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I’ve spent weeks complaining about Under the Dome’s shameless reliance on non-Dome related plots to stretch things out in its increasingly pointless second season; we had the tunnel, the city of Zenith, Pauline and her paintings, the various mysteries revolving around the glowing egg. It made a sad sort of sense: this show was intended as a miniseries, became a hit, and got renewed by CBS. Lord knows it’ll probably get renewed again. But the longer it lasts, the longer it’ll take to figure out what’s going on with that Dome.

So guys, let’s face facts—it’s time to pack it in. With the return of Pauline, Sam and Barbie to Chester’s Mill, the highly suspect trip to Zenith has hopefully been wrapped up for good. This week’s episode was devoted to everyone arguing over who gets to go through the teleportation tunnel to freedom, and was solved by Big Jim’s bonehead decision to toss the egg off the cliff. Now the egg’s gone, the portal to the outside world has disappeared, and everyone’s stuck under a dome that’s suddenly getting real, real chilly.

"Normally Fall's my favorite. Book by the fire, nice glass of pinot. But this is just...odd," Rebecca notes of the leaves turning brown prematurely. Yeah, that’s real odd, Becks. About as odd as your town getting encased in an unbreakable dome. I’ve torn my hair out at this so many times now, but it never ceases to amaze me when the characters of this show argue that being trapped in the dome has been good for the town, and act as if the turn for the worse just happened. Like, “oh, I know things seemed okay, but now our crops are dying!” Why wasn’t everyone worrying about this from minute one!?

The big twist of this episode is that the egg turns the portal back into a bunch of sharp spikes, and the former Sheriff guy jumps onto them, which sucks for him. There’s a bunch of less interesting twists, most notably that Barbie is Egg Girl’s half-sister. There’s five minutes of dialogue devoted to that pointless affair. Barbie and Melanie unpacking the memory he had as he returned to Chester’s Mill was about as interesting as, well, hearing someone describe their dream to you.

So, the egg is gone. It’ll pop back up again: Julia throwing it into the water didn’t do much good getting rid of it, after all. The egg is this show’s all-purpose deus ex machina, tossed into places when they need to be zapped into something different. It’s also a grand symbol of how lazy the plotting on this show gets—despite the fact that it’s based on a book that had a definitive ending, the writers at this point just seem to think “the egg did it!” will justify any lame excuse for a twist.

Guys. It’s time to call it quits. You have a few episodes left this year; use them to wrap things up. Jim is still parading around like he runs the town and pointing his gun in the face of children. It’s time to kill him off, once and for good. The Dome-Teens are nuzzling up to each other on the couch; I don’t want to see any more of that kind of smut. Barbie and Julia have found each other again and will live happily ever after; Pauline is reunited with her son, too, who manages to redeem himself a little bit by not killing Sam on the advice of ghost-Angie.

I have a headache. And I was kidding before—I wish Junior had buried his axe in Sam’s head, if only to give me the feeling that we were hurtling towards some kind of conclusion. But no, instead next week we’ll be treated to an extended treatise on changing seasons in Chester’s Mill. Perhaps Rebecca will give us a slide-show presentation. I wish everyone would just toss themselves onto the cliff-spikes and end it all. Or they’d get the stupid egg back, crack it open, and make a glowing pink omelet. Anything would be better than what’s happening right now. 

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