Really though, this show can go to hell.
By Matt Fowler
Warning: Full spoilers for Under the Dome follow…
Now that CBS has pulled the plug/lifted the lid on Under the Dome, I can’t help but think back a few years to when a lot of us were actually excited about this series coming to TV. A Stephen King book. Adapted by Brian K. Vaughan. Dean Norris fresh off Breaking Bad. Lost’s Jack Bender as a producing director. A fun, mysterious concept that felt like it’d mesh well with a weekly series. And the pilot was pretty good actually. The premise held promise.
So how did it spiral so furiously and unapologetically into nonsense? With some of the worst writing on modern TV? Well, I’d have to say that it started in that pilot. Yes, the series premiere that I already mentioned wasn’t terrible. It started with the character of Junior. And his opening story with Angie, who we both seemed to meet mid-story when he locked her in an underground bunker. Out of everything presented to us at the outset, this was the weakest link in the chain. And Junior never ever improved. He continued to be one of the worst characters on a show that would pretty consistently introduce awful, painfully childish, obviously handled, color-by-numbers characters.
But I’m here to write, more specifically, about Season 3. For those masochistic enough, my reviews of past episodes are readily available. For those who want to more closely track the demise. In this season though, which was to be the final hurrah for the series, an alien race was fully introduced and more concrete answers were given about the dome itself. All leading to the finale where the dome was actually destroyed (with crystals and whistling, because of course), followed by a bunch of faint cliffhangers promising that a new dome might fall on a different town in a fourth season. Presumedly with all our heroes once again trapped inside it.
But there is to be no more. No more Dome. Embrace the cold comfort of this minor victory, friends. No more “Kinship” (because the aliens readily used English terms to describe their entire symbiotic societal structure). No more “love” being the thing that snapped people out of their alien brainwashing. Or “pain.” Or whatever it was that randomly worked whenever the show needed it to. Because this tactic also just as easily didn’t work when it suited the plot. The pattern seemed to be “good guys could break free, bad guys couldn’t.”
Season 3 kicked things off with most everyone in a Matrix-type reality, living out their lives as if they’d escaped the dome at the end of Season 2. Only Julia and Jim remained behind, which thusly caused them to unite for most of the season in an effort to take on the pod people. A dynamic I approved of if only because I was happy to see Julia get lumped in with someone as cartoonishly despicable as Jim. Because she’s horrible too.
Anyhow, the luxurious cocoon life gave the season premiere a decent “reset” feeling, allowing everyone to explore fake lives beyond the turmoil of Chester’s Mill. And Barbie was allowed to fall in love. And while we never got to know Eva as a character (not that I’d actually look forward to that on a show like Dome), his relationship with her, in the “fake” year they spent together, was way more meaningful than – like – the afternoon he and Julia once spent not arguing. But the show insisted that he and Julia had some sort of unbreakable love connection. Just a laughable concept through and through.
I would like to take this chance however to point out the one moment from this season that I truly liked. One that I almost knew was too good to be true, but still allowed myself to absorb for what it momentarily was. In the episode “Ejecta,” it looked like the entire outside world had gotten obliterated by meteors. Which actually made for a more subdued episode featuring everyone reflecting on how life was now meaningless. Sort of how we all feel when watching the show. Barbie even found himself powerless to stop a bunch of families, who were trying to get into the Dome, from being incinerated.
It was a huge curveball…that of course wasn’t real at all. It was more Dome trickery. And show cowardice. And the next episode reveal that the end of the world was all a sham was something that everyone, despite the time we spent watching their reactions to the planet being destroyed, took rather well. Like “Oh well. Dome’s gonna Dome.”
So the show took a outlying step forward only to immediately follow it up with a s***-ton of steps backwards. Back into its usual mode of televisual atrocity. Eva got super-pregnant and then gave hyper-birth (in one of the show’s worst scenes ever, featuring Julia pushing the alien baby out of Eva while Barbie buried his face in her crotch). And then that baby uber-grew up to become a doppelgänger of Eva wearing a blonde wig. This was all in the span of two episodes, mind you. During a series crucible that, by the end, had only lasted a month. Yes, only a month in that damn dome. The TV time-crunch element further adding to the preposterousness of everything.
Under the Dome made some notable attempts to start shutting down its tale of woe in Season 3, introducing an alien race, their schemes for survival, and bringing in guest players like CSI’s Marg Helgenberger and ER’s Eriq La Salle.
And by the end, the dome indeed came down, freeing the surviving citizens and possibly giving CBS the out it needed to swing the axe. The way out was not an easy one to bear though, as the show continued its trend of insultingly bad storylines, characterizations, and dialogue. Many times even becoming a parody of itself.
