In Search Of… S03E23 Sodom and Gomorrah

When I first decided to review these shows, I began rewatching them for the first time in years. I remembered some of the themes – cryptozoology, disaster porn, missing person, sensationalised anthropology. But I completely forgot the whole Biblical archaeology theme that runs through the show. Why? Well for a start, it’s boring. Like, massively, massively boring. Even the dull ghost stories are better than this.

I’m going to skip my usual blow by blow account of the episode and get down to the key – indeed, the only point – the episode makes. Archaeologists found a non-Biblical source that names two cities called Sodom and Gomorrah.

That’s it. It’s meaningless. To the believer and non-believer alike, it proves nothing except that the writers of the Bible used real place names. And yet this simple factoid is repeated ad nauseum like it means something.

There’s the usual desert travelogue that we get whenever the Bible comes up. There’s clips from some Biblical movie. There’s some interviews with odd people who start by saying that archaeology doesn’t prove the Bible but, hey, doesn’t archaeology prove the Bible? There’s Nimoy in the California desert but let’s pretend he’s in Israel. And there’s lots and lots of padding. There’s some vague hint that the destruction of the Cities of the Plain was connected to some poorly described geological disaster. I wish they’d gone into more detail on that last one, because it would have been much more fun.

I usually aim to write about a thousand words on these reviews, but this time I just quit. There just isn’t enough substance to this episode to justify my going on.

Quotes:

Nothing

Summing up:

Nimoyness: 6/10, Everything else 1/40. Overall 7/50. Fail