I Wasn't Loving Jeffrey Dean Morgan's Destination X. Then I Got The Final Riddle Wrong And I'm All In

Spoilers ahead for the series premiere of Destination X on NBC, available streaming now with a Peacock subscription.

Summer has come to the 2025 TV schedule, which means that NBC switched from The Voice Season 27 finale over to the Season 20 premiere of America's Got Talent and the debut of Jeffrey Dean Morgan's Destination X for Tuesday nights. While the actor is likely best known nowadays for playing Negan in the cast of The Walking Dead's world, he's now the host of the new unscripted travel competition show that's taking contestants all across Europe in the pursuit of $250,000.

I'll admit it – I wasn't really invested in the premiere for most of the hour, but oddly enough, my bold final guess being completely wrong is what makes me want to tune in again.

Why I Wasn't Loving Destination X

Perhaps because I was coming off of two hours of the very straightforward America's Got Talent, but Destination X struck me as pretty convoluted from the start. The first ten contestants were loaded onto a bus that would probably be a nightmare for any claustrophobes out there, and driven all over a mystery country while gathering clues about what "Destination X" is. At the end, an unlucky handful of contestants had to head to the Map Room to place a pin closest to where they thought they were.

There were fancy goggles that were basically blindfolds, coins with symbols, and a chase through the streets of a village that felt very Amazing Race to me. My sticking point was that the locations that were used as clues were all actually far away from Rome, which was supposed to be Destination X. The locations they got to see were in Italy, but they were never actually taken to Rome before they had to lock in their guesses.

Honestly, for a healthy chunk of the premiere, my hottest take was that I hoped the poor figurine shop had been staged for the show because the two racing contestants basically destroyed the place looking for the right Pinocchio doll. Plus, I'll come clean – I'm generally not great at guessing in competition shows. I'm pretty useless at The Masked Singer. Jeopardy? Any day. Destination X? I wasn't feeling it. Winning my grade school geography bee was a LONG time ago.

What Hooked Me

One would think that my usual failures at solving clues like on The Masked Singer would mean I was frustrated by how spectacularly wrong I was in my guess for what Destination X was at the end of the premiere, but that's not the case. Convinced as I was that the first Destination X wouldn't be as obvious as Rome, the coin with a "J" surrounded by a heart that one team identified as a clue about William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet gave me the answer to where the contestants were... or so I thought for the rest of the episode, anyway.

Let me nerd out here for a minute, because instead of assuming that the Romeo and Juliet clue was as straightforward as pointing to Rome – a.k.a. the first syllable of the title – I thought back to the opening lines of the actual play penned by Shakespeare, which were:

"Two households, both alike in dignity,

In fair Verona, where we lay our scene,

From ancient grudge break to new mutiny,

Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean."

Clearly, Jeffrey Dean Morgan was tricking viewers into thinking Destination X was Rome, when the location was obviously Verona! I was confident enough that I even overlooked other clues pointing toward the actual capital of Italy, and really went hard on assuming that the show was being trickier than it actually was.

And you know what? I had fun being wrong, and was so very wrong that I could laugh at myself and watch the promo for the next episode eagerly. Plus, Big Brother vet Josh Martinez made the most of being the first contestant eliminated by announcing to the rest of the competitors that "Rick is a snake" and everybody should watch their back around him.

Considering that Mack had been the most wily of the premiere, Josh dropping the Rick bombshell was a doozy of a way to end the episode. Was he right that Rick, the dad of the group, had been setting him up to guess Milan instead of Rome? I can't say, although I decided to keep an eye on him once he identified "Luigi" as one of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Whether or not Rick is a snake, good on the former Big Brother winner for stirring the pot before leaving the bus.

So, I will be tuning in for another episode of Destination X, because dang it – or, to quote Biggy, "dadgum" – I want to get a riddle right and not twist one single clue into some kind of Shakespearean conspiracy. Is that what Destination X was going for in the premiere? Almost certainly not, and I'm guessing most of the audience correctly named Rome as the answer instead of flashing back to high school English class.

Find out where the remaining contestants are headed next with new episodes of Destination X on Tuesdays at 10 p.m. ET on NBC, following America's Got Talent. You can also stream next day on Peacock.