…and let the flashback begin!
Under the Dome Season 3, Episode One Recap: Flash Dance
It’s as if we’ve been slumbering – a restless slumber, filled with dreams of butterflies and bad acting. But now we have arisen from our desperate rest, only to find… oh, God, it’s starting again! It’s starting again!
Unfortantely, we’re not the only ones who’ve been dreaming.
Welcome to Under the Dome, Season Three, Episode One Recap. Let the flashbacks begin.
As the intro tells us, it’s only been three weeks since the Dome showedup. Three week time, covered over the last three years. And we pick up right where we left off, with lots of enigmatic murmering from Melanie, the girl who isn’t the girl from Tommorowland but who stepped in to do the muttering for her. It begins as it ended last year: “It’s time to go home.” Which turns out, not surprisingly, to never be said or referred to again.
Okay! Barbie says, taking charge as always. Everybody follow me into the blinding white icky fog. Everybody stick toge—HEY, where did everybody go?
Oh, never mind. After a little bit of shouting into the whiteness (you’ll see a lot of that in the next two hours), we’re back. All of us together. Except we’re outside the Dome, watching it do its whole purple-pink star-thing, cracking and zooming and poofing and wowing and… it’s gone. The Dome is down.
Barbie races inside to find three bodies in the forest (how does he know exactly where to do? Not a clue.) He finds Big Jiml skewered, Big Jim’s occasionally crazy son Junior dead nearby, and Julia’s beautiful corpse just a few feet further on. She has blood on her chin! Ew!
Next: the firt of many many unlabeled and befuddling flashbacks. Or flashforward. This one takes us and Barbie to … Yemen? What? Yemen? Yeah’s he’s a Black Ops super soldier, with the ominous jump suit and weaponry to prove it. He gets to say stuff like “Target’s a ghost!” and “Hunter! Talk to me!” and shoot at bad guys in turbans. (No racist clichés here, heck no.) He’s a stone-cold killer with too much lip color (seriously, check it out.. Kind’a creepy.)
OK, this is going on kind’a long. We meet the beautiful Ava, his gorgeous chief of operations (don’t worry, it’s a woman) with whom he is showering and, one assumes, sleeping. And he’s suffering from Doubts. You know, doubts. That night, he has bad dreams about embracing Julia in the crater in the Dome, and some place along here you realize he’s not in a flashback and having precognitive dreams, this is his future. This is what he did after the Dome went down. ‘Cause sure, that’s how you’d deal with weeks of hellish imprisonment and the death of your greatest love: you ggo to Yemen and show terrorist.
You know, I’ve often complained, over the years, of UTD not being consistent. But I was wrong. It’s absolutely consistent at doubling back, revisionist storytelling, and ominous pronouncements that ultimately make no sense or simpl never get mentioned again (see, “welcome home,” above). And at the core of shaky story-telling: the flashback. This two-hour season premiere has more flashbacks that it has clear slime and purple glow-lights, and it has a a lot of clear slime and glow-lights.
Here we go: back to the last few hours of the Dome, to see what happened to Julia and Big Jim and Junior after the end of the last season. And clearly, we have all the time in the world: Dean Norris get to play, actinig crazy-evil and givng us an old Twilight Zone recap – hi, Burgess Meredith! Wish you were here!
So Big Jim, the only guy with a gun, ties up Junior and Juia (which always sounds like a bad rom-com to me), to find out what they’re going to do now that Barbie and the Townspeople have escape. When they say, ‘We’re going to try and escape, too!” that seems to satisfy him. Why? No reason. It just does. So he unties them to let them escape, pausing only long enough to shoot his son on the shoulder.
Don’t ask why. No one can tell you. And it doesn’t really seem to bother Junior all that much, getting shot and all.
So now – flash! – we see Barbie returning to Chester’s Mill a year after the Dome went down. They clearly had to do this in part because the teenagers have grown up – big time – both Joe and his sassy girlfriend Norrie . Yemen is now in the murky past, and Barbie is returning to Chester’s Mill – along with his girlfriend Eva and his right hand soldier-buddy Hunter — for the one-year memorial. (Why does Hunter look so familiar…?)
Is it just me, but if I’d been trapped for no known reason behind an impenetrable dome for three nightmarish weeks, and then released for reasons I also can’t explain, I would never even think of going back to that place. We don’t’ know why the Dome went up; we don’t know why it came down. No, man, I’d never even get inside the state of Maine!
