TV Review: Destination Truth 3.09 – “The Bhutan Yeti”

Episode: Destination Truth 3.09 – “The Bhutan Yeti”
Original Air Date: November 4, 2009

Usually, I’m pretty certain in my dislike of the SyFy Channel’s need for “mid-season finales,” but in this case I’m actually glad for it. I like this show. Josh isn’t a d-bag to the people who work with him on these cases, they clearly enjoy what they’re doing, and they don’t mind having fun on camera with the people they encounter. I get the impression that they actually do take the job seriously, but realize that humor goes a long way in cases such as these (where they usually don’t have a lot to show on camera). So, when Destination Truth started getting really hard for me to watch a few weeks back (staying awake to the end was becoming increasingly difficult), I was afraid that the charm of the show had worn off. The mid-season finale is happening at just the right spot for me. Too bad the 40 minute hour of the show didn’t deliver something a little more “Holy cow, I can’t wait for the second half of the season to start already!”

In the first episode of the second season, Josh and the team investigated the Yeti on Mount Everest in Nepal. What they found out there was an impressive footprint that made the rounds on news all over. This time, the team heads to the Himalayas located in Bhutan for another shot at finding the elusive man-like creature.

This is something I wish more paranormal investigation shows would do — go back to the same place more than once. Actually, I wish they’d spend more than one night in a particular location, but I’d settle for multiple visits. The team does supposedly trek through Bhutan for ten days, which seemed to be the amount of time it took to get to each investigation location. They didn’t see anything during those day treks, just in case you were wondering (everything happens at night, don’t you know).

As with a majority of Destination Truth eps, the best part is seeing the locations and watching the team interact with the locals. Bhutan is beautiful, and even though they only started getting TV a decade ago, it doesn’t stop the monks there from being hip with the times and using mobile phones. I actually would have liked to hear more about the Gross National Happiness and how they keep everyone so happy, but I guess looking for a big hairy guy who likes to hang in the mountains is good enough. On the way through the mountains, the team runs into a group of people having a rarely witnessed ritual that is done to ward off evil (a majority of the population do believe in the Yeti). One of the locals they talk to actually has two vertebrae that had been passed down a few generations, with the story they were from a Yeti.

During the actual investigations, Jael asked Josh if they had any weapons. Because, you know, they’re in the wilderness. With bears! And tigers! And why is she just now worried about being able to defend herself against the dangerous animals they know for a fact are out there? They do a lot of yelling and running in the direction of thermal hits or sounds again in this one. That method of tracking makes me suspect they don’t actually want to catch any footage of whatever it is they’re yelling at whilst chasing. The team does find hair samples that they bag and tag and that’s about it. Unfortunately, the team just do a lot of the little things that annoy me about their investigation tactics in this episode.

In the end, the vertebrae look very similar to those of a black bear and that gives them a possible explanation for those. The hair sample, on the other hand, turns out to be some pretty compelling evidence of some unknown being out there in the mountains. They get a specialist to run the gamut on the samples, and surprisingly enough the results are that of a large primate of an unidentified species. Further proves that we don’t, in fact, know everything and there are things out there still waiting to be discovered.

Rating: 3 / 5 Stars