Under the Dome. So, yeah.. That sure was a thing, wasn't it? Full disclosure: I didn't like it.
Sure, I kept watching it, but I grit my teeth through the whole season, and I don't think it was in the same ways the show runners were looking for (when I wasn't passing out during it). If its at all accurate to the book: I don't know, I've still haven't read the tome the series is based on, but I also don't really think it matters now that its made the jump to a new medium. Taking it as a completely new thing, I've got to say, it didn't make for very good television to me.
Now, I know people who've really liked the show. My dad even likes it, and I'd generally say something like this would be over his head. 11 million or so people tuned in for the finale, and the shows lowest viewer count was around 8 or 9 million, but we have to be realistic: what else was people going to watch during a pretty dry, droning, summer season?
Reruns and Netfix can only get you so far.
So what was it about Under the Dome that I didn't like? Well, thats quite a list, I'll tell you. I've spent the last few weeks trying to decide if I even wanted to post this because of the brain bleed it gave me.
Be prepared for some big spoilers ahead, don't tell me I didn't warn you!
Barbie and Julia:
This one is huge, at least for me. These are the two characters your supposed to ship for getting together and the show really doesn't waste any time simply giving you that with very little build up and a whole load of "what the fuck" logic (both in the lazy and the contrived sense of the term).
The story starts with Barbie actually killing and burying Julia's husband in a shallow grave, for unknown reasons. Then the dome comes down on the town and everyones reacting (sort of.. more on that later) and Barbie unknowingly gets close to Julia.. But that mystery only lasts a cool 3 seconds before he figures it out, after being invited to stay at the home she used to share with said, dead, hubby.
Awkward.
Well, soon all awkwardness flies right out the window, as these two are making eyes at each other and, soon after, acting like Ozzy and Harriot.
Seriously, within days of the dome falling over the town, these two are in bed together saying things like, "how was your day honey?"
Wait. I'm gagging. Hold on a sec...Okay, I'm good.
Trust me, I'm no prude; my problem is just that this relationship came out of no where with next to no provocation. It was like, zero to dry hump in 6 seconds. It's hardly days into this event, with Julia still "worrying" about her husband's whereabouts, when she decided to let this complete stranger into her home, let alone her heart. I'm not saying it couldn't happen in real life (in fact, it doesn't.. At least not in the sense that people get together because some forcefield pushes people into each others arms)but its highly unrealistic, even in a suspension of disbelief, to have a female character as smart, strong and level headed as we're lead to believe Julia is, have their heart vaguely lead her into something like this.
So it starts to come out through suspicions and loose talk that Barbie had something to do with Julia's husbands disappearance, and she gets angry with him, just in time to catch a strain of meningitis. She's all groggy and slaps him on the wrist with a , "Your not welcome in my home," line and then passes out, as we wait for the cure to take hold. Great, things are starting to feel real, even if the only real consequence is he doesn't get to hear her shower anymore... But then it pretty much gets forgotten minutes into the next episode.
Later on it becomes clear that Barbie did kill the husband, with very little fanfare surrounding the revelation, and all she ends up saying, because of some insurance papers in her husbands name, is basically, "Don't keep secrets from me any more." And thats about it for that: She's still unrealistically swooning over him after knowing more then she should.
Later on, after she gets shot by another unrealistic female character, he flat out proclaims his love to her over her unconscious body. When she wakes up, and he's been framed (if thats what you'd even call what they loosely did to say he did it) for her shooting, she wakes up and does everything in her wounded power to save his life.
Meanwhile, its only about 11 or 12 days into this whole thing.
The Dome:
Before I got any further, a small, but important, gripe: Some of the characters act like the dome is sentient... So should a writer bee capitalizing "dome" to reflect this?
I mean, they're very plainly acting like its part of the cast, so it almost seems befitting. Also, this makes the dome possibly the most boring character in the series. That's really saying a lot.
Junior and Angie:
Something is really disgusting about the way the show runners just flung these two into a demented, almost randomly generated, kidnap/obsession situation. These two seem sort of okay at first then, BAM, Junior's a psycho who seems like he got some of his life goals from Gerald's Game.