So: Big Jim’s dead, Julia’s Dead, Uncle Sam who killed Angie way back when (among other people nobody cares about) is in prison and in AA and for some bullshit reason, he says, he’s not only reformed but he’s gonna get out.
And oh, yeah, Crazy Melanie has bene seen wandering through town even though she’s supposed to be one-year dead, and the comic-relief Skater Boy from last season is now super-smart and cured of his asthmas and thinks that the last year has be a dream – a dream, man! — which, of course, Barbie won’t even THINK about because…um…because that would be crazy? In such an otherwise normal and consistent world?
And here, half an hour in, Marg Helgenberger – one of two actually new cast members — arrives to offer us yet more exposition: Joe is blowing off his therapy, he’s been accepted to Cal Tech, and … okay, we’re one-third in and we have lots of ominous/eerie images and awkward exposition and not much else.
Okay, it’s been almost five minutes, so let’s have another flashback! We’re back in the tunnels after most of the townspeople have escaped but the Dome’s still up and we’re with Junior and Julia (good movie title!), where Junior’s shoulder wound has made just a little spot of blood on his t-shirt and seems to have given him kind of a cramp, but otherwise, he’s good to carry ladders, crawl on all fours along makeshift bridges, and fight off swarms of killer butterflies (like we all do). Wow, he’s pretty tough for an intermittent psychopath with no consistent personality!
(We haven’t mentioned the glowy-glossy-glassy transitions between scenes; that does imply that Skater-boy may be right: this is looking kind’a dreamy.)
And now Marg is meeting Sam in prison, so she can do some more exposition and cliché’d pronouncements. But her role is sketchy at best. She seems to be the one that’s counseling Joe to remember and honor his sister’s memory on one hand AND trying to get that same young woman’s murderer sprung from jail. She’s even trying to get him sprung to speak at the memorial service in Chester’s Mill. Of course, this massive inconsistency is supposed to be seen as ‘mysterious’ and ‘intriguing’ rather than what we norms would call it, which is ‘bad story-telling that’s not going anywhere.’
MORE flashback: Big Jim, in the last minutes of the Dome, is shooting pictures on the wall like a crazy Nixon imitator. Moments later, back in the increasingly un-credible present, Barbie’s meeting Marg for the first time. Turns out she’s from FEMA, a trauma specialist, that’s supposed to help all the survivors (‘cause yeah, FEMA does that. Look at all the great post-disaster care those people from Katrina and Sandy got.) But at least that explains how he can wander around undisturbed and exposit at will. Sort of.
…and for the second or third time, we see Melanie standing in front of an extremely cheesy alien-crystal muti-screen sci-fi window display in some dark underground grotto, feeling up the tech and muttering enigmatically again – a skill she perfected last season, and that she’s cranking up to eleven this week.
After some more pointless tunnel wandering, we cut to the big memorial service. Marg – a woman who wasn’t even in or outside the Dome a year ago – is giving a speech at the service as if she has a right to. She reads a message from Angie’s killer (without naming him), and Joe – who’s growin’ up real nice, I have to say – gives a spontaneous eulogy that would be real effective if it wasn’t just a string of aphorisms we’ve heard a zillion times before in better shows. But don’t’ worry: Barbie steps up to save him. Melanie’s watching from her alien grotto. Barbie’s new girlfriend from the Yemen action looks kind’a sorta sad. Who is she again?
Um… Barbie says Julia was always loyal, always had your back, but I could have sworn she kept secrets and lied to him and betrayed him at least a couple of times in Year Two…
… but never mind, Skater Boy, who hasn’t had asthma in a year, shows up to the ceremony just in time to have an attack, apparently because Alien Melanie didn’t want him spilling any beans, and die. Way to spoil a memorial, dude. His…body? Spriti? Somehow appears with Melanie in the alien grotto, butterflies either come out of him or land on him (who can tell?), and now we’re whip-sawing back and forth between Melanie being weird in the caves and Julia – maybe in the past? Maybe now? Making the big discovery of the night: OH MY GOD, THE WHOEL TOWN’S IN ICKY ALIEN-LIKE PODS, dreaming their dreamy-dreams.
Skater Boy was right! Though apparently slightly dead now. Break at the half!
Oooh, I need another drink.
