

Urbina explains the complicated role that Libya plays in policing the migrant waters between Libya and Europe. He breaks down the complicit role that the EU plays in the capture of migrants, how they are often held in a network of secretive prisons run by competing militias.

With interview footage and eyewitness accounts, Urbina explains how exploitation, abuse, and death are common in these prisons. For added horror, he tells us how these prisoners are also routinely “rented” out, both to be farm labour or soldiers in battle. The vast anarchy of this world is explained, but without sensationalist tones or overly emotive guesswork. His narration was occasionally underscored with scene tape.

Episode three is where things get real: Urbina (and later we learn his whole team) was kidnapped and dumped in a dingy Libyan prison—the same sort that he had spent weeks reporting. His narration is gripping, and allows you to feel some of what he must have endured during his time in capture.

Here’s a 6-minute overview of our conversation:

What’s different between Season 1 and Season 2?

The first thing about Season 2 that jumped out at me is how Urbina allows himself to be in the story, as a character. In Season 1, although he’s the host and narrates the journey, his presence was is often indirect.

But for Season 2, I wondered if it was going to be different. It’s a cold open of a translated interview that asks the question of “How many shots were fired?” We are placed at “the most dangerous” crossing, of Libya, to Europe, which sees 30,000 migrants a year—but that’s only counts the ones who make it.

“Those that die are casualties in a proxy war that's being funded by the European Union and carried out by Libyan forces,” Urbina says in the opening scenes. A perfect set up for the first three episodes.

Right away, I can feel a new production quality. It places it in time, 2021. We begin with Ian Urbina in a room, with his fixer and translator, Pierre Kattar, translating French to English, we hear both sides. You can’t see the room, but you feel it. It’s cold and vast. It’s humid and damp, so people stand at a distance to each other. It’s an uncomfortable moment—there’s tension in their voices.

When we spoke recently, I asked him why there wasn’t more tape here, throughout the rest of the series, he was plain: “ It was not a decision. We were kidnapped by a militia and they took all our stuff.”

Like his answer, his narration is full frontal

He was on the phone with his wife, a knock at his door, he opened to see who was there, was knocked to the ground, and then kidnapped. His account of the beating he endured is evocative and fresh. He speaks to you, and tells you his memory of what happened during this horrific experience. It might turn your stomach; but you will still want to listen.

I was pleased to see this different approach to narration with Season 2. Narration was an issue I had with Season 1. In our interview (which I will feature on this channel soon), I learned that for Season 1, Urbina was interviewed by his producer, and then the questions were removed to create the final narration. While this is a commonly used technique in documentary films, when it’s used for a narrative podcast, the end product makes it feel like the host is speaking to someone else in the room, not the person listening.

This time, for Season 2, Urbina has lots and lots of scripted narration, written and created with the help of his CBC colleagues. Daemon Fairless and Michael Catano worked with him to write a narration script based on his longform articles and through various studio sessions. The series was crafted along with the long list of story demands that Urbina wanted to include, and his desire to stick with “the compilation approach,” as he explained to me. But the CBC producers smartly steered him towards a multi episode framework…there was just too much to fit into a single episode.

The effect is mixed; sometimes the words feel and sound right coming out of his mouth, other times, not so much. Clearly Fairless and Catano are experts at writing a narrative script, but the tension between what they wanted to hear from the narrator, and what Urbina wanted to say, was audible. Sometimes this worked and the script rolled off his tongue. When it was the point that he was uncomfortable, and it sounded stilted, that also worked. But at peppered throughout were moments that I couldn’t help but feel were made to feel like a CBC product inside of a longform written story that would more comfortably fit in the pages of The New Yorker or the NYTimes.

I appreciated that this work showed a new approach to storytelling that felt more collaborative and first-person. What I longed for was something between the classic CBC approach and the long-winded version of Urbina, who seems better on storytelling or talking points than performing a script.

A mix of multi-part storytelling and one-off stories

Inside Season 2, there are two mini-seasons; Libya’s secret prison network for migrants caught trying to enter the EU, and then a shocking expose of forced Uyghur—predominantly Muslim ethnic minority— labour inside the Chinese fishing fleet. I would not be surprised if this reporting nets him another XL journalist prize; Urbina and his team are able to document the Uyghur people’s role in seafood production was totally off the radar. Seafood that gets imported to more than twenty countries, including the U.S. and Canada. There are specific international laws that are supposed protect Uyghur from exploitation—and the sale that profits from this labour is criminal. Yanking the lid off the buffet table is notable journalism.

Same beef, years later…I just want more of what’s already there

My main complaint of this series is that I wanted more…more of that insane Repo Man…I could spend hours with him. More of the backstory of the whistleblower from the shrimp factory…and I wanted to live inside that scene that is described in the China mini-series (Episode 6-8), where they communicated with a crew by throwing a bottle from a skiff to a ship, offering cigarettes and other essentials in return for information. Yes, Season 2 goes way further than Season 1…but it also shows what could be possible.

Scene tape, plainly put, is what I wanted. His voice, even if through translators, that let me see and hear him in these distant, scary, drastic locations on the high seas. Or maybe even just him talking into a microphone at the end of the day, telling me what crazy event that day involved. His emotion, his discomfort, the sound of the ship creaking, the crashing of the waves on that make him want to vomit. The loneliness and isolation of the ocean. The immediacy, the intensity. It’s already there, but wow, it could stop up about 10 notches.

To get there, different production choices would need to be made, both up front and in the moment. If podcasts will become a main vehicle for this reporting going forward, it needs to be more considered in its approach.

There’s so much more to this…

Poke around on The Outlaw Ocean Project website, and you will get a sense of the giant universe Urbina has created. Each story has rich media attached, and the number of outlets, countries and languages each story has been featured in. The numbers are high.

It wasn’t until our conversation that I understood that…in our interview, he opens up about his new business model is for impact journalism. My jaw hit the floor as he explained it to me.

That’s coming soon in another indepth post.

---

Audio Flux is back! Circuit 6 will be announced tomorrow on August 1!