Mysteries Decoded

Jennifer Marshall seems very objective. She asks good questions and doesn't just accept everything. Some of the past series like this seem to abhor skepticism over enthusiastic acceptance of anything with shock value. Her measured approach is refreshing.

It's really fun to see these mysteries approached from a trustworthy source. Jennifer Marshall is a Navy veteran and Private Investigator. She considers the facts with logic and an open-minded. I love watching her interact with her co-hosts, with believers, with witnesses, and with the unexplainable.

Ugh, nothing new to see here, folks. Two thirds of the show is re-stating history and stories and one third is the detective with some rando sensitive person that rarely does anything to further the investigation and usually just slows it down. She is good about not jumping onto seeming connections and conspiracy theories, but it is just not enough with a sea of these shows out there. There are youtube series that are more informative than this and offer some sort of new information most of the time.

I was hoping this series would provide new information, with facts and science behind each episode, otherwise, there really is no point to dredging up the same stories we've seen and read about for years. I don't really expect them to "solve" each mystery, or that would be a headline. However, the episode on the Salem witches had me disappointed. There was some history that was never dealt with, namely Cotton Mather. He was a prominent figure and had great influence on the Salem trials and yet, there was no mention of him at all. This now leads me to bring every episode into question as to how carefully or in depth is the provided information.

Not only jumped it, rocketed over the cattle-mutilated mystery shark-shaped apparition in a top secret military paranormal ghost time-traveling alien spacecraft.

Season one was an intelligent revisit to the kinds of "mysteries" that have kept Ancient Aliens on the air for eighteen seasons. The host would visit these "mysteries" and debunk them through a combination of common sense and logical reasoning. It was intelligent.

Intelligence is in short supply these days and this show used up its allotment, so late in Season one and now in Season two the show started treating the audience with contempt by presenting as fact the standard "mystery" tripe: baseless claims, wishful thinking, honest mistakes, and the usual gang of say-anything-for-a-buck pseudo-experts with made up qualifications the producers of these kinds of shows have on speed dial.

Eight stars for season one up until the final few episodes where they started pairing the once credible Jennifer with a deluded believer in whatever they were investigating. No stars for season two, which is an embarrassingly forced cartoony rehash of Ancient Alien Skinwalker Ranch Ghost Adventure Scooby Doo. The average is four stars, so, four stars.