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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.