If you become a New York Times subscriber, you can listen to all episodes of The Good Whale right away, no waiting, and it's super easy. Sign up through Apple Podcasts or Spotify, or go to nytimes.com slash podcasts. 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 Keko, 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 Keko arrived. I was there long before Keko 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 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 of 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 were 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 a near-resistible story, to 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 Kiko's multi-million dollar home, putting the finishing touches on it just days before Kiko 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 Kiko being pulled slowly in what was basically a giant dumpster full of ice water. People were cheering, people had signs, welcome Kiko 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 Kiko was lifted by crane out of the box in a sling, a big canvas sling. I 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. But you hadn't ever seen a Norco for it. What was your impression of of Kiko as a 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
that cry in the dark and 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 for me, anyway, gave me an overwhelming sense of responsibility to do the right thing for this animal. That January day in Oregon, when Keko arrived, everyone agreed what the right thing was to get Keko healthy. But as it happened, just when the goal was inside, the consensus around that simple story
would begin to fracture. From serial productions in the New York Times, this is The Good Whale. I'm Daniel Alarcón. So the plan for Keko is rescue rehab release. If getting Keko out of Mexico had been a rescue, Oregon would be all about rehab. To make that happen, the Freewillie Keko 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 Keko well and see if we could not let him die there. The aquarium. That's Nolan Harvey, who's in charge of Keko's rehabilitation. He'd moved to Newport, Oregon from an aquarium in Tacoma, or 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 Keko 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's 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 his body shape is what we call the 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 un-gelates. 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. Keko 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 Reynaventura, Keko'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 two million gallons of filtered seawater, much colder than the water in Mexico. At a temperature they hoped would help clear up the papilloma virus, Keko had developed. The depth was important too. At Reynaventura, Keko 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 Keko, of course, and they came by the tens of thousands, but 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 set up underlined the mission. Keko wasn't in Oregon for the amusement of his human fans. It was quite the opposite, in fact. His human team, 25 staff all together, 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, Keko.
Take your take. You got plenty of room. Pull your tail. Out of boy. Thank you! Keko had worked 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 Keko first arrived in Oregon, he could hold his breath
for about three minutes. He could come up and he was having an impuffin. We started working on that. Then we go a little bit longer and we'd start seeing the three minute, five minute, seven minute. To do this, they'd have Keko swim to a diver at the bottom of the pool who'd give him the command to stay, like you might do to your dog. Keko would stay, in fact, until he couldn't wait any longer and had to race up to the surface for a breath. Then there was the food. In order to adapt
to his new healthy lifestyle, Keko had to bulk up, new workout, new diet. Half the aquarium's food was reserved for Keko, 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 unglomerious work was a no-nonsense trainer named Mark Trim. Mark says the goal with Keko was to expand his diet, give him new sources of protein. So they introduced him to different kinds of fish.
Sammon he did okay with. Squid and a kind of smelt called Kaplan, not so much. In the very beginning, he would just spit the squid out into the water and the Kaplan. So, and then he's watching it sink and then he'd just go and pick off the Kaplan and then it would just rain squid down to the bottom. Slowly, over time, Keko learned like squid. He was making progress and the foundation's team of trainers and scientists were giving track of it all.
Keko 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, Keko's appetite had nearly
tripled and he'd put on about 2000 pounds, grown about 8 inches longer. His papaloma virus had cleared up and by the end of his first year in Oregon, he could hold his breath for 13 minutes. Anyway, you looked at it. This was incredible. More than Keko's trainers could have imagined and it had happened so fast. Keko's remarkable transformation says a lot about the quality of care he was getting, but perhaps even more about Keko's personality. He was a good boy through and
through. No one says he would give him these tests in which Keko 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 while he knows trained 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 different behaviors in one training session. He was so malleable, so eager to please the staff even give him nicknames to reflect that. McFly, the cowering bullied father and back to the future, or the dude, the militantly laid back protagonist of the big Lebowski. Trainer Mark Trim, who'd 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 a, 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, Kiko would unwind by watching television, which is, I mean, totally relatable, celebrity whales, they're just like us. In Kiko's case, TV was therapeutic, prescribed by one of his veterinarians to keep Kiko 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. Kiko's taste in TV was pretty middle of the road. Black and white, Andy Griffith-Ryrundz pro wrestling and action movies like Independence Day, but as far as we know, not free willy. 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 Kiko. And he had quite an effect on his visitors. One of the trainers told us Kiko 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. 30 seconds, 30 seconds, Jim. He's coming over, yes! Oh my god, look at this! Look at this! Oh my god, that's so cool!
