By Dale Nickey
Los Angeles, CA (The Hollywood Times) 6/3/24 – A staple item of mainstream broadcast television is the spinoff, a show with an umbilical connection to an already successful franchise. Enter Beyond Skinwalker Ranch; set to begin its second season.
There’s something about Utah. Otherworldly Rock formations, petroglyphs, and Mormons. It’s home to some of the strangest places on earth. Skinwalker Ranch isn’t the only place that has unexplained phenomena and Native-American legends of shapeshifting beings; and since the Skinwalker Ranch is fully engaged with their project, a new junior varsity team of investigators was created to look into high strangeness outside the borders of Skinwalker. Thus, Beyond Skinwalker Ranch was born.
The runaway success of The Secrets of Skinwalker Ranch has captured the imagination of science geeks and conspiracy enthusiasts across the board. Built on a solid bedrock of scientific method and provable fact, Skinwalker Ranch has entered its fifth season with no end in sight; so, it’s logical for the similarly themed Beyond Skinwalker Ranch to piggyback on that success with the mother series as its lead-in.
Credibility sells the Skinwalker franchise; and Beyond Skinwalker maintains that standard with its star Andrew Bustamante – a former CIA intelligence officer, decorated war veteran, and Fortune 10 corporate advisor. Clearly, Bustamante doesn’t need a History Channel spinoff for a paycheck. Paul Beban is his sidekick. Beban is an investigative journalist and producer who specializes in all things weird. His main function is to breakdown the science data into digestible bits for the audience and providing an extra pair of hands for Andy.
Season Two opens at Skinwalker HQ. Each show begins with a round table discussion headed by celebrity science-guy Travis Taylor and his fellow cast members. A new locale of reported anomalies is discussed and The Beyond Skinwalker team trots off to investigate. In the Season Two premier, Mount Wilson Ranch in Nevada is the target. It’s a sight previously investigated by Robert Bigelow (the godfather of Skinwalker investigation). The ranch is reported to have a huge unnatural object buried below ground in the meadow of the ranch. It’s also reported that Bigelow quickly abandoned the project when…well, you’ll have to tune in to find out. No spoilers here.
The Beyond Skinwalker team is obviously a scaled down enterprise when compared to the lavish techno eye candy on display on Skinwalker Ranch. Less hardware and high-cost experiments. It’s more of a guerilla operation that reports back to the Skinwalker team in Utah. The main function is to provide data that duplicates and supports phenomena already documented on Skinwalker Ranch in Utah. However, Andy Bustamante’s bona fides are impeccable and the region is a gift that keeps on giving when it comes to scientific anomalies.
Beyond Skinwalker is a worthy adjunct to the main franchise that further confirms that something is going on in the world we can’t see. It’s also nice to know that science is still sexy in this crazy world of alternative facts.
