2 out of 5

Developed By: Brian K. Vaughan

Covers up through Season 1

Jesus, if this didn’t have Vaughan backing for comic dorks and King backing for… comics dorks (OOKAY and the legion of King followers), I’m pretty sure it would’ve gotten pulled.  Plenty of TV shows – ranging from great to piss poor – are guilty of inclusive TV logic, where, for summary sake, a character utters some kind of connecting statement and explanation that no rational person would offer.  ‘Under the Dome’ does it constantly, and the stupidity of it is more egregious because we’re not in a fantasy realm that needs retroactive rules detailed to the viewer – we’re supposed to be based in the small-town reality of Chester’s Mill when something unexplainable – an impenetrable, invisible dome descending all about and around the town – happens.  So when characters shrug off something off or justify it with what amounts to hastily-accepted 1984 logic (as in 2+2 suddenly equals 4 and that’s okay), it’s pretty fuckin’ dumb.  Sometimes Vaughan writes heavily-handed dumb dialogue (Pride of Baghdad), and though I get that he didn’t write all these episodes, his name is all over hyping this show, and he mentions in his current comic (Saga) letters pages about it being time consuming, so surely he’s pretty damned involved… and for monkey’s sake, dude, you worked on Lost and Heroes, so you’ve been around the TV block.  You’d think he have a better sense of what ‘reads’ well on the screen.  …’Cause I’m not alone in finding this mostly laughably scripted.

The first episode started well enough, with the wonderfully named ‘Barbie’ burying a body, then making a cryptic phone call about the ‘deed is done but done gone wrong’ before the dome-drop happens in front of him and cuts a cow in two, but once our premise is in place and the show gets to toss some crowd-pleasing wreckage our way, the television nonsense starts ASAP, highlighting obvious character types and subplots like a TV for Dummies guide.  And you gotta deal with this through first episodes on occasion – Person of Interest worked through a whole bunch of nonsense for a few eps before finding its stride, but the difference there being the show wanted to get to an episodic format and so decidedly tossed all the background up front to get it out of the way and done, and those that found the basic premise rewarding enough to hang through these odd eps found themselves rewarded.  ‘Dome’, on the other hand, doesn’t seem to know what kind of show it’s going to be, since it’s based on limited material, and thus lurches from crises to nothing and back without much awareness of luring a viewer to a next episode or scene.  As though the assumption is just that we should be interested instead of making sure to make the material actually interesting.

About 2/3rds of the way through the season, after our requisite King characters have gotten their mystic mumbo-jumbo pieces in place, the series picks up a little bit, finally turning away from stupid character-based subplots into the larger puzzle of WTFness of the dome and toying with the civilization in captivity concept.  But this gets derailed as well by town leader ‘Big Jim’ swiftly becoming ‘Totally Evil and Without Conscience Jim’ and making really dumbly obviously evil decisions that are a nice counterpoint to his son’s rash behavior, because his son is this weird unsympathetic psycho who gave us our no-lead-up drama of our first few episodes when he was keeping his ex-girlfriend – also unsympathetic and rather annoying – captive.

In fact, do any of you have a preferred character?  Even Barbie is sort of TV dumb at times.  There’s just no real solid aspect here.

I think the cast does well enough with the material, and I appreciate that the direction, thus far, has not tried to be overly flashy.  Annoyingly, there’s enough ideas here to make a viewer curious what’s going to happen next (damn you, King), but at this point, even if season 2 is amazing, it can’t change the unfocused mess of this season.