Diane Hammond, Kiko's press secretary, told me Kiko 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 Kiko looked at you, you were seen. And I think by and large people who were in his presence believed that to be true.
Seeing and being seen by Kiko 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, aided the local restaurants, poked around the shops overflowing with Kiko paraphernalia. It all added up. Local TV news from the era is absolutely lousy with
whale ponds about Kiko's impact on the economy. By the end of Kiko'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 Frouilly Kiko Foundation. They had the rights to Kiko's name and licensed it out on everything. Stuffed animals, t-shirts, all men are a black and white plastic doodads, mystical Kiko amulets, and his own brand of root beer. Petsmart was selling Kiko adoption
kits by the thousands. The toy company Mattel made a handsome donation to the Frouilly Kiko Foundation, and then exchange was allowed to sell a special edition Kiko-Indocean Barbie. In the commercial, Barbie dives in the water and untangles Kiko from a net. And though no one can prove or disprove it, let's just imagine it exists. A plastic Kiko 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 Frouilly Kiko Foundation, the guy who spearheaded the plan to move Kiko 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 Kiko 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 free, 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 Kiko 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
Kiko got the closer he was to leading. 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, Kiko was objectively stronger, objectively healthier. Everyone wanted him to get better, so great, they'd done it. Now what? That's after the break. Kiko hadn't been in Oregon all that long when two of his main trainers started to interpret
his progress differently. Mark Trim saw Kiko's progress, and yeah, was definitely impressed, but he was not convinced it meant that Kiko was ready for the ocean. During Kiko's first six months in Oregon, the LA Times came to visit Newport. They talked to Kiko's press secretary, Diane, to Nolan who led rehab, to Mark, and the article they eventually published called Willie Went Free, but will Kiko raised serious concerns about the viability of Kiko's return.
One of the key quotes in the piece was from Mark, the way he tells it, the reporter took a look at Kiko how energetic he was, how vocal and said, he looks great. When's he going? I'm 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 Kiko's demeanor, Mark had other
doubts. The two years I was working with him in Oregon, he must have been six times, five, six times, not something you want to see in an animal that's going to spend every single day trying to find swim far enough, swim fast enough to try and find enough food to eat. Not everyone remembers Kiko getting sick this much, but that wasn't the only thing that concerned Mark about Kiko in the wild. It was also unclear to him if Kiko would be able to look
after his most basic needs, like being able to hunt and eat live fish. Kiko 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 tossed them in, alive but dazed, moving just slowly enough to be caught by Kiko, a pecs 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 Kiko like over-eager parents at a little league game, desperate for their child not to strike out. Kiko'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 Kiko 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 1 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 him, and he is dead last. The ocean, the actual ocean, is nothing like an aquarium with train 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 Kiko 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 Kiko misbehaving. He bit through a metal pole attached to a vacuum, snapping it in half, and after Nolan reprimanded him, Kiko 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 defend for himself in the wild. The contrition, not so much. But a year later, Nolan was feeling more positive about the idea of Kiko going back to the ocean. Kiko 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, Kiko wasn't very vocal. If he vocalized it all, he wouldn't make orca sounds, but would sometimes imitate the calls his dolphin friends made. Sometimes he seemed to mimic Mexican ambulance sirens. In Oregon, he was vocalizing more, sometimes even at go locating, using sound to map the space around him. A skill orca is often used to find prey. But the thing that gave Nolan the most confidence was Kiko's willingness to rise to every challenge.
