Things are not going well for the people of Miller’s Crossing. Or the viewers of Under the Dome’s second season premiere, for that matter.
Honesty up front: we didn’t like it. In fact, we were very disappointed. And though this is no recap, here are a few reasons why:
- So the Dome is now fully self-aware, and as its first act of consciousness it…magnetizes itself?
- Nice knowing you, Natalie Martinez. Follow her exploits on Secrets & Lies, a new nighttime soap coming to ABC in early 2015 (no, really)!
- Just because you’re sealed under an impenetrable dome doesn’t mean you can’t have new people come to town. They could have been hermiting up in a log cabin deep in the tiny patch of woods that’s under the Dome and nobody noticed, or just blub up from the bottom of the lake after you drop a magic egg in the water, or pretend they were just one of the extras until now. Easy!
- Lucky for us, when the Dome makes pretty teenage girls materialize, it also materializes modest frocks that dry quickly, so we don’t have to look at any naughty parts. Thanks, Dome!
This magnetic “thing” is just absurd. Apparently nobody in Miller’s Crossing wears a belt, or we’d have seen half the population drawn to the Dome by their crotches (buckles, you know), or wears shoes with grommets, or they would have been dragged feet-first clear across town. Worse: we see Big Jim fartin’ around the whole damn episode WEARING A HUGE WRIST-WATCH, completely unaffected by the magnetic field, even when it’s plucking things out of the air and throwing them. Either that’s a solid gold timepiece or nobody in the writer’s room was really thinking this through.- Also: magnetic fields can make you pass out? Give you hallucinations? REALLY, high school science teacher lady we’ve never seen before but who’s clearly ANOTHER new character and romantic rival?
- So let us get this straight: a big bunch of copper wire …wrapped around a tower…will ‘counteract’ the…Dome’s magnetic field. But the charge needs to…build up? But real electromagnets don’t actually work like… Okay, We quit.
The nice dead lady from the radio station is a pretty good Ghost of Atrocities Past, but stop poking at that chest wound or it will never heal.- The only thing we hate worse than arbitrary deus ex machina super-powers that make no sense are dream sequences. With pop music soundtracks.
- Bottom line: if the Dome can do any damn thing it wants, and can make selected people pass out whenever it wants, and if the Dome really wants to kill Big Jim…why not just kill him? It must have that ability. Or if that was never its goal, if it just wanted to “stop the killing,” (apparently so it can do the killing itself — sorry, Natalie), why not just say so? It can now speak through dead folks, in plain English, so what’s with all the riddles? This has rapidly gone from intriguing to really, really annoying. We feel like we’re stuck in Season Two of Heroes.
- Wait: Big Jim is ready to kill himself, but can’t pull the lever on the gallows? It’s two feet away, man. Have you got back problems we don’t know about? And dude: that much slack in your hangin’ rope and you’re gonna hit the ground hard enough to break your ankles Just sayin’.
Also, guys: you don’t choke from a hanging. The knot breaks your neck. So if Julia had cut the rope when she did, Big Jim would be as dead as Gwen Stacey.- Cool! Stephen King drinking coffee in the diner! Not that he explains how the diner still has coffee, or even electricity, after two weeks of Domification. (Even the writers don’t know, since they have High School Science Lady talk vaguely about our “sources of electricity,” which, she says, have “mostly” burned out – which she says while standing in a diner that seems to have more than enough electricity to cook food, light lights, and brew coffee.)
- You have to love Angie, the fierce little teenage kidnap-victim-orphan-diner-owner. She’s certainly going to be a major player in – uh oh. Never mind.
- So Sam the Hermit Paramedic turns out to be Big Jim’s dry-drunk brother-in-law, as well as crazy-boy Junior’s uncle and long-missing brother to Dead Mom, whom they haven’t seen in years … even though he’s been living the whole time in a “remote” cabin (how remote could it be and be under the Dome?) that’s within walking distance of downtown Miller’s Crossing. And the first thing anybody asks him when he shows up after all that time is not, “How the hell did you get in here?” Yeah, that makes sense.
- Twisty-poo, bangeroo, the “dead” Mom in question isn’t dead at all! She’s living in some big-ass city and painting psychic pictures. (Did we mention Heroes already?)
Good Lord, that’s, what, at least four new characters not even hinted at in Season One, now in a world where nobody can come in or go out? Sam the Hermit Paramedic Uncle, the Girl from the Lake, the High School Science Teacher, and the Not Dead Mom. And even the dead can come back for cameos, as long as they don’t actually explain anything. We wish Brian K. Vaughn, who knows about temporary death in comics better than anyone, would have realized that having the dead interact so easily and arbitrarily with the living makes those deaths that were so touching last year, like Angie’s Mom and the Radio Lady and Mare Winningham and Natalie Zea, fundamentally meaningless. And the same will apply to future deaths as well (yeah, we’re talking to you, Angie!)
Damn. So basically the original story, the one that was good enough for Stephen King’s huge novel, just wasn’t good enough for the TV. Now everything’s changed, and everybody’s changed (Big Jim’s a good guy now? Nooo….), and the dead can be reborn, and the Dome can do whatever it wants whenever it wants, and everybody in Miller’s Crossing drives Toyotas.
