Right now, the problem with Under the Dome is that the bulk of the action takes place in Chester’s Mill, and ever since last week’s introduction of Zenith, Chester’s Mill isn’t all that interesting.
To wit: Big Jim takes up the mantle of Sheriff, a position which, as Julia pointed out, hasn’t been too kind to its previous holders. One of the major missteps of “Awakening” is its indecisiveness towards Big Jim: in one scene he’s a villain, seemingly communing with the dome; in another he’s a reluctant hero being cuffed to jail cell bars in a Christ pose. UTD can’t have its cake and eat it too; either Jim is a villain or he’s not, and the most frustrating thing about season two (well, one of the most frustrating things) is its apparently arbitrary vacillation between those two extremes. Dean Norris continues to sell any scene he’s in, but the writing is doing him no favors. His subplot in “Awakening” is barely worth mentioning, especially since it more or less contradicts the findings that Barbie makes in Zenith. It’s one thing for a character to be unaware of another character’s actions; it’s another thing entirely for a show to not know or care how one character’s actions can affect another.
In Zenith, Barbie has successufully sent an email to Julia by way of Joe (Joe’s email is ScarecrowJoe, which might be the first time this show has referenced Joe’s nickname from the book). The email is doctored by Barbie’s father, and now it includes instructions to not only jump into the abyss, but to also bring the egg. To top it off, Barbie is being shadowed by a hacker named Hunter, who has the playground-cum-portal under surveillance for what I’ll assume are non-perverted reasons.
So here you see the problem: Jim believes that the dome has chosen him for some higher calling, and that it has spared his life so he can fulfill it. But in Zenith, we see that not only is the dome being monitored, but it may very well be man-made (based on Don Barbara’s knowledge of the egg). These two ideas, while not without merit on their own, are fundamentally contradictory, and serve to undermine the dual mythologies that Under the Dome has spent much of season two building up.
Lyle is still at the nuthouse, and instead of repeating “Melanie” over and over, he’s now repeating “It’s in the cards” over and over. Pauline gets Sam access to some kind of miracle drug, which Sam as an EMT is qualified to administer, because EMT = doctor. Of course the drug works, because Under the Dome doesn’t want to waste Dwight Yoakam, but real life intrudes on this sequence, because if there’s some drug that can cure dementia, why wouldn’t the whole world know about it?
Anyway, the cards that Lyle was referring to are of course Pauline’s postcards. I’m hot and cold on the whole Pauline subplot. On the one hand, her statement that the dome was “twenty-five years in the making” is potentially very intriguing; on the other, if she knew it was coming, why did she just mail Lyle cryptic postcards instead of flat-out telling him that the dome was coming? Eddie Cahill continues to be cagey and myserious as Sam, but as of now, this Pauline subplot isn’t fully-formed, which is a shame because A, it’s already episode eight, and B, Barbie’s Zenith plot is much more engaging.
“Awakening” ends with Barbie making contact with Julia, the two of them pressing their hands together with the dome between them. Barbie is apprehended by the military, and I really hope that there isn’t some Dharma Initiative shit going on here, because the dome is much more interesting as a supernatural entity.
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