Yeah, he surprised the hell out of me. I mean, he really 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, Kiko's agreeable down for whatever attitude, Nolan saw it as an asset. It made him confident that
with the right guidance, Kiko 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 Kiko's rehabilitation together. The story of his progress, the Kiko 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. We five 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 wall to put in with him.
There actually was an effort to find another Orca to live with Kiko, but it didn't pan out. And I suppose that's the other version of this argument. Not safety versus freedom, but bored them 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 Kiko 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 Kiko needed more time at the aquarium. On the other side, you had Dave Phillips and the Freewillie Kiko Foundation, saying they wanted
to release Kiko back to his home waters in Iceland. Up until now, the two institutions had shared responsibility for Kiko'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 Kiko had to come work for them. The lines were clear now. It was the Foundation versus the aquarium. They had a 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 set off for Phyllis. It's like how dare we go on our own. A type of thing. Was there beef like people would instead of 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 Kiko 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 some 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 not Kiko is healthy or not.
The Foundation was appalled. To them, this was a thinly veiled plot to keep Kiko right where he was. In an attempt to rest control the narrative back from the aquarium, they Phillips shot back with his own presser. In our view, the aquarium has made unsubstantiated and false claims that Kiko is not well. When in reality, the evidence shows that Kiko 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 Kiko 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 Kiko had been sick, the Foundation was saying, but he was better now.
And in any case, they argued Kiko'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 Kiko 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 know 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 Kiko'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 Kiko's staff could only access their whale during normal business hours and otherwise had to fetch someone to let them inside. But 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, Kiko's first and most devoted fans is unclear, but it's no longer the same story at once was. We're far now from the simplistic but effective emotional punch of the movie's climax. Far from Mexico's noble sacrifice and 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 Kiko well again.
It's not surprising that in the midst of all this disagreement, someone would try asking Kiko directly what he wanted. Bonnie Norton was an animal communicator, one of several who claimed to speak with Kiko regularly. She transcribed their conversations which she later published in a book called Kiko Speaks by Bonnie Norton and Kiko. According to Bonnie, Kiko seemed to side with the aquarium, saying, quote, I love it here, I'm 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 will, I am Kiko. And Bonnie didn't sit on this knowledge. As Kiko's departure from Oregon began to seem imminent, she organized the protest outside the aquarium. She cared to sign that on one side read Kiko plus Iceland equals two risky. On the other it read, Kiko loves the children, a local news station covered the event. Hi, can I give you some information as to why it's risky for Kiko to go to Iceland?
Most doubt her animal connections, but some don't disregard Norton's notion. Maybe Kiko should stay. The people of Newport may have sympathized with their cause, but no one else joined the protest that day. Literally no one. Maybe they understood it was simply too late. Kiko's health was concerned. Ultimately, a blue ribbon panel made up of eight consulting veterinarians was convened to make an assessment. They gave Kiko the all clear. He was healthy. And now someone had to make a choice.
Had to decide once more what was best for Kiko. Legally, that was the foundation. They owned the whale and they chose home. It was where the story was always leading anyway, what they had been preparing for since Kiko 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 Good Whale. We would take him out into the patch of the wild whales. I see he served like a dolphin.
We're going to see how this goes and how he does and we'll be guided by that. It just was a disaster. Dr. Brinnell 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 Kiko in his new tank in Oregon. Go to nytimes.com slash serial newsletter. The Good Whale is written by me, Daniel Alarcon, and reported by me and Katie Mingle. The show is produced by Katie and Alyssa Shipp. Genguera 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 Good Whale comes from La Chica and Osmond. Our theme music is by Nick Thorburn and additional music from Matt McGinley. Research in fact, taking by Jane Ackerman with help from Ben Falen. Tracking direction by Elna Baker, Susan Westling is our standards editor. Legal review from Alameen Sumar and Simone Prokis. Carlos Lopez Estrada is a contributing editor on the series.
The supervising producer for serial productions is in Day Chubu. Mack 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 Colson, Bob Ratliff, Craig McCaw, and Dalyakos Lowsky. The Good Whale is from serial productions and The New York Times.