Wind, Rain, and A Drinking Game Gone Out of Control
Okay, we’ve bitched enough about how the capabilities and restrictions of the Dome change week to week, so just replay that in your mind as we go through this week’s wackiness. And remember: every new character, every never-before-seen power of the Dome or a cast member – take a drink! (And have a designated driver handy. Seriously.) But don’t quit early: stay for the concert!
WINDMILLS. High School Science Teacher/Local Genius Rebecca has this super-neat idea: WINDMILLS will solve the dome’s as-yet-entirely-unseen energy problems. Think this through, people: WINDMILLS. In a dome where NO AIR (okay, very little air) CAN GET IN. Apparently THIS version of the dome lets water and air flow through. And smoke. And smell. And…well everything except humans and their artifacts. We think. But wait: maybe water is trapped, because last season there was this huge kerfuffle about drinking water, and a whole bunch’a Downeaster hillbillies got killed, but…WINDMILLS. Jesus.- More ridiculous “character development” for Uncle Sam (no, really: he’s an uncle and his name is Sam) who was neither mentioned nor present last season. LOVE it when he says to Junior, “No matter what happens, you and me are family.” He doesn’t add the second part: “It’s just that I’m the kind of family that hides in a secret cabin when all the shit’s gong down and only comes out when it’s safe. THAT kind’a family.”
And here’s this week’s big bad: It’s raining. Inside the Dome. What seems to be blood. No, wait: red acid. Out of big gray clouds that seem to be unimpeded by any dome-like overstructure. It’s just there, and if it’s a localized in-Dome phenomenon, nobody mentions that. So …- Somebody says, “It isn’t blood,” and Norrie the smart-ass, who has a good week being smart-ass, says, “Well it ain’t Cherry Kool-Aid.” Actually, Cherry Kool-aid would make as much sense, and no amount of super-fastFederation-like “science” mumble from increasingly unpleasant Super Genius Rebecca is going to cover that up. Man, that lady talks pseudo-science gibberish faster than Geordie LaForge.
- But hey, good news: Remember the drinking game? New characters take a shot; new powers take a sthot. So it’s 10 minutes and and we’re two ounces down: First: Red rain! New Dome-Power! Ka-POW! And now: Dwight Yoakam as a fundamentalist barber named Lyle whom we’ve never seen before, to replace the crazy minister who died too early last season! BAM!
And as it “rains” … the internet works again! For no good reason! THIRD SHOT! But of course, it does arbitrarily serve the plot: for a few minutes, the kids (apparently nobody else in town, just the kids in the abandoned high school) get cryptic messages from outside, including Junior, who gets a vlog from his Not Dead Mom, revealing… whoa, she’s not dead!- And look! Mom is the whiney doctor from ER! “By the time you see this you’ll know I’m alive.” How the hell would he know that? And it looks like her resurrection is short-lived: she’s only set for two episodes this season, and this is #1 of 2. (Trust us: don’t look at the episode count in IMDB. It will only make you sad.)
- Hey, anybody else wonder how a red rain that is acidic enough to melt human flesh doesn’t seem to be affecting the trees, grass, or furry creatures at all? (Also, skip the fact that there’s never been an acid rain remotely that strong. It’s more like weak lemonade than sulfuric acid.)
- Meanwhile, Dwight’s acting the hell out of Lyle the Barber, who goes from never-heard-of extra to former boyfriend of the Not Dead Mom and psycho-religious murderer of scientists in less than an hour! (And oh, sad, he’s only scheduled for two episode, too. Crap, even Natalie Zea and Jeff Fahey lasted longer than that.).
Check it out! Amnesia Girl has psychic lock-picking powers! SHOT NUMBER FOUR! (ooh, getting woozy)- Okay, so High School Science Teacher/Genius is squirting…antacid? Into the lake? A mixture of WHAT with WHAT? And it makes the acid rain stop immediately? God, I wish TUMS worked that fast. Clearly, Rebecca is becoming the Lex Luthor of Chester’s Mill: a super-genius, arrogant, and eeeevil. See? Nothing good ever comes of British people faking American accents. (Just ask Anthony Head.)
- You know, kids, a basic premise of good storytelling is “show, don’t tell.” So maybe you should stop telling us that there’s this doomishly huge shortage of food and water coming, or that the acid rain killed crops and livestock, and just show us a little of this. All we keep seeing is plenty of food in the ever-busy diner and endless electric lights that never so much as flicker. In fact, you might want to make the damage especially nightmarish if you want us to believe it’s necessary to start (ew) “thinning the herd.”
- And speaking of which: another character reversal. Last week, soft-bodied pussy-boy Joe became a gun-toting vengeance killer for a few minutes. This week, Barbie, who has been the rough individualist up until this moment, who doesn’t trust Big Jim or the army or anybody … has no problem contemplating mass murder by that exact same Big Jim, Lexa Luthor, and a vaguely referred-to unelected “government” just so the chosen few can live a few days longer. Yeah, that’s perfectly consistent!
But finally: something that is worth the whole hour: Dwight Yoakam as Lyle the Crazy Barber gives us a stunning a capella rendition of “Who’ll Stop the Rain?”! Boy, we’re glad we hung around!
Other than some ham-fisted hints about past relationships between Uncle Sam, Lyle the Barber, Not Dead Mom and other characters you don’t care about, and a “startling” revelation that Amnesia Girl leapt out of a twenty-five-year-old yearbook … we’re done for the week.
