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| Do you remember when this happened? Because "Under the Dome" doesn't. |
Dear Readers,
I’m sorry. In part,
I’m sorry that this review is coming to you two days late. The truth is I didn’t want to write this
piece because I think I’m at my wits’ end with Under the Dome. You see,
dear readers, Under the Dome thinks
that we are stupid; not just a little bit stupid, but colossally, astoundingly
stupid. That’s the only explanation I
can come up with to explain the first three episodes of this season.
The Dome writers
think we’re too dumb to realize that the water cycle does not work in such a
way that you can spray the local lake with a magical maguffin and instantly
turn acid rain clean. They think we’re
so oblivious that we wouldn’t notice the magical “wormhole” granting internet
access provides only one barely relevant plot detail and really just serves as
a five minute commercial for Windows tablets.*
They think we’ll blindly accept the idea that a school, any school,
would keep an entire roster of every student who has ever used a locker going
back more than thirty years – and to accept that that roster would be in a
hardbound book, not in an Excel spreadsheet.
* If that wormhole and
internet access do not periodically return throughout this season, the third
episode of this season will go down as the single worst instance of product
placement in the history of television.
The writers believe our memories so short that we won’t
remember anything from last season, like how Junior imprisoned Angie and is
kind of a nutball, or the number of people Big Jim killed, or the fact that
people were running out of propane in the season finale. None of that has been present in the first
three episodes of this season. Junior is
just one of the guys, and a deputy to boot!*
Big Jim is still apparently a citizen leader, despite trying to frame
and execute an innocent man all of two days ago. And while the dreaded conversation over
“resources” is happening, nobody outside the core group is complaining
anymore. That’s not even getting into
the fact that Sheriff Linda died in the season premiere and nobody but Melanie,
the undead mystery lake girl, has bothered to notice.
* “Hey Junior, how do
you become a Sheriff’s deputy in Chester’s Mill?” “Oh, you just need to be the kidnapper son of
the murderous city councilman.”
Look, I get that this is a television show, and a science
fiction television show at that, so a certain amount of narrative forgiveness
is necessary, but this show insults my intelligence. I’ve watched bad TV before. I watched every episode of Smash, twice, for Christ’s sake. But
Under the Dome is a show that expects
me to forget everything I’ve seen before so that they can do what they need to
do, whether that’s turning a bad guy good or just airing a Microsoft commercial
(complete with “the tablet’s working perfectly but the internet’s gone”
lines).
The frustrating part is that for as terrible as Dome is, it still presents some
interesting ideas. Monday night, we got
the beginning of a potential religious war between Julia, who believes the dome
is there to save everybody; Lyle, who believes the dome will only save “true
believers;” and Rebecca, who uses the logic and rationality of science to cover
her blatant self-preservation. She’s
obviously fine with culling the herd because she believes she’ll be safe from
the culling.
But these interesting ideas are hidden by an ever-increasing
bundle of mysteries that never get answered.
The egg? Forgotten. The
butterflies and the Monarch? Dead and forgotten. The speech given by whatever entity inhabited
Norrie’s mom’s body? Forgotten. The fact that Julia was shot just a few days
ago? Forgotten. In their place we get creepy Lyle, enigmatic
Sam, and Junior’s mom’s entreaty to trust nobody. The show keeps piling mystery on top of
mystery as though that can take the place of actual storytelling.
I really don’t know what to do with this show. It’s capable of introducing intriguing ideas
but is as likely to dump them as explore them.
It’s also a series that must think its audience to be complete
morons. I don’t want to keep watching,
but the truth is that I’m a bit of an OCD completionist when it comes to
television. I’ve only given up
completely on two shows in my memory: Entourage
and Nip/Tuck. I’ll probably keep watching, but can’t
recommend that anybody else do the same.
At this point Under the Dome
is all hope and no substance.
Tyler Williams is a
professional librarian and an amateur television critic. You can reach him at TyTalksTV AT gmail DOT
com or on Twitter @TyTalksTV.
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