Review: Destination Truth (2nd season premiere)

(NOTE: The following review was originally written back when I was one of a large number of critics for a website that reviews movies and TV shows. The review was rejected by the editor of said site, and my relation ship with them subsequently ended. The review has been sitting on my computer ever since--time to clean house.)

These days, cable TV is overrun with investigative reality shows, with lots of crawling around in dusty old houses that may or may not be haunted, traipsing through forests in search of Bigfoot or donning scuba gear in the hopes of catching a glimpse of the Loch Ness Monster--all seen through the eye-bleeding green haze of night vision photography.

Sci-Fi Channel’s Destination Truth tries to differentiate itself from the rest of the pack by displaying a more wise-ass, snarky attitude while still approaching its subjects--in the case of the second season premiere, the focus is on the Abominable Snowman--with a semi-serious, semi-scholarly approach. The results are sometimes funny, sometimes irritating and only occasionally interesting.

Host Josh Gates, who looks like a scruffy slacker dude and sounds like Harold Ramis in Ghostbusters with a hint of Ray Romano thrown in, takes his group of investigators to Katmandu, Nepal, where Gates wanders the streets asking passers-by (who clearly don’t speak much, if any, English) if they believe the Abominable Snowman exists. Meanwhile, his “crack team” (his words, not mine) are so anxious to spot a Yeti that just about anything gets them excited, like spotting movement of a distant hill that turns out to be...a cow.

A brief stop at a monastery to check out a reputed Yeti scalp is momentarily exciting, mostly because one of the monks (dressed remarkably like an American deer hunter) threatens to smack Josh with a rock if he doesn’t turn the cameras off. After a mysterious woman negotiates a truce between the investigators and the monks, we finally get a close-up look at the scalp, which is kept in under lock and key in a glass display case and only taken out for ceremonial use. Unfortunately, the monks won’t let Josh and crew take a hair sample--which might have, you know, proven something.

Finally, the group treks out into the thin air of Mount Everest to try and track down some physical evidence of the Abominable Snowman’s existence. They stumble around in the dark (night vision cam--ah!) on slippery rocks and through thick brush with thermal imaging equipment. (Snatches of movement are seen in the distance, but nothing distinct or even identifiable.) Josh sticks his head in various caves and only gets a face full of bugs for his trouble.

Eventually, though, something exciting actually happens: Josh finds huge footprints made by something with an enormous stride. Unfortunately, the excitement quickly dissipates because every single member of the team is shown coming up to the footprints and shouting "Oh my God! Footprints!" before anybody gets around to casting the evidence in plaster. Once back in the states, Josh takes the footprints to an expert, who compares the alleged Yeti print with alleged Bigfoot prints and says that they’re remarkably similar, which only goes to show that Josh’s “discovery” is really nothing new without an actual Yeti, alive or otherwise, to go along with the impressions in the ground.

But is the objective of a show like Destination Truth to actually find the truth, or is it more about the journey than the destination? If the latter is the case, it would be nice if the journey were more entertaining or informative than what Destination Truth has to offer.