Theres little to no build up to the situation. There is next to no reason to care about either of these characters before this happens. And what makes matters worse, it traps Angie away to be someone we just sort of check in on every once and a while, just to watch her do something stupid in her bid to escape, and really no character development at all.
Even when she gets free, and Junior lets up quite a bit on the creepiness, she keeps finding reasons to get close to him every chance she gets, while she still hates his guts.
Junior, himself:
For most of the season you would have had to pay me to believe that this show wasn't supposed to be the Junior show. So much time seems to be devoted to what he's doing that its hard to escape the feeling.
Problem with this is, it was hard to decipher if the character had any motivations at all. Yeah, he trapped Angie to get her to love him and not skip town, when I think he was about to leave town for college himself. Then there's his whole daddy issues thing. But otherwise, he's just meandering around town, sometimes acting like a cop, but mostly just puffing his chest out. Even the season ended, he had no clear goals to hope for in the next season.
Another frustrating thing that only seems to be handled in extreme passing is how the show handles trying to garner any sympathy for the character. It seems like they start to try to dip their toes into that pool, then the writers yank him away from it... But the character is so fucked up as it is, with the strange stop and start pace of the show, that allowing him to become even a little likable wouldn't be any stranger then anything else going on. It may even help him come into his own. But they seem just as noncommittal with what to do with him, as the character itself seems to be playing out.
Big Jim and Junior:
Reading comments about these two across the web, I was pretty surprised to find out that people were confused about the whole issue between these two, which I felt was pretty obvious as soon as we saw Junior didn't have a mother. The issue of Jim being a devious, mentally abusive (and unstable), single father, and the unsaid (before it was just spat out by someone completely unrelated and throwaway) mystery of Junior's mother, is going to have a major effect on a growing boy.
But when I thought on it further, I found myself unsurprised people could be so thrown off, because the show very rarely bothers to go ahead and state the obvious while the characters are running around like keystone cops, doing inane things for the sake of drama. These two spent so much time beating their chests and barking at each other, with Big Jim shutting down everything Junior says, that the writers never gave any quarter to allow fans of the show learn all that much more. And that thought is still pretty annoying to me.
Angie and Big Jim:
Want to have a conversation about creepy chemistry? Lets talk about these two for a hot second.
These two don't appear in the same scenes very often, but ever since Big Jim finds Angie chained up in his fallout shelter, he's been apologetic and promising that she can have "whatever she wants" as long as she keeps this whole thing under-wraps. It appears as though he's doing it to save the embarrassment of having it come out that his son would do such a thing, but its much less for Junior's sake as it is Big Jim's ever-lusting obsession with power
Whats worse, whats truly creepy, is that he almost immediately started staring at her like he's going to jump his bones himself. Theres this look that Dean Norris has in his eye thats a lot less like, "Will she talk," or, "I'm sorry this ever happened," and so much more, "You got a purdy mouth, here take this diner and run it without food"
Theres just something ridiculously lewd about his eyes, and I wish I could find a picture of it right now to prove it.
Big Jim, himself:
This guy really feels like one big horrible joke. He obviously lusts for power and will do anything for it... Being only a small town councilman. And by councilman I'm assuming theres more council somewhere, but as far as I can remember the show has never once addressed that issue. We've just continuously been lead to believe that Big Jim is the only one with a seat on this thing; and doesn't that automatically give him the power?
See, its having to ask stupid questions like that, that really detract largely from this show. I really can't imagine that all of the rest of the council is locked out of the dome, or that they wouldn't have at least tried to step up and run the town as a democratic body, instead of this pseudo-dictatorship that Big Jim is trying to form.
Anyway, what should have been a thing that made us scared of Jim really worked against him. It just fell completely flat. In one episode Jim and Barbie are out on a man hunt after another of Sheriff Linda's failures (more on that later), and Jim goes into a weird, supposed-to-be-threatening, story about how he broke some kids pelvis with his head, when he played high school football. It was supposed to insinuate that Big Jim wasn't going to back down, he was going to run down everyone in his path towards what he wants... Except, it came off as an older guy musing and beating his chest about how he was once this strong buck who headbutted someones crotch till it broke. It wasn't exactly the most legendary tale, and it left my side splitting for at least a few weeks after (every time I see Dean Norris now, that -and minerals not being rocks- is going to be the first thing I think).
