We watched four episodes of Under The Dome before we lost interest. It’s not a terrible show, but it’s not a good one.
I admit I was predisposed to hate it. I thought the idea was dumb when I read the review of the Stephen King book it’s based on: A dome appears over a small town. It wasn’t built there, it just appeared. It’s transparent to light, it stops sound completely, and when cars drive into it or airplanes try to fly through it, they’re smashed as if they hit an indestructible wall. Everyone in the town is trapped there, with no idea how long this will go on. If that seems to you like something that could happen, then you might like this story. It sounds dumb to me, so I figured I probably wouldn’t.
To my surprise, the first episode was not all that bad. It was mostly about introducing the main characters and hinting at the intrigues they were involved with. The dome descended and most of them reacted in ways that seemed believable, so we kept on watching. Over the next couple of episodes, though, it pretty much fell apart. Why did they spend so much time on screaming girl? One or two scenes were all we needed to establish that she was trapped by psycho boy and that she could scream like a Wagnerian diva, but they kept coming back to her every five minutes. See, she’s still trapped down there, and she’s still screaming. Man, that girl can scream, can’t she? Let’s listen to her scream for a few more minutes before we cut away. Surprised they didn’t have some crystal wine goblets on hand for her to shatter with her piercing voice.
Weirdest to me is that, after four episodes, which works out to about three or four days, nobody has set up a way to communicate with the people in radiation suits waving Geiger counters at the dome and the soldiers standing guard around it. Although they can see each other, only one person has thought to write a note and press it up against the dome for someone outside to read. That was in the first few minutes after the dome fell on the town; after that, the people inside spend hardly any time at all trying to get the attention of the people outside, and the people outside literally act as if the people they can easily see inside the dome aren’t there.
All those grunts standing guard is a bit of a mystery, too. If they were there to prevent people on the outside from getting too close, that would make some kind of sense, but most of them are facing the dome, as if they were trying to keep people in. What the hell is that? And even though they’re standing at port arms all day long facing the dome, they don’t taunt or tease the people inside, never flip them off, don’t leer at the pretty girls. “You could strip naked and they probably wouldn’t react,” the rugged-looking ex-Army guy tells the gorgeous young journalist. Oh, please. She could strip naked and the soldiers wouldn’t bat an eye? Which army were you in?
So we’ve had enough of Under The Dome. Time to move on to something more believable, like maybe an Adam Sandler movie.
This Is Drivel 