Mysteries from Above

I've already gone off on this series as well as "History" channel's current format in my review of the now-infamous Skinwalker Ranch series, and prefer not to waste much more time or brainpower.

If the spawn of our current culture weren't such slaves to the draw of internet fame, I doubt any credible professional would agree to share a platform with someone dubbed "explorer in residence", e.g. YouTube 2-day-beard-growth guy who trespasses on abandoned piles of rust while banging on about it as if it were the find of the century and he the modern equivalent of some sort of Indiana Jones romanticism.

One of the episodes even includes one of those Brits of the most insufferable ilk; the dreaded 60-something hobbyist scrounger, commonly known as the "detectorist", on auto-replay bragging about HIS "horde" of ancient Viking coins located in some field. How utterly vile! Are we supposed to applaud these people, when in all likelihood there was a great deal of suffering and sorrow attached to these? And that's not including the pain of his family, as well as pub co-patrons who are forced to hear about it, ad infinitum.

What does this old saddo, and his thieving pastime have to do with anything??

Let's get this straight: Archeology is just another word for well-funded thievery, and historically, "exploration" has brought nothing but misery to indigenous peoples while more "advanced" (read: well-funded and ARMED) people annihilated entire communities and cultures, all in the name of some God-given (literally, so they thought) entitlement to "expand"; what they call colonialism and colonisation was really just the result of decades of inbred insanity.

Yeah, and knowledge + wisdom (ahem...AGE!) can lead to bitterness.

Anyway, back on track. Enough with the ear-bleeding bombastic blaring music that never lets up, the scenery-chewing, over-the-top facial expressions, the yelling, jump cuts, the endless filler/ repetition and continual previews and recaps of literally the only interesting detail-which equals about 2 min of meat on the bare bones each episode every 3 minutes...if they are even able to dig one up.

I see from the other reviews that this filler for some documentary channel is not fooling them either:

• Interminable over the top padding to drag out a factoid into a 15 minute long dirge, replete unnecessary speculation and over the top soundtrack
• perhaps it is a way to keep production costs down while padding out the content, but this is filled with dubious 'rent-an-expert' types overly dramatically espousing ridiculous phrases and theories. If any of them had any credibility, they'd be doing actual research or focus on proper documentaries where their faces aren't the main thing being shown.

A prime example of the freefall in quality of documentary making.

Churned out in the mold of shows like, Oak Island and the many ghost hunting time wasters, non-mysteries are milked with fake urgent setups, pumped by talking heads with irrelevant expertise and punctuated with dramatic, drum thumping, pre-commercial cliff-hanging cutaway.

The absolute worst sort of faux-documentary. They could pack an entire season of real content into a single episode.

Narrator: Why is there an airplane in the middle of a rural woodland?

PhD Chemist: Did it crash?

Professor Cute Blonde: Was it used by drug cartels?

Hunky Evolutionary Biologist: And who put it there?

The guy we all know who bought it as a home conversion decades ago.

Fark.

This is yet another formulaic rehashing of Mysteries of the Abandoned using the same, dragged out reveals of things we already know explained by the same rotation of "experts" (like what the heck is a History Communicator?) filled with unnecessary filler. The overly dramatic reads (see: Andrew Gough) interspersed with terrible red herrings to stretch out easily explained "mysteries" are at least entertaining if not hilarious. Kudos to writers who use the heck out of a Thesaurus with the silly questions posed by voice over explainers whose credentials have little of nothing to do with the "secrets revealed".

I am on my second episode and it is looking more and more like it will be my last episode. I have watched many "from above" types of shows like Europe From Above and they have been chock full of spectacular drone footage of scenery, monuments, cities, historical sites, etc cetera, and it has been wonderful to watch. This is the exact opposite of those types of programs. They instead take a few lame overhead shots then fill it with overly tedious drownings from so-called experts, whose main area of expertise seems to be wasting time. The result is a few 5 minute segments stretched out to make a 45 minute waste of time. Give this a pass.