That whole exchange just sets the tone for all of Jim's character for most of the season, and it gets compounded when he goes out across the lake to another character's home (whom I'm about to talk about) and ends up kidnapper her mother (who I'll talk about soon after), and that woman's ridiculous death that he really didn't cause, and how that was supposed to be the "turn" towards him truly being this shows "big bad." The show waffled on it for too long, and put that "crotch incident" up as a wall in between us and any real revelation, when it really should have been clear from the start that Jim was the one to watch.
And any way you slice it, the townsfolk (who I'll also talk about later) are pretty shortsighted if they keep doing everything this guy says. They're all sheep, and its annoying. Seriously, theres nothing stopping anyone from shooting and killing this man for being an asshole, while he's making one of his grand speeches about Chester's Mill being his home, and he'll do anything to protect it. It doesn't sound like this guy really was all that well liked before the dome fell (I think he was a used car salesman, to boot), so I just can't see why these (not cast) people are blindly following him.
Oh, and while I remember.. This whole vague drug manufacturing.. Thing.. He had going on and keeps killing to protect (when not "protecting the town"), would have been a much better, deeper, storyline that would have better set up Jim to be a big bad, then the mess they put him through. The stop and start nature of the season had him speeding up and putting on the breaks so fast, so hard, that it pretty much gave the writing brain damage. If they just committed to a slow simmer that lead up to a situation like Julia trying to expose Jim for what he is (because she's the "need to know it all" journalist --which got forgotten pretty quickly too), and Barbie playing hero to protect her, even though he had just as much blood on his hands, it would have maybe made for a more believable situation, under the most unbelievable circumstances.
Maxine:
She comes in very late in the game, completely unannounced, and suddenly has the two of the most influential characters on the show by the balls, in a situation where they seriously could have outright killed her and no one would have been the wiser (what with all the other crazy shit going on in the town). Basically, Maxine epitomized pretty much everything that was wrong with the show.
She somehow survived for days without showing herself, but she was so powerfully connected to everything and nothing all at the same time. Poof, she was given importance when all she really had was 9 episodes of impotence through absence.
Instead of really flexing any of that power she pretended to have what did she do? She starts a fight club.. And the morons of this town were just willing to show up with what little food they have and trade it for an entrance fee, further fueling the shows insane "of the week" mentality.
Then Maxine decides to further this weird, shoe-horned, obsession with wanting to dominate Barbie with her sexual wiles, that he quickly and animately denies... So she hauls off and shoots Julia, because: why the fuck not?
Then, after another baffling chest beating exchange between Big Jim and Barbie, while on some odd mission to Maxine's headquarters (or whatever), Big Jim just off and shoots her like the bit player she was really meant to be, framing Barbie for it and "cementing" himself as the shows true big bad.
And thats Maxine: Three whole episodes of "evil," with very little motivation described.
Maxine's Mother:
The mention of Maxine's mother is mentioned in other sections, but she needs to be talked about for a little bit more in depth for a simple reason: She spends so much time pointing a gun at Jim, explaining her back story, implying something about Jim and her past with her talk of "you don't remember me?", just to die in the most horribly ridiculous manner, just minutes later.
Her death really is one of the most stupid things I've seen on television. The whole execution of it, from a directorial standpoint, really just didn't happen as well as I think the showrunners hoped for. There she is, on Jim's speedboat all tied up, wiggling and hoping for escape, only to get up and flop into the water. Not as a means of escape, but because she "fell in." Then Jim stops, thinks about it a second, and then just shrugs and leaves her there. No crazy monologue about how it needed to happen. No creepy, "I'm sorry it had to be this way." Just leaves her, like he dropped a bucket that he didn't' want to go back for.
Our main villain folks.
The Preacher:
I can't really remember this guys name, and I know I could look it up, but thats okay: He died so quickly that none of us were meant to give much of a damn about him in the first place. But boy, when he was around, he sure was a mess.
I've never seen a character take such dramatic shift in tone between episodes before in my life. The guy goes from this bumbling, sort-of-drugged-out, moron who almost dies in his own fire, to becoming the official Doomsayer of the End Times, all clean and sober and all, pretty much the next day.
Then Jim confronts him and shoves his hearing aide ear into the dome, killing him. Thats it.
