Completely random plot twists in one of the least convincing “apocalypses” on TV, and yet another new character. But at least Crazy Dwight Yoakam’s back!
First: The opening narration! Oh my GOD, they heard us! Seriously! We bitched for weeks that the intro kept saying, “Two weeks ago,” when clearly far longer has passed, and now, like the Dome itself, the narration has magically and inexplicably altered itself into, “A few weeks ago.!” It’s…so…beautiful. But they didn’t change the “we’ll never stop fighting to find a way out” even though they never seemed to be looking that hard and as of last week, they actually kind’a sort’a did find a way out…but they don’t want to use it.
It would be one thing if no one knew that the pit under the high school leads to the outside world. But almost immediatley, the Magic Quartet figured it out. So hey, everybody line up at the locker, single file, and jump off the cliff! Next stop Zenith! Problem solved! Or…not. (Come on, people this isn’t Episode 13! There’s padding to be done!)
Dean Norris really is too good an actor for this. He acts like the embodiment of evil last week and scares the crap out of us, and then opens this week as the self-appointed sheriff and says to Lexi Luthor, whose life he threatened just show-hours earlier, “I’m sorry; I don’t know what came over me.” And she buys it. We all buy it. Dean Norris for President. And evil, schizo President, maybe, but President.
Okay, Barbie can send one e-mail message to Julia. Because…wll, because Daddy said so. No arguments. Now, bear in mind, last time Julia saw him, he fell down a bottomless pit to his invisible doom. So given this opportunity, what does he write? Not “Hey, Julia! It’s me, Barbie! I’m alive! No, seriously, I popped out in Zenith instead of dying in a horrible fall!” Nope. In fact, he doesn’t really explain at all. He and his Dad both treat this like it’s an old-fashioned telegraph. (“JULIA: NOT DEAD – STOP. DON’T JUMP. STOP. JUMPING.) And he doesn’t do anything to establish his identity. He just says, “Julie, I love you. We’ll see each other again. All it takes is a leap of faith.” and just assumes she’ll understand this cryptic message and believe it’s him. He doesn’t even sign it …and the he has ‘them’ send it to Joe’s address, so for SURE she’ll know it’s him. Does this make any sense? No, it does not.
Why is Norrie wearing a t-shirt with a that looks like a Batman logo but isn’t a Batman logo, obviously for copyright reasons? Why even do that? Why not go with a Person of Interest tee, or maybe Pennywise?
Why does the firewall that the gov’t put up only seem to allow gateways to open in the abandoned high school? How do they know when Joe and the Gang are going to be there? How can that happen? Who cares?
Okay, is Sherry Stringfield a patient or a doctor or an art therapist in the insane asylum? She seems real tetchy about being called ‘crazy’ if she’s just some kind’a medical worker.
Time for drinking! Crazy Lyle, played like a wonderful dope by Dwight Yoakam, back from his concert tour, might be able to be cured with a “new experimental drug” but he doesn’t “fit the protocol.” No matter: Junior’s Mom, now suddenly – twenty years too late – obsessed with getting Junior out, tells Uncle Sam, “You’re an EMT! You can figure out how to get that drug make it happen!” which makes perfect sense because EMT’s, especially stranges from out of town, are so much more powerful, knowledgeable and respected than highly trained and well-known medical specialists. That’s just the way the world works, man. Oh, and time for drink #1: A new thing, never mentioned before! A miracle mental drug that makes crazy people sane in a matter of minutes, without any actual diagnosis required!
…and quick on its heels, a reason for Drink #2: All of Zenith (a town we’ve never heard of before two weeks ago, but now the center of attention) is under surveillance by a zillion high-tech cameras, and the feed is being monitored by a handsome young hacker wihtout a name – a guy we’ve never seen before. Does he work for his Barbie’s Dad? Is he a hacker? WHO CARES? Another new character and plot ‘twist’ in Episode frickin’ EIGHT? DRINK!
“I’d do anything to see my parents,” Joe says. Except…no, not really. As far as you know, you could get out NOW, and start looking for them NOW, and YOU KNOW HOW. JUST JUMP OFF THE FRIGGIN’ CLIFF! You KNOW it works now!
Cool. Uncle Sam uses his cool EMT skills to steal drugs! Great training! Oh, and don’t worry about how you know which drug it is, its name, its dosage size, where and how it’s injected. That’s kid stuff! He has the drug!
Don’t you love it when somebody uses a walkie-talkie to say, “Something’s wrong. You gotta see this.” Instead of just describing what the hell you’re talking about? In this case it’s Lexi Luthor, who can’t seem to find the words to tell Big Jim (her bff again now, apparently) “hey, some dudes broke your windmill, man.” She has to show him. Way to go, instantaneous communication!
Ooh, you can tell things are bad in Chester’s Mill. Because there are tidy bags of garbage, careufully sealed, and boxes of trash carefully taped up, placed in the middle of the street. That’s like SO ominous, guys. Maybe this is what the apocalypse will look like in Canada…!
So this hacker-boy just happens to see Barbie on the surveillance cameras in the park-playground, and immediately recognizes him, and just happens to be all set up to penetrate His Dad’s Company’s super-secure system. Yeah, that’s convincing. And of couse he gets away with it and the last second, because we’ve never seen anything like that in bab cyber-dramas before, have we?
Question: why does Barbie like to be called Barbie? If his first name was Cosmo or LuluBelle or something, you could understand it. But…Dale? What’s wrong with Dale? Wouldn’t Dale be way better than constantly being referred to as a creepy teenage girl-doll?
Ah, HackerBoy’s name is Hunter, and he does work for Barbie’s Dad, but Barbie’s Dad doesn’t know he a Hacker for Truth. We’re late, but: Secon drink! New Character!
