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Review of Expedition Unknown S01E04 "The Legend of Jesse James"

1/30/2015

24 Comments

 
Expedition Unknown is a strange program, not for its content but rather for its lack thereof. It doesn’t seem to have much of an identity. One week, it’s an Indiana Jones expedition to the ends of the earth, and another it’s a dull as dishwater slog through the boring dregs of American history. Granted, it’s a new show and trying to see what sticks, but I can’t fathom who the audience for this is. Each episode contains too little travel information to make it a travelogue, too little history to be a documentary, and too little analysis to clear the low bar set by History Channel and H2 crazy-quilt conspiracy shows. And with the topics veering from ancient history to Nazis to the Wild West, the only factor giving the show any unity is the fact that all of the show’s topics are mirror images of topics covered on the History Channel and H2. 
No, I take that back: The unifying factor so far is the failed quest for treasure, however that treasure is defined. To that end, I guess the audience is supposed to be the same contingent of middle aged men who enjoy treasure-hunting shows on History, H2, NatGeo, American Heroes Channel, Spike, Discovery, and all the others.

Last night’s episode, S01E04 “The Legend of Jesse James,” was exceptionally dull and stupid. Gates scoured Oklahoma for a good couple of hours looking for Jesse James’s lost treasure, and he failed to find it. Instead, we watched him try on Western outfits, ride a horse, shoot a gun into a tree stump, and wrangle mules. He also talked to a large number of old men, many of whom like to wear historical costumes, and all of whom obsess about Jesse James and the Wild West while employing magical thinking and nostalgia to try to find his gold.

Granted, I’m not the audience for treasure hunts, but this episode felt like a rerun before it even started. Part of the reason for that is the echoes of Scott Wolter’s treasure-hunting misadventures a few weeks ago on America Unearthed, and the other part is that Wolter also had an episode about Jesse James and lost treasure, which was repeating a still earlier History Channel show on the same called Jesse James’ Hidden Treasure (2009). Like Wolter in the episode about Custer’s lost treasure, host Josh Gates wore goofy costumes, wandered around in the wilderness, talked to obsessive treasure hunters, rode a horse, and found nothing. Like Wolter in earlier seasons, Gates also used a dowsing rod to try to find Jesse James’s gold, though he at least was smart enough to acknowledge that dowsing rods don’t work. Like Wolter, he also pretends that the can full of gold coins (the Saddle Ridge Hoard) found in California recently could have been part of the lost treasure he’s looking for, but unlike Wolter, Gates fails to acknowledge that the coins, which date to the 1890s, could not have been the Mexican gold hidden by James decades before. So, the score is tied at 1 to 1, but Gates gets the win because, unlike Wolter, he doesn’t wish out loud that James had succeeded in helping the Knights of the Golden Circle establish a vast North American slave empire for the Confederacy.

If you were to watch only these kinds of shows, you’d swear America was filled with nothing but middle aged and old white men who obsess over the past, dress up in historical costumes, and fantasize about how much better life was in the nineteenth century. Oh! I think I just figured out the audience for this show.

I’ll probably give the show one more chance since next week will be about the legend of the lost city of gold in Peru (another treasure hunt), but after that I will probably drop this show from my viewing. It manages the neat trick of being too honest to make for a good critical review and too superficial to endorse as quality viewing.

