Review: Treasure Quest: Snake Island

There have been quite a few shows on television that involved hunting for some sort of lost treasure. For the most part, they haven't been successful and haven't even been very good television. Primarily because if you don't find the treasure, than the show is just about the hunt and a process show can often be pretty boring to watch.

The new Discovery show TREASURE QUEST: SNAKE ISLAND premieres this Friday and while I don't know if they'll find any treasure, the search promises to be a lot more exciting than the normal treasure hunt. Any place called "Snake Island" should be pretty dangerous and in this case, we're dealing with an island that has an average of one dangerous snake per meter of land. So, calling the place "Snake Island" might be underselling the danger.

Here's a bit of the backstory: more than 400 years ago, Portuguese soldiers teamed up with a local Brazilian tribe and launched an attack on the prosperous (and gold rich) Incan empire. They were eventually driven back, but not before the soldiers and their allies had collected hundreds of millions of dollars worth of gold and other treasures.

Unfortunately for the soldiers, the local tribe that had been fighting alongside them decided to cut themselves a new deal. They killed the soldiers, grabbed the treasure and headed back to their home on the coast of Brazil. The trail gets a bit murky after that, but legend has it that the locals were afraid that holding onto to the treasure would make them a target. So they hid the wealth on some nearby island.

For five hundred years, treasure hunters have been searching for the lost Incan gold without success. Aided by a mysterious trasure map that surfaced in India a hundred years ago, nearly every island off the Brazilian coast has been frantically searched.

But long-time treasure hunter Cork Graham looked at the map and developed a new theory. He believes the natives hid the treasure on an island named "Trinidade." The island isn't inhabited and hasn't been previously searched due to its mountainous terrain and the presence of thousands of deadly snakes.

TREASURE QUEST: SNAKE ISLAND is about the search for this Incan treasure and based on the first episode of the show, it promises to at the very least be filled with some excitement. Much of the premiere episode involves showing how difficult the search can be, as the team uses sonar to try and map the location of an old shipwreck Graham believes is somewhere off the shore of the island. If the wreck is there, it would prove that the treasure might have been moved there hundreds of years ago. It would also provide enough incentive for Graham's team to visit an island filled with deadly snakes.

Aside from the snakes, there are some other dangers, including the presence of local pirates, who have been known to capture boats, kill the crew and strip the boat of everything that can be carried away. Balance that danger with the fact that the crew isn't allowed by Brazilian law to carry weapons and you can begin to see the many challenges of this search. 

Episode one spends some time introducing the crew, including expedition dive master Mehgan Heaney-Grier, Herpetologist and snake expert Bryan Fry, ship mechanic Jeremy Whalen and the ship's captain Keith "Cappy" Plaskett. As you might expect from any group of people braving such danger in hopes of finding treasure, there are some real characters on the crew. But they seem to get along reasonably well so far, which is a nice alternative to  the typical yelling and screaming you often hear on TV shows like this.

TREASURE QUEST: SNAKE ISLAND is a welcome change from the typical "Let's get rich" type of television show. And while the first episode could be a bit more exciting, that's more a problem caused by the need to introduce the process and the people. The episode ends on a great cliffhanger and based on clips I've seen from upcoming episodes, I'm expecting the action to ramp up substantially next week. Team that with a look at a very different part of the world and you have yourself a winning programming formula.

In the past couple of years, Discovery has created a niche for itself on Friday nights airing over-the-top action adventure shows. TREASURE QUEST: SNAKE ISLAND fits nicely into that genre and if you've been missing GOLD RUSH or BERING SEA GOLD, you'll be happy to know that you have something new to do with your Fridays.