As we bring this turkey in for a landing, the narrator circles back to Segment 1 and recaps what we already heard about disclosure and the New York Times and UFOs, and we listen to various ufologists and John Podesta wax poetic about their desire for UFO disclosure. Giorgio Tsoukalos laments that “nobody cared” about the Times story, and the narrator asks if the U.S. government and other countries will reveal the truth about UFOs. But nobody stops to ask the more sobering and frightening question: What if they already have shared everything they know, and they actually know nothing?
Overall, this was both an expected episode for the series, given the publicity surrounding To the Stars Academy, but also an unusual choice for a season premiere. The episode had only token appearances from their two most recognizable ancient astronaut theorists—Tsoukalos and Childress—and many in the regular cast are absent altogether in favor of a ragtag group of largely anonymous ufologists and paranoiacs. The subject also had virtually no connection to the “ancient” half of the show’s title, despite another token effort to shoehorn in some irrelevancies. The added hour of runtime doubled the length, but not the depth, of the episode, and at twice the length, the essential laziness of the production team, and the cheapness of the production, stand out in stark relief. In the four months between December and now, they could have done all manner of investigation—or even just made use of published inquiries into To the Stars Academy—but they chose not to. Oddly, watching on a screener in which the computer animation wasn’t ready, these problems are even more obvious because the visual doodad aren’t there to distract from the threadbare narrative and complete lack of effort to do anything more than to read the internet at us and call it a TV show.