Under the Dome is going to give me a goddamn aneurysm. “In the Dark” was a better episode than last week’s “Reconciliation,” but that’s an unfair comparison because “Reconciliation” was a hate crime against the medium of television. UTD is still treading water narratively, and the entire purpose of “In the Dark” seems to be to introduce and dispose of problems in 42 minutes.
Everyone gets their own bottle episode tonight. Junior goes to find, sigh, the other hands, and Melanie comes along. Barbie and Sam get trapped in Lyle’s secret locker tunnel, and Rebecca and Julia team up to get them out (by which I mean, Rebecca makes an explosive while Julia bitches at her). Jim sets out to redeem himself to the townspeople.
The problem with Barbie and Sam looking for Lyle is that since Dwight Yoakam’s name isn’t listed in the credits, we know they won’t find him. Their time together serves the same purpose as all bottle episodes: make the characters talk a lot so you can get away with only using one set. The only interesting thing to come out of their sojourn is the revelation that it was Sam who killed Angie, not Lyle. Of course, Under the Dome changes its mind every week about who it wants us to think killed Angie, so by season’s end it will turn out that there was no Angie!
At least Sam has decent moviation: he firmly believes that killing the four hands will bring the dome down. Right or wrong, at least he has conviction and some semblance of follow-through. He decides to jump into an abyss (of course there’s an abyss) but not before hissing at Barbie, “When you see Julia die, you’ll take the knife to those kids yourself.” If Barbie spends the latter half of this season hunting and killing Joe, Norrie, and Junior, I will have the following reaction:
Jim gets the townsfolk to help him build a windmill to disperse mist (or copies of Myst, it could be either one) to get rid of some dust, which blah blah blah, another problem of the week for Under the Dome. Joe’s walking Avril Lavigne song of a friend shows back up, just to have an asthma attack. I’m not kidding. What a stupid asshole.
One thing that I actually liked about “In the Dark” was that people actually acted like, well, people. For some of the time at least. When Rebecca says “The dust is really more my field,” Julia replies, “Yes, all science is your field,” like a smartass bitch (I mean that in a good way). When Jim asks for Barbie’s help, Barbie rightly calls Jim out for throwing him under the bus and outing him to Julia as a supporter of the extermination plan. When Joe gets fed up with Norrie bitching at him, he packs his shit and leaves. If characters on this show would just be smartasses to each other all the time, I would love it so much.
About Author