I thought I’d finish today on a completely different subject. Below is an interesting passage I found last night in Al-Maqrizi’s medieval Al-Khitat (1.15) regarding the mythic prehistory of Egypt. It discusses one of the achievements of Hermes Trismegistus. I pick up the story, in my translation from the French edition, when Egypt has been devastated by a horrific and uncontrollable Nile flood:
At that time, says Master Ibrahim ibn Wasif Shah, there reigned Budasheer, a mighty king, who was the first to employ enchantments and magic, and could make himself invisible. His uncles, Ashmun, Atrib, and Sa each reigned in his province, but Budasheer subdued them by his bravery and his courage, and, like his father, his fame surpassed that of the kings who preceded him; thus he was more powerful than his uncles and they had to submit to him. It is said that he sent the Egyptian priest Hermes to Mt. Qumr (the Mountain of the Moon), at the foot of which is the source of the Nile. Hermes’ mission was to raise (at the source of the river) bronze statues and to restore the lake from which the river’s waters flow. It was, they say, this priest who restored the two banks of the Nile, whose waters had been lost in the ground and whose course was sometimes interrupted. The palace where the statues were erected contained eighty-five figures built by Hermes to bring Nile water through pipes and hoses through which the water flowed. On leaving Mt. Qumr, water entered a statue and came out through its mouth. Hermes then established a carefully graduated scale of known cubits. All the water was thus brought down to the various beds of the river which led to two lakes from which it emerged to enter into another lake which gathered together all of the output of water at the foot of the mountain. Through these statues, Hermes regularized the river that was to bring to Egypt fertility and well-being, and thus what had been harmful now became useful.
Now, since ancient astronaut theorists and fringe historians ask us to view Ibn Wasif Shah’s fabulous history of Egypt as true, surely this is a testable hypothesis! I recommend that Giorgio Tsoukalos and David Childress fly out to the source of the Nile immediately to dig up these 85 statues and prove that Hermes Trismegistus did what they think he did!
24 Comments
chv
1/30/2015 07:48:50 am

Has Josh Gates ever discovered anything at any time in his life?

Reply
ED
12/27/2017 02:07:37 pm

Good comment, NEVER EVER has discovered any thing.
I am not going to watch any more. This is like too much tilin tilin and never see the icecream
Sorry to bad .

Reply
John Dunham
1/30/2015 08:05:13 am

Hallie Gnatovich

Reply
EP
1/30/2015 08:14:07 am

I didn't realize she's a therapist, lol!

http://www.halliegtherapy.com/

http://therapists.psychologytoday.com/rms/prof_detail.php?profid=89249

"I work with men to break down harmful expectations of who they are "supposed" to be, to create room for who they truly are."

Reply
John Dunham
1/30/2015 08:16:36 am

Actually, as Jason points out, Josh Gates is by far the most level headed (might one say, balanced) of any of the hosts of these types of shows. Heck, did they not even discover some sort of animal on DT that scientists thought was extinct?

EP
1/30/2015 08:28:54 am

Are you saying that he's already free of harmful expectations of who he is? Has he found a way to be "whole in Hollywood"?

John Dunham
1/30/2015 08:33:11 am

Not exactly EP - I think Josh sees his job as a host of a kind of fun show that goes to crazy places around the world in a kind of fun way.

I don't think he has a religious or other agenda like Wolter, Tsoukalos or Moneymaker.

I actually enjoy Gates' shows. I scream at the TV and punch myself in the head when I watch AU, AA, and FB

EP
1/30/2015 09:01:54 am

That's not incompatible with anything I said ;)

Clint Knapp
1/30/2015 11:06:09 am

So, for sheer fun I did a little scraping around (no way a serious dig) at the edges of the Al-Maqrizi passage just to see if I could anticipate where AA cult would take it if one so happened to notice.

First, it's worth noting that the most commonly held modern source of the Nile is Lake Victoria, though the rivers feeding into that are also considered sources, and expeditions have occasionally attempted to locate the sources of those rivers to find the true origins of the Nile itself.

Since AA certainly won't be launching any expeditions up Ugandan rivers any time soon, it's probably safe to say they'd stop at Lake Victoria, declare the statues a dam that's now submerged, maybe send Tsoukalos down in a minisub ala Scotty's Amazing Underwater Pyramid Adventure, and declare the statue-dam lost forever after a harrowing episode concerning a low oxygen reserve.

The mountain, Qumr, does pose an interesting problem, though. My (very) superficial search turns up no such mountain, but since we're talking about an Islamic fantasy about the pre-history of a then-mysterious land, that's not a surprise. The Mountain of the Moon could be, and most likely is, just a literary device meant to signify that the river itself flows from Allah, who's symbol is the moon.

However... according to (and I cannot vouch for the accuracy involved) a baby-name site, quranicnames.com, Qumr is a female name meaning... well... this:
"Qumr is an Arabic name for girls that means “extremely fair-skinned”, “extremely white-skinned”."

That's right! Behold! The source of the Nile is ancient white aliens, and everything I've written up to this point has been a useless attempt at painting a (very) slightly scholarly coat on a dream episode of AA.