[Let’s take a moment to make a note: this is the big reveal. It is unequivocal, unchallenged, that all we’ve been watching about the Chester’s Mill townspeople for the last hour is a dream, a lie. And yet… we are about to spend another hour watching them reel out a string of mini-dramas that ultimately…well, you can imagine what ‘ultimately’. But let’s get to it…]
That underground butterfly swarm might be deadly, but it’s also really dumb. Melanie actually distracts them by throwing a rock down there in the cave in Flashback 21-C (subsection b) so she can keep exploring. Meanwhile, in the same timeline, Melanie makes out with Junior, who was separated from Julie because the writers aid so. The kiss takes him into the sticky fog, where Melanie appears and says, “It will all be over when you and your friends are who you need to be…to survive. But first we have to fix you.” And then he sinks into goo.
Oh, so that’s why…uh…that’s why… uh…what?
[Another commercial break, and let’s think about this. IF the story behind the egg really is that some intelligence needs to transform humans into something else to survive an upcoming something bad… okay. So why not just reveal yourself? Why not just explain it, straight up, and ask for volunteers? Most folks might not join up, but a few would for sure. And you could skip all this didgy-dodgy-guess-the-riddle crap. But noooo…)
Melanie shows herself to Julia in the cave, and tells her that she can’t free Barbie, or “he’ll end up like all the others.” She shows Junior is in a pod now, too, and tells Melanie a whole pack’a lies about how he got that way. (Really, people, this lavender alien grotto looks like a bad Sci Fi Haunted House in an Omaha corn maze. Gad.) She pushes Julia to get the egg back that was stolen by her father. That matters.Even though it hasn’t been mentioned unitl now, the middle of Hour Number Two. (Hey, remember that egg? ‘Member when it was a cute little nubbing being protected by The Four, who were really really important, but who were completely forgotten when Angie had to go off to do Tomorrowland and the show looked like it was would renewed? Ah, those were the days.)
Never mind: we are mired in the past, where Big Jim, not yet dead, is wandering around down yelling at dogs and saying, “Yeah, this is MINE, man! MINE!” Barbie, in the ‘present’ (that’s actually dreamtime), shows his (possibly non-existent) buddy some phone footage by Dead Skater Boy that ‘proves’ it’s all a dream, but his buddy screws up the file while trying to analyze it.
Joe and his bitchy girlfriend Norrie fight about moving on or not. Clearly she’s gone all evil now: in her year away from Chester’s Mill she’s joined a sorority. And we see that Marg Helgenberg is evil, too: she’s wearing a big-ass ring with a lavender stone, same color as the stones in the alien grotto. DEAD giveaway, Marg! Lose the jewelry!
All these time- and scene-changes are making me dizzy. There’s no forward movement, just spinning around. A fist-fight with Sam in prison. A “let’s not make love” scene between Barbie and his hot new girlfriend. And then…Junior shows up. He’s not dead anymore. He is now integrated into the fake history; it only takes Barbie about thirty seconds to be pulled into the fantasy.
Melanie’s dad and the egg make a cameo; Eriq LaSalle, one of the doctors from ER, rolls in to give even MORE exposition about how a whole bunch of eggs fell to earth as meteorites years ago, and have been in the custody of the Big Bad Company ever since. Wow, if somebody gave awards for Most Awkward Exposition of the Year, this two-our mumblefest would win hands down. Don’t you just love it when perfectly competent actors are forced to give speeches to each other that lays out backstory they both already know, clearly and only for the benefit of us dumb ol’ viewers. (And Brett Cullen… don’t you wish you were back in the flashback on Person of Interest instead, making The Machine? We do.)
I love it. Melanie says to Julia, “You’ve always trusted me; you always done what’s best.” But check your calendar: they’ve known each other for like A WEEK, since a few days after Angie died.
But let’s not leave the past quite yet. The Dome’s still up as Don Barber goes into the tunnel and pops up from the lake, to bring the egg back to his long-dead recently resurrected daughter. (Apparently he had no trouble taking the Most Powerful Object in the World from the Most Evil Corporation on the Planet, even though he and his people killed a whole bunch of folks – a year ago, a week ago — for trying to do the same thing. No matter: He gives the egg to Melanie, but Melanie isn’t Melanie, she’s an alien bitch queen, who chokes him to death with one hand. BOOM! Yeah, she went there! And walks back to the tunnels, egg in hand.
