Well, not just men, because the women were pretty good, too (Donna, Lisa, Paula, etc.), but it's a figure of speech, all right? From a Bonnie Tyler song.
A while back, I got the DVDs of the first few seasons of SyFy's Ghost Hunters and watched them; I just finished season three and am waiting to get season four. I also jumped into the second half of season eight once they put them up On Demand, and the differences between them are pretty startling. I mean, it almost seems to be a completely different show and, to a point, it does bother me, for several reasons. I mean, I know that change happens and all that, but not all change is good and, so far, this doesn't seem to be.
TAPS, in the beginning, was all about debunking a haunting, not proving it, and that seems to have completely gone out the window. Now almost everything found by the new investigators is considered "paranormal," and when you're used to TAPS's old way of doing things that can get annoying pretty fast. Most of the time, sitting on my couch at home I can see explanations for the weird noise Britt is hearing or the weird shadows Adam is seeing--one of the worst instances of that was when they were down in Louisiana investigating the Alexandria Zoo and Adam was getting a really high EMF spike, so he and Britt were freaking out over it, when asked about it later they said they thought it might have been something paranormal. The problem with that? At the time Adam was picking up the EMF spike, he was standing on old zoo railroad tracks (metal)...during a thunderstorm (lightning). And it was never once suggested that the high electric field was caused by the reaction of metal to lightning. Not. Once. Not cool, guys.
Most of the crew seem to go into a place expecting it to be haunted, completely in contrast to the "old days" at TAPS. And, half the time, they focus on one reported haunting while barely mentioning another, like up at Fort Ontario. The fort reportedly houses the ghosts of both American soldiers and Jewish refugees fleeing the Holocaust, and yet throughout the entire episode, most of the investigators asked the spirits if they had fled World War Two or if they were refugees, even if they were in places where the soldier-ghosts had been seen. This is the part where I give props to Amy, which I really didn't expect to be doing, because she usually asked if they were a soldier or refugee, and then continued asking questions about refugees once she felt she got a response in the positive. If only most of the others had done that, maybe I wouldn't have been screaming at the TV so much during that episode (although I feel like I have to yell at Amy a bit for investigating even though she is pregnant, because there are factors on investigations that can both physically and spiritually harm you and I don't feel she should be exposing her unborn child to that).
I want to point out something good, though, just so this post doesn't seem like one big put-down fest. The three remaining members of what I think of as the "original" TAPS crew (Jason Hawes, Steve Gonsalves, and Dave Tango) still hold the most to the whole debunking thing--although I've seen Jason accept some evidence that I felt he would have glared at Brian for thinking was paranormal a few seasons ago--my, how things change.
Positive, Star Baby. Right.
On the same investigation, up at the fort, Steve and Dave kept hearing a strange noise they couldn't place and eventually managed to figure out that it was something up on the roof blowing in the wind. I screamed "THANK YOU!" because it was like a huge present, seeing that the word "debunk" still lingers somewhere in TAPS's collective subconscious. Jason and Steve also, during an EVP session, also waited until they felt they had received confirmation the ghost they were trying to communicate with was a refugee ghost before they started asking refugee questions and, when a locked door tried to open, made sure nothing else could have caused that to happen before they presented it as evidence.
The Trinity, as I've come to call them to myself (and now to you) still show me the stuff I started watching the show for, although at a much smaller volume than they used to when the whole group was like them. They're doing their best, I guess, and considering the level my blood pressure spikes up to when I watch the newbies do their stuff (and some of them aren't that new, which makes things worse), that's all I can ask for, though I remember when I didn't have to.
And would it be too hard to analyze the evidence a little better? I mean, when I hear some of the EVPs they catch and compare it to what they think it says, it's a Queen Mary-length apart. Of course, back in the "old days" there were EVPs where I heard different things than TAPs did, but those times were relatively few and far between, not every single time they play a dang thing. I know that people can hear things differently, especially when it's encased in static, but sometimes it's ridiculous how differently we hear things, and a lot of the time they don't even hear anything close to what I hear. They've presented things as words when all I heard was laughter, as names when the words didn't even to start with the same sound (for example, once they thought an EVP said "Amy" and I couldn't even pick an A-sound out, and to me it sounded much longer, like they were saying a multi-syllabic word or phrase).
Jason doesn't even seem the same these days. He hardly seems to smile--he doesn't look that happy to be there on most investigations, even. He seems sad and drawn half the time, like all of this is taking a bad toll on him, and combine that with that goatee he's sporting and it starts looking like he's been kidnapped and replaced by an evil Jason from another dimension.
Seriously, though, it bothers me to see something like this happening, because I love Ghost Hunters so much and watching the first few seasons helped to cement my desire to become a ghost hunter myself. It almost hurts watching the old seasons in parallel time with the new one, because it's like watching the TAPS van roll down some giant hill and crash into schlock-soaked nitroglycerine at the bottom. There have been barely any residential cases lately, which makes me doubt the sincerity now of their "We're TAPS and we're here to help" slogan. Who are they helping now? Hotels? Forts? They should be helping normal people, too, just as they did when Grant was there with them. A home potentially being invaded by spirits of some sort or another used to be a large portion of their cases, and now those have all but faded from sight.
Will I keep watching? Yes, I will, but I'll be wishing it was even just a little bit more like the old Ghost Hunters and a lot less every other stumble-around-in-the-dark show on TV.
And I'll always miss the way the shows used to end, with Jason and Grant together in the TAPS van discussing their last case and closing things with a fist-bump, a true ghost-hunting bromance.
Well, on to the next.
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