Reply
EP
1/30/2015 11:22:37 am

"declare the statues a UFO that's now submerged"

Fixed it for you :)

Reply
Jose S.
1/31/2015 03:38:02 am

No, no, EP, the statues were stolen by the Templars and buried in Oak Island together with the Ark, and the treasure they brought to America in their 18 ships... Ships? You may be right after all the could be 18 UFOs... :-)

gdave
1/30/2015 02:34:23 pm

The "Mt. Qumr" (literally, Mount Moon) in the passage above is likely a transcription or translation error somewhere along the line for Mountains of the Moon.

The idea that the Nile originates in the Mountains of the Moon originates, I believe, with the ancient Greeks, appearing, for example, in Ptolemy's Geographia. This idea was generally accepted as geographical fact by Arab geographers - they believed there was an actual, physical mountain range, actually known as the Mountains of the Moon by locals, where the Nile originated. No Allah-symbolism involved (not that that would stop AA theorists from adducing it anyway).

I'm not familiar enough with Arabic names to say whether "Qumr" is used as a given name for a girl, fair-skinned or otherwise, but it certainly makes sense (fair as the moon).

By the way, the verb root, QaMaRa, means "to gamble", or with a direct object, "to defeat [the d.o.] in gambling", or, in passive form, "to lose at gambling", or, oddly, "to be or become snow-blind" (I guess some sort of reference to the snow-white Moon? Maybe?). Other forms derived from that root deal with gambling and speculating, "to be moonlit (night)", and, truly weird, "to toast (bread)". The common nouns and adjectives derived from the root are various terms referring to the moon, gambling, and (again, weirdly,) toast.

If you can make an AA theory out of all of that, I'll be very impressed!

Reply
Clint Knapp
1/30/2015 05:09:50 pm

I did come across the Mountains of the Moon reference, though not specifically from Ptolemy, and figured such was the case. Otherwise I was going to suggest that it was a localized name for a mountain that otherwise went by different names to different people, or a cross-referenced name given to one mountain being named after another. Any number of things, really, I just didn't delve very deeply into it.

Thanks for all the good info, though.

As for making an AA theory out of the expanded information; that's easy. "Because, aliens!" You see, at night a UFO shines so brightly like the moon that one can become snowblind by looking at it up close for too long, and it's always a gamble whether you'll survive the encounter or end up toast!

Jason Colavito link
1/31/2015 04:14:22 am

From what I've read in the French translation, I'm thinking that the translator wasn't terribly familiar with the Classical allusions. The French literally read "the Qumr Mountain" and left the word untranslated, but others who have written on the subject call it the Mountains of the Moon, after Ptolemy.

Only Me
1/30/2015 02:48:54 pm

Tsoukalos would have no reason to be concerned about a low-oxygen environment.

Remember, he once said he went into a pyramid and was amazed his lighter didn't work...because there wasn't enough air inside...and no one, including him, passed out or died because of that...

Oh, hell. My brain just broke.

Reply
EP
1/30/2015 02:50:05 pm

Wait, what? When did he do that?

Only Me
1/30/2015 02:59:53 pm

It was during the premier of Ancient Aliens.

EP
1/30/2015 04:30:37 pm

I must have repressed the memory.

(Shudders.)

Clint Knapp
1/30/2015 05:11:23 pm

Oh god. I forgot about the lighter incident too. I was going to suggest that he could stay down longer than the air supply lasted just by way of carrying enough of his own around in his skull, though.

Clete
1/31/2015 04:42:31 am

When I read your comment about America being filled with Middle aged and old white men, who dress up in historical costumes and fantasize about how much life was better in the nineteenth century, I could not help myself. My thoughts turned at once to the United States Senate.

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EP
1/31/2015 04:53:03 am

They dress up in historical costumes?! :o

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Clete
1/31/2015 10:00:42 am

Not really historical costumes, more, in keeping with what they do, clown suits.

Christine Erikson link
2/1/2015 03:39:32 am

how wonderful life was in the 19th century? A lot of those who think like that wouldn't have made it to adulthood, or to the age they are now.

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Jason Dixon link
3/12/2020 04:24:46 pm

Yet everyone knows who Josh Gates is and no one knows who you are.

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