And yeah, this should really have been where Jim became the clear cut villain of the show, but his aforementioned crotch-killing anecdote, and even his own son, undercut him from that pretty early.
Sheriff Linda Esquivel:
Possibly the worst sheriff in the history of television. And thats saying something following up an act like Emma of Once Upon A Time.
Linda constantly breaks her own rules right in front of people she just told to follow those rules. Like when they roped off the dome and told people not to touch it, but she breaks the line immediately after to touch it in a sentimental moment with her firefighter fiancée.
She also constantly gets her subordinates killed. It just seems like a steady supply of people under her watch get killed --including her fiancée's brother.
She also constantly gets knocked out or otherwise tricked, which is what lead to the situation that lead to Jim's football story. That one also had the distinction of them having to track down one of her subordinates, who rightfully gets freaked by all this dome business and decided to go rogue. He ends up getting shot dead too.
Her last two big feats of greatness are definitely falling for Big Jim's "Barbie killed everyone, even Maxine's mother that no one else but me knew about," thing, then subsequent getting knocked out by Barbie so he could escape off into the woods. And then the "Whats this little dome doing here, oh, okay, well this mysterious thing I've seen for all of 5 seconds is now police property.. But not one else touch it but me.." followed by the quick sizzle of her getting the jolt of her life from the mini-dome, allowing the kids to escape with it again.
Oh, and she makes the brilliant move of making Junior a deputy. Sure, she still doesn't know how much of a creep he is, but she got a taste of it when he shot a guy at one point, but still completely overlooks it.
The towns lack of life, even in desperate times:
This is pretty much the stupidest town in America. The people here are, like I've mentioned before, being lead around like mindless sheep by Big Jim, who I'm pretty sure they all think is an asshole any way, but also never question where the other councilmen (and woman.. maybe..) are. They let Linda take over as Sheriff, probably because no one else wants the job any way, just to have her either be too stupid to make good decisions, or to shit all over her own rules immediately after she sets them. But thats also to say the town actually decides to react to anything.
We hardly ever see the towns people, and if we do see them, its because a "of the week" activity calls for them. Like a meningitis outbreak. Or the sudden epiphany that water may run out one day (except they freak out about it, like, 3 days into the incident.. Don't think the water would disappear that soon).
The town, otherwise, really just feels dead, like the people in the town just hide in their basements waiting to die until they hear about the next great Big Jim speech is going down and they feel the need to shout random grunts.
I say, if Big Jim wants this place, he can have it... I'd rather live like a hermit in the woods.
Minor use of Minorities:
There are 4 people of color (or ethnicity) on the show, well, okay 5, I guess. Sheriff Linda; Nori's mother (or other mother); Dodee, the Radio girl; Phil, the DJ guy; And Ben, Joe's skater (probably stoner) friend. Thats really it, and all of them, even Linda, get pushed off to the side in lue of a pretty much whitewashed main cast.
Sure, I've noted Linda's sweeping role as the worse Sheriff ever, but thats when they decide to use her. And maybe its better off, because I'm sure she'd be even more infuriating.
But the rest? Well, Phil and Dodee mostly get pushed off to the radio station. Yeah, they get some play, and the incidents around Dodee's death are pretty serious, with Phil taking this massive hard-on to make sure Barbie dies because he also knows Barbie had something to do with Julia's husband's death, but.. They're still corralled off to the side most of the time, talking to each other.
Nori's mom gets maybe 2 good scenes the whole run of the series, when Nori's biological mother died and when she was standing up to Big Jim's gestapo squad when they're looking for the mini-dome and/or Barbie.
And Ben, who falls under the, "I guess," because I don't know whats up with that kid. He gets some good scenes, and end up being a pretty big help towards the end, but he's really just there sometimes to be the token "other" kid.
Otherwise, the important characters are white.. And usually have blue eyes.
Noticeable faces used as shock-kill fodder:
Samantha Mathis (Super Mario Bros.); Beth Broderick (Sabrina the Teenage Witch); Mare Winningham (Hatfields and McCoys); Jeff Fahey (Lost, The Lawnmower Man). All faces we've seen before in some capacity, whether you've seen them in what I've mentioned, or in any of the countless other things they've been in over their careers. These performers have been everywhere.. And here they were used simply to die in horrible, and many times anti-climactic ways, to shock the viewers into thinking this whole situation is just completely off the rails. The worst of these deaths really being Mare Winningham's. Such a waste of such a talented actress.
