Gold Rush's Current Season is Officially the Longest in the Show's History
Since its inception in 2010, Gold Rush has been a major reality project on Discovery, currently comprising more than 300 episodes over the main show’s 13 seasons and several spin-off series.
However, the distribution of episodes across the seasons has been surprisingly erratic — and season 13, which is now airing, turns out to be the longest in the show’s history.
The final episode of season 13, titled “Klondike Climax,” will be aired on March 31.
This will be the season’s 26th episode, and combined with the two specials released earlier this year, the 13th season features a total of 28 episodes. This is even longer than the show’s season five, which had 21 episodes and three specials.
Viewers are quite stunned by this record-breaking number of episodes, especially because Rick Ness, one of the show’s favorite stars, has been out for most of this season, and it was expected that his absence would create a big hole in the series’ content. But apparently, this was no obstacle to the series’ resourceful producers, who came up with plenty of new stories to entertain their audience.
In a discussion on Reddit, fans speculate if this extended season duration has been pre-planned or not, and some of the suggested explanations are surprisingly comprehensive and plausible:
“Footage from what might have been a Dave Turin's Lost Mine season footage was being used, possibly necessitating another episode or two, but when Rick was lost from the season early on without planning for it by the producers, they immediately scrambled and used all of the footage from what turned out to be Dave's last season rather just use it as a preview of a separate show, and then they scrambled some more to film Winchesters and Claytons as Rick replacements,” Redditor Southern_Donkey_3326 shared their idea.
But not everyone is happy about the 13th season being so lengthy, as much of the action in it could have been cut out or replaced. The opinion is that the producers are dragging out the show, filling it with lots of unnecessary and uninteresting things. Gold Rush has become repetitive and is slowly dying, many viewers think.
“There’s so much more to mining they never show. One of the more interesting things was Kara doing the mine safety upgrades a couple of years ago. Cover what’s involved in reclamation. I’d love to see them melting and selling the gold,” Reddit user VOODOO_285 wrote.
Gold Rush’s season 13 has not been the most exciting season, but whether viewers like it or not, it’s certainly the longest one so far. And it’s coming to an end very soon — on March 31, 2023.