So: Julia and the Dome-crew send a cryptic message in a bottle down the bottomless pit. Why cryptic? No reason. Barbie’s got a reason to be cryptic, because people are watching. But Julia? No reason. Just ’cause.
But never mind. After talking about it for five ENDLESS minutes, they actually don’t do it at all. (Did we mention something about padding? Yeah. Here.) Instead, Barbie sends an e-mail thorugh at the last possible second, perfectly time. And Julia, of course, sees that he’s got all the details of their first kiss wrong. So does she deduce that it isn’t Barbie sending the messages – which one would normally do, since he failed the ‘memory test.’ No, instead, she deciphers, unbidden, the true meaning of the message and decides to go to the resultant rendezvous totally alone. Why? “It’s just something I have to do.” (Thats the way this show works: have some charater – probably Norrie, who isn’t buying any of this – point out the inconsistencies and absurdity in plot and character, then have somebody else say, “Yeah, we noticed, but never mind: trust us.”
Another example: Barbie, shockingly, discovers that Hacker Boy actually does work for his Dad, as his chief (and apparently only) IT guy in this vast building. Barbie shoves him up against something – he loves shoving people up against things! – and snarls, “Why didn’t you tell me you worked for my Dad?!” True answer: no good reason, except to set up a “surprise” reveal five scenes later. Answer given: “Baby steps, dude!” Or, in other words: “Yeah, we know. Never mind. Trust us.”
And good ol’ Lexi Luthor, former evils scientist mastermind, is back to being Big Jim’s minion, after leaving him, betraying him, and working against him. Why? See Padding, above.
Oh, sorry: third drink! New character! HackerBoy’s name is Hunter, and he’s good enough to cook up fake ID for Barbie, who uses the tried and true Clark Kent disguise strategy to get up close and personal at the Dome: he puts on some glasses. Then the writers dust off a whole slew of enemy-at-the-gate cliches: will his fake ID work – yes! No! Wait, thumbprint! Will that work! Whew! Then the gate guard grabs him! WHY?@ “Here’s your pass.” Wow, that is close. Or rather, boring. *yawn*. And why did Hunter the Hacker do all this? Not clear. His motives for all the highly dangerous stuff he did? Also not clear.
Anyway, Lyle wakes up from Uncle Sam and Junior’s Mom drug ambush, perfectly sane, and they decide to do the obvious thing: smuggle this raving lunatic who doesn’t even remember how he got here and probably knows nothing, out of the lockdown facility! Good Plan.
Apropos of nothing: we just noticed: everybody’s clothe are clean and pressed. After “weeks” inside the Dome, apparently electricity, water, and laundry are still abundant. (All talk of shortages of energy, food, and water have ended, even from Lexi Luthor, who was ready to kill two-thirds of the town to save their other third But come on, man, that was weeks ago. Never you mind.)
Sherry Stringfield, another very fine actor stuck in a thankless job, is being forces to chew scenery and spewing clueless intensive:“I have to get my son out,” she grits. Oh, NOW it matters!
Uncle Sam and Junior’s Mom have no trouble getting Lyle out of lockdown, despite the fact that he’s miraculously now ambulatory and coherent. With pudding, yet. And Lyle, in his first speaking scene in weeks, informs us that the key to Understanding Everything is not, in fact Junior’s Mom’s Journal, which was last week’s Key to Understanding, now completely forgotten. No, apparently it’s actually the postcards that Mom herself painted over the years, but apparently can’t recall or recreate or even describe.
Now we’re down to the last five minutes, and things really got to hell. Big reveal! Evil Sherri ff DJ isn’t dead! He’s alive, somehow completely recovered from a sucking chest-wound in a town with no medical facility, and gleefully rifle-whippin’ Big Jim! THIRD DRINK! Evil DJ chains Big Jim up in his on jail for…what? Interrogation? Torture? Giggles? Not clear. It doesn’t really matter, because Junior and Lexi Luthor find them almost immediately, beat the Evil DJ down, and rescue Big Jim. How did they know where he was, what had happened? Why do they seem unastonished by the, you know, life of Evil Sheriff DJ? NO EXPLANATION. But hey, at least that scruffy broadcaster with a gun is safely in jail! Score one for the Good Guys!
Meanwhile, Dwight, who doesn’t even remember how he got here, seems to know exactly where to find the cards and how interpret them even better than Mom, who has no idea why she drew these cards or what they mean (she acts as if she’s never seen them before) … but, hey wait am minute! She has one more! A Red Door … (which sharp-eyed viewers saw in the ground in the woods at the end of last episode.)
Meanwhile, Julia has made it to the rendezvous point, where she starts talking out loud to the Dome that used to love her so. Not great work, Rachelle Lefevre. Might want to take a few notes from Dean Norris. Anyway, Barbie makes it to the Dome from the other side, just moments in front of the soldiers and choppers and spotlights who do NOT want him there. No sound gets through, so he writes on the wall. (Did we know you could do that? Does that count as a new power? Nobody ever wrote on the wall before.) And his only message is: Don’t jump. Apparently, given “all” that he’s “learned” in Zenith – i.e., e.g., not a damn thing – he thinks it’s better to live inside the slowly dying town under an impenetrable forcefield than to actually be free. Admittedly, free in a corporate fascist Utopia, but still: no Dome. Just sayin’.
Okay, we confess it: this didn’t make a damn bit of sense to us. None of it. It just seems to be doing little character and plot twirly-twirlies, padding out the next five hours until the season finale. It seems impossible that all of this, or any of this, is going to come together any time soon, but why should be think so: showrunner/series developer has already said he knows how it ends, but he’d like to see it go for five seasons.
Five. Seasons.