Barbie’s putting it all together. Most everybody in town is a memory construct. Meanwhile, Joe is getting talked into leaving forever by Alien Minion Marg Helgenberg. (Hey, remember when she played a much more interesting alien minion in that other Stephen King TV mini-series, The Tommyknockers? With Jimmy Smits? That one was good.)
So Junior and Marg meet, and he immediately tells her that he killed his father. Which seems to be okay. Sam went to prison for killing Angie in this made-up world; Junior went to…Marrakesh? To be a mercenary or a bartender or something? Nooo, don’t try and make sense of it. We already know it’s just a dream anyway.
Back to Big Jim! Building a barrier out of junk across a road (while leaving the perfectly passable field right next to it unmolested), he finds Melanie’s Dad’s body and just…walks by him? Then goes and finds Julia and brings her back to the body because…why? Obviously for MORE exposition, because the writers think we may have lost track. Julia tells us that this is Don Barber, Dad to Barbie and alien bitch-queen Melanie. Big Jim and Julia yell at each other for a while, then she punches him (you know, the guy who outweighs her by a hundred pounds, is kill-crazy and HAS A RIFLE IN HIS HANDS) and walks off… while Alien Bitch Queen Melanie takes her newly reacquired egg down into the Cheesy Grotto and presents it to…Marg Helgenberg in her pod? And Julia, once again, enters the tunnels.
Poor Julia. Between nearly falling off makeshift bridges, broken chain-ladders and fistfights, she’s had a rough couple of hours. But she perseveres…even as Bitch Queen Melanie keeps sauntering through her cheesey purple grotto, glowing egg in hand. She does not look good in luminous lavender, but then nobody does.
Meanwhile, Norrie’s decided to be a whore. No real reason, just for fun. She knocks on the door of Barbie’s war-buddy Hunter (who is he again), and invites herself in for a drink. “So why do they call it ‘hard’ lemonade?’ she asks, and Hunter says, “I got nothin’.” Which may be the most insightful thing anyone has said in this whole torturous two hours.
(And it is only now, NOW, that I realize that this “Hunter” is a dream-reincarnation of the cute hacker-boy who showed up late last season, an employee and secret agent of Don Barber’s, who snuck into the Dome! OMG! Look at that! NOTHING makes sense here!)
Oh, and Barbie’s dream girlfriend? Pregnant. BOOM.
We’re down to the last seven minutes of this two-hour meander, and Joe – for some reason – decides to have a sit-down with Angie’s killer, Uncle Sam, in prison. You have to wonder why we’re bothering with any of this, since we now know – pretty much without equivocation – that this is all a dream, and as soon as they’re popped out of their pods the whole thing will reset. And yet we sit through an earnest two-minute scene with these guys as if it actually means anything.
Oh, and Sam gets shivved. Darn.
You know, there were better underground alien tunnels than this in the original Invaders from Mars. Like fifty years ago.
Julia, recovered from her most recent trip-and-fall, shows up in that selfsame grotto just in time to see Melanie put the spittery-sputtery egg on one of the pods (whose?). Melanie, who never really had any reason to be nice to her, gets caught in her lies and knocks Julia down. Faster and faster, all around, the eight-nine-ten side-stories start going flash-flash-flash as the lavender light gets positively blinding. Amd Big Jim shows up in the grotto (What? Was he following her? I must have been distracted by all the lavender!) and breaks the egg at the height of its cosmic orgasm with the butt of his rifle!
Annnnnnnd…
Reset. Cast members start breaking out of the pods. It’s gooey, but they’re recognizable: First Junior, then Barbie, then Uncle Sam and Joe, all the way down the line. Also Marg Helgenberg and Barbie’s girlfriend, and you realize, as they look breathlessly at each other in the last scene…these are the only two new cast members. Everybody else is just a character from last season, some of them just re-imagined, Regulators/Desperation-style.
And ultimately, of course…none of it matters. The ‘true’ story is that the townspeople all went down into the tunnels, the butterflies put them in stasis pods, and they all had a big dream that is now over. Chances are – tune in next week! – the Dome is still up and nobody’s really dead – except for Don Barber. Not even Big Jim, which is good news: Dean Norris chewing the scenery remains the most entertaining thing about this show. But meanwhile, all the rest of that high school drama club histrionics was a false start. And we’ll never get those two hours back again.
Yep, Under the Dome has returned, with the same messages it started sending in the middle of Season One: What, that character, that explanation, that plot twist doesn’t make any sense? Oh, never mind. Look over HERE…
