Under The Dome Season 2

Under The Dome season 2 finally ended on Monday with the episode ‘Go Now’ leaving most of the viewers with one unanswered question: is CBS going to make us suffer through another season or is the show going to be end? Here is everything you need to know about the second season of Under The Dome, and the town Chester Mill , all they did wrong and all they did right (not much beside the Pilot).

The second season of UTD was a mess.By the end, I hadn’t learnt a single thing about the Dome itself. This show sees a lot happen in forty minutes- murders, mysteries, plot twists and kidnaps– so it is impossible to get bored.  But UTD gets it wrong in four ways: no character development, too much use of plot convenience, bad dialogue and the concept of the show itself.

From a character point of view it is clear now that UTD is about people feeling and acting what the show needs them to feel and act during a particular episode. Think about when Big Jim (Dean Harris) throws the egg over the cliff, thus basically almost ‘destroying’ the Dome and all the people inside. This was an act quite unusual for his character, a cynical salesman. The citizens are ‘the mob’, easily duped by everybody and who will act only through two people with two opposite ideas and who decide to publicly fight each other. Their general opinion manifests itself through imprecise percentages and sometimes the whole town will be even reduced to the seven or ten people who hang out at the diner.

source: tv.com

Many things in the show happen just because the plot needs them to happen. Angie’s unnatural bloody hand print on the locker for instance or when main characters act on simple hunches and create even more problems. At the other end of the spectrum is when problems are resolved too easily, such as when Lyle (Dwight Yoakam) comes back to Zenith in a state of madness and Pauline’s (Sherry Stringfield) hospital in Zenith happens to be developing a new experimental drug that is going to heal him immediately.

To have an idea of how bad the dialogue is just remember the episode ‘Turn’ and this particular conversation which is a classic of Norrie (Mackenzie Lintz) and Joe’s (Colin Ford) teenager conversations. They usually involve saying what is happening out loud and things such as VLOGs, Twitter and e-mails:

Joe: It’s contracting!

Norrie: You mean it’s shrinking?

Joe: It keeps starting and stopping!

Rebecca: At least the dome stopped spinning and inverting the atmosphere and that’s why the temperature’s warmed up.

Norrie: Yeah, but now it’s shrinking!

Joe: First that earthquake struck, then it got super cold in here, and now this! Do you think the dome could be evolving?

Norrie: Into what?

What ruined the most the show for me was though the concept of the show itself. When Barbie comes back to Zenith, using the portal down the cliff, one of the billboards in the city says Dome Day 17. It is not a mistake since we are always reminded at the beginning of every episode ‘Two weeks ago an invisible dome crashed down…’. This is problematic for many reasons: firstly it means that relationships such as Barbie and Julia’s are built on nothing. Barbie in fact killed Julia’s husband, flirted with her, started dating her, split apart, came back together with her and one day you see them in bed saying things such as ‘I missed this’, while everything happened in a couple of days. Secondly this also means that people dealing with the death of close ones such as Junior, who was obsessed by Angie for so much time, just fell in love with Melanie (Grace Victoria Cox) in a couple of days. The show loses all credibility at this point.

UTD gets it wrong in four ways: no character development, too much use of plot convenience, bad dialogue and the concept of the show itself.

In the last episode the Dome apparently is shutting down, as Joe clearly states out loud and his friends repeat over and over, and the whole town gathers around the new tunnel that sucked down Melanie hoping to escape certain death. In the meantime Rebecca(Karla Crome), gives a morphine overdose to Pauline to end her suffering and Big Jim kills her with a hammer. He then vows to kill all the precious hands of the Dome if it will not bring back Pauline in the next three seconds. He also describes how he will do it. I have to admit that finally seeing Big Jim star of his own slasher movie was a delight. He shoots Andrea (Dale Raoul) and almost kills Julia but is then shot at the shoulder by his own son. Even this final buildup does not feel right since Junior have always had mixed feelings about his father going from oedipal hatred to trust. Barbie in the meantime finds out that the tunnel is a dead end but he touches it with a hand and conveniently, the wall falls down and a soaked Melanie is waiting for them on the other side telling them that they are going home. I will admit that I am quite curious to discover where that shiny passage through the tunnel is going to bring our heroes.

For the next season the writers will have to explain a lot. The citizens need more consistent backstories and personality; the writers have to stop taking alcoholic uncles living in cabins and science teachers that never appeared in the first series out of a magic hat. We also need more information about the Dome itself and why it’s there.

I am afraid these requests will not be answered since it is a low budget show and the damage is already done. As says Joe McAlister while waiting in front of the computer for an e-mail ‘how long are we supposed to do this?’