Of The Weak:
Every week is a new problem, while trying to stick with the greater arch of the series. Okay, I can see that this event is still new, and things are going to start happening that will weigh on the town in a big way... But they aren't going to vanish in a day with a little bit of elbow grease from the main characters.
This series runs into the same issues as Revolution had in its first season: An "of the week" mentality, with far too many characters to try to follow. This is why we end up with shock-killed fodder, or the unfortunate idea that minority characters aren't able to get anywhere near the forefront.
Woman Hate:
Now, I'm very serious when I say that I'm really not wanting to get into this, because I'm getting sick of it coming up every other minute in certain other mediums, but this feels way too hard to ignore in this particular show. But theres just this weird thing thats happening where the women on this show are getting the shortest end of the stick. This is really weird considering that within the week after the last episode of the season aired, Stephen King was quoted as saying he didn't like Stanley Kubrick's The Shining because it was "too misogynistic." Wrap your head around that while you read this:
- The sheriff is a woman, great, but she's a moron who gets fooled or hit a lot.
- Even the smart, strong woman is made into a fallacy because she becomes oddly hitched to a total stranger with little to no spark between them, who also happens to have killed her husband -but she's fine with that. And she gets shot in a weird attempt at a vague love triangle.
- A woman we've known for a whole 10 minutes gets drowned, just to prove that the bad guy is the bad guy.
- Her daughter who've we've known for maybe 3 episodes gets shot, just to make sure we finally know who the real bad guy is.
- A lesbian mother just has to succumb to her diabetes and die.
- The heavy-set but fun female tech genius has to get shot to further prove who the real bad guy is.
- The level headed diner owner gets killed for really no good reason (I really don't know what the point was for killing Rose. It really changed nothing at all.)
- Possibly worst of all, one of the first plots of the show had to do with kidnapping and enslaving a female, simply because the male character wanted obsessive dominance over her. And even afterwards, when she wants nothing to do with him because he's a freak who locked her in a fallout shelter, she still finds ways to be around him because of "fate" or whatever the show would have us believe.
Well, what the hell did you like, cranky-pants?!:
Quite honestly those two right there are the only thing this show seems to be doing right, and even they're pretty annoying at times.
The whole tone of the show just felt wrong and it was just too all over the place to feel followable. When I'd go around to episode recaps or reviews the next day, I'd see all my same thoughts and feelings on my screen.. But then I'd see them giving the episodes 4's and 5's out of 5, after they just plainly said how much they couldn't get behind anything going on.
I've even seen some people equate the show to Lost. I loved Lost. I loved being lost in Lost. I'm not liking being lost in Chester's Mill, because that dome is transparent, and its really to see the horrible flaws through it. It's no smoke monster.
Where Lost set up a sort of mythos for itself by the end of its first season, where Under the Dome meandered around like like that Normandy invader from Saving Private Ryan who got his arm blown off by mortar fire, all confused, in shock and not sure which patch of flesh on the ground is his. The show needs a medic.
I'm no stranger to the Stephen King storytelling style. My mom was a King fanatic as she lived and breathed, and his stories were something of a morbid bedtime story throughout my life. I've also read a few of them myself in later years. This series, as it seems, is following the same sort of long, plodding, slow boil that you'd come to expect from one of Kings tomes. But that sort of thing doesn't generally work for TV, at least not the way the show runners are working it. The characters are flaccid and paper thin. But the fact that some of the writing is so stop and start erratic, hurts it even more. The story makes no sense, and worst of all isn't really revealing anything about itself -even as its season ended. And now we have to wait a full year to see where its going to go.
The concept of Under the Dome should have translated into an amazing TV experience, had they pumped up the action, darkened the tone and made the characters believable and less... Moronic... Had drawn out certain characters to greater effect. Something tells me. Nay, makes me want to believe, the sacrifice of this show was made to the network gods, and had this show made its premier on HBO or Showtime, we may have gotten a body of work that pulled no punches, but it seems like the punches pulled ended up recoiling so hard it gave the series brain damage.
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