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The Good Whale
Jan 09, 2025•2 min
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Episode description

After the movie “Free Willy” became a hit, word got out that the star of the film, a killer whale named Keiko, was sick and living in a tiny pool at a Mexican amusement park. Fans were outraged and pleaded for his release. “The Good Whale” tells the story of the wildly ambitious science experiment to return Keiko to the ocean — while the world watched. An epic tale that starts in Mexico and ends in Norway, the six-episode series follows Keiko as he’s transported from country to country, each time landing in the hands of well-intentioned people who believe they know what’s best for him – people who still disagree, decades later, about whether they did the right thing.

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Transcript

His name was Keko and everyone agreed he was a good whale. Keko was one of a kind. The Keko had like this personality completely different from any other or guy. I mean everybody that worked with him called him the one and a million whale because no matter how far my career stretches and how long I work with marine mammals there will never be another whale like that. Keko was good at performing, beloved by the crowds at the Mexican amusement

park where he lived for more than a decade. Most of his life since he was captured as a calf. He was good with his trainers and with the kids who came to visit. I would have taken my one-year-old daughter and put him on his back without a care or concern in the world. He was that gentle. And Keko was good when he was cast in the movie Free Willy. He played the part of Willy, of course, a captive killer whale who was befriended by a 12-year-old boy and then set free.

Afterwards, when the world decided Keko himself should be set free, that he should learn how to be a wild whale, how to hold his breath and hunt for his own food and live in the ocean. Keko, like always, was eager to please his humans. So everyone agreed he was good, but there were some things no one seemed to agree on. Like, can good whales be wild whales? It felt like bringing your pet dog out to

the forest and then running away and the dog being a hungry and scared and wanted to go home. I was furious because I could see what we had done to him. We played God at that point. Was wildness even something Keko wanted or was it something we needed from him? A chance to redeem ourselves for the harm we'd caused, not just to Keko, but to all captive whales. I always ask people that are the detractors. Where would you have stopped it?

This is the story of a high profile, high-stake science experiment whose goal seemed almost impossible to teach a captive orca to be wild. At the center of it all was Keko, an orca with fears and limitations that no human could ever hope to interpret with any certainty, not that they wouldn't try. We wanted to see how far he could go. From serial productions in the New York Times, I'm Daniel Alarcon and this is The Good Whale, coming November 14th wherever you get your podcasts.

✨ This transcript was generated by Metacast using AI and may contain inaccuracies. Learn more about transcripts.