‘Dig’ Review: USA’s New Indiana Jones Meets The Da Vinci Code Series Comes Up Short All Around

‘Dig’ review for USA’s new doomsday series with a plot aiming for Indiana Jones meets the Da Vinci Code while coming up short on both accounts…

By Damon Martin — Editor/Lead Writer

USA’s ambitious new event series ‘Dig’ debuted on Thursday night from creators Tim Kring (Heroes) and Gideon Raff (Homeland), which explores an international mystery that will likely lead to the end of the world. Or at least that seems like where things are headed after the pilot.

The series gets off to a rather generic start with a passage from the book of Numbers in the Bible followed up by an R.E.M. lyric (It’s the end of the world as we know it), a not so subtle hint where we’re headed although getting there may be an arduous journey.

‘Dig’ is based primarily around three locales and a host of different characters.

In Jerusalem, the main plot revolves around an FBI investigator named Peter Connolly, who got transferred to Israel to escape the horrors of home after his daughter died. He’s currently hooking up with his direct superior officer, Lynn Monahan (played by Anne Heche) while searching for a murderer, who is suspected of killing a Senator’s child back in the United States. Connolly is a stereotypical ‘troubled cop’ constantly haunted by his past who encounters a young American exchange student who is currently living in the city while working on an archeological dig beneath the streets of Jerusalem.

Their ‘chance’ meeting leads to a walk through the city and eventually some skinny-dipping in some underground pools close to the dig site where scientists are currently trying to find the Ark of the Covenant (yes, the same one from ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’ and they even reference that so kudos to the writers for acknowledging it). The next morning Connolly is surprised to find out that the exchange student was found dead hours after they were together and while looking at her pictures in the police file it finally comes to him why she looked so familiar — this girl looks like his daughter!

So yeah, creepy enough already that he jumped naked into a pool with this girl and kissed here and then later discovered she looked like his daughter, but Connolly now has a bigger problem because he wants to investigate her murder without ever telling anyone that he met her. Because that always works out so well.

In Norway, a red calf is born that is part of the Biblical passage at the start of the series. A group of Hasidic Jews examines the animal to ensure it’s pure and once they’ve found the match, a young man is left behind to guard the cow as it grows strong enough to travel.

Meanwhile, back in the United States by way of New Mexico, a fanatical evangelical preacher, who writes books titled “Immortality Through Jesus”, is secretly running a doomsday cult while raising a young boy named Joshua, who is constantly locked behind closed doors and never allowed to see the light of day. This boy has a greater mission to complete and undoubtedly he’ll play some role in the apocalyptic plot that will certainly unfold in the coming weeks.

The series pilot ran for an hour and 20 minutes and only barely scratched the surface of what’s actually going on with the plot. The first episode was mostly a long string of hints and innuendos meant to draw viewers in to stick around for the entire series to find out what exactly is going on. Unfortunately the only thing the pilot did was serve to confuse and rarely gave any kind of answer that made sense. The creators and writers were trying to make ‘Dig’ a modern day Indiana Jones wrapped up in a Da Vince Code type mystery, but largely failed on both accounts.

Now, one thing that is for certain, any time you’re dealing with a series meant to unfold a larger plot over the course of 10-episodes, the first one may not give you all the answers you seek, but it’s supposed to at least suck you in enough so you want to come back for more.

‘Dig’ gave very few answers and mostly got wrapped up in presenting far too many questions over the course of the pilot episode. How these stories all come together remains a mystery and while the overlying theme — the end of the world as we know it — is supposed to run as a common thread amongst all the characters, ‘Dig’ felt like one part cop procedural and another part doomsday mystery.

Neither was all that interesting and didn’t seem to accomplish what the creators set out to do. At least not through the first episode anyways.

‘Dig’ Pilot Episode Lands a 2 out of 5 on the Skolnick Scale