People Are Now Just Stabbing Each Other to Death on ‘Under the Dome’

The egg is making everyone mad and thinning the cast out before the season finale next week.

I’m not foolish enough to think that Under the Dome (which still gets decent ratings) is wrapping things up for good next week, but at least a couple characters got stabbed to death this week, and another got vanished into a sinkhole in the ground. That’s what I call progress. Maybe you think I’m cold-blooded for cheering on the deaths of multiple characters on this show, but I say this in response: there’s literally no one on Under the Dome who can still reasonably claim that they deserve to live. At this point, my favorite character is probably still Angie, and she got killed with an axe weeks ago.

Teacher-lady Rebecca is still around, as is the handsome hacker (reduced to notepad-carrying duties when Barbie communicates with the outside world). But otherwise, this week served to rid the audience of all the new characters we got to know this season. Lyle stabbed Pauline because she was getting back together with Big Jim. I don’t know why he didn’t just stab Big Jim if this was a problem, but Lyle was never the sharpest tool in the box, and I guess he had some twisted plan for revenge on Pauline for never hooking up with him back in high school. Probably has something to do with Dwight Yoakam being ten years older than Sherry Stringfield.

Anyway, in response Big Jim stabs Lyle. Great news all around, really. Pauline was a real bust for this show after all that buildup and the all-star casting of Dr. Susan Lewis herself. So she could paint visions! Sometimes! It didn’t explain her faked suicide or abandonment of her children, and it only came in handy when the plot demanded it, as is true with everything on Under the Dome. Lyle made even less sense as a character even forgetting Yoakam’s advanced age, but I must applaud the zoot suit he showed up in for his final appearance.

Let’s not forget this season’s other big new character, Melanie, who has been off-color for weeks ever since Jim impetuously tossed the egg off a cliff into a vortex (a decision he regrets, by the way; never let anyone tell you Jim doesn’t learn from his mistakes). As Melanie lays dying, a frustrated Rebecca tries to figure out what’s wrong with her, because she believes in SCIENCE and thinks there must be a logical answer to what’s happening. Let’s just expand that out for a second. Rebecca wants a logical answer…while she lives under an unbreakable dome installed by a mysterious force…to the sickness of a girl who supposedly died in the ‘80s and yet remains a teenager.

Rebecca’s search for logic echoes the much more interesting man of science/man of faith question Lost loved to pose, and Under the Dome has long cribbed from that far better show in terms of how to unnecessarily prolong mysteries and goofily jab at philosophical questions. But c’mon, Rebecca. You know what the answer is. The answer is always the same. It’s the ding-dong floozle-doozle pink egg. It’s glowing, it’s angry, and it needs to come home. Don Barbara realizes this once he hears his long-lost daughter Melanie is still alive (via vlog) and returns the egg, allowing everyone to perform an eggy ritual on Melanie in the woods where she originally died. This sucks her into a sinkhole. I don’t know why; I don’t make the egg-rules.

Next week, maybe we’ll finally get some idea of who does make the egg-rules. This show can’t continue in the vein it’s followed the last few weeks. Yes, I laugh hysterically at every scene of Don and Barbie talking to each other via notepad/laptop, and yes, I take a shot every time someone says the word “egg,” but please, please, have Melanie get abducted onto a UFO next week or something. Enough of people pointing at the dome and wondering about what it wants. Just tell us so we can move on with our blessed lives.