The Curse Of Oak Island Moment That Went Too Far
"The Curse of Oak Island" is a reality show on The History Channel that has been airing since 2014. It centers around brothers Rick and Marty Lagina, who search for legendary undiscovered riches alongside Oak Island residents and treasure hunters Dave and Dan Blankenship. Each week, the team is this close to finding... something — and each episode, that big find turns out to be an uninteresting dud.
For some reason, viewers keep coming back for more. The show just started airing episodes of Season 9 and is still getting at least 2 million viewers per episode, per ShowBuzzDaily. Some of those viewers are undoubtedly optimistic that the boys will be successful and find a literal treasure trove that the Lagina's have been pursuing for over a decade. Other fans are a little more skeptical, making fun of how hyperbolic the show can get at times (but they can't seem to stop hate-watching). One of the show's most notable duds really got fans talking.
Fans felt that the cork oak discovery was too much of a stretch
During Season 3, Episode 4 of "The Curse of Oak Island," the team believed that a seemingly out-of-place tree stump meant Portuguese religious explorers had visited the area centuries ago. They initially thought that the tree stump was from a cork oak tree native to southwestern Europe. From there, the narrator extrapolated that a Portuguese sect of the Templars, The Knights of Christ, were the ones who brought the cork oak seeds to the area — and that they may have left buried treasure behind.
Like so many other "big finds" on the show, the Portuguese Templars theory turned out to be a dead end. When that truth came to light, fans had a lot to say about how the wild speculation went too far, like in this Reddit thread that insisted it was one of the show's most WTF moments. There was also a lot of talk about what the mysterious tree's species actually was, with the overwhelming consensus that it was definitely not a cork oak. Understandably, some reality TV shows will go out of their way to generate hype and get better ratings, but theorizing that Portuguese Templars left behind buried treasure is one of the more outlandish storylines we've seen on the show so far.