32 Short Films About Chester's Mill

Dear Mister Barbie, You Should Let These Boobs Kill Themselves. I Am Not A Crackpot!

Once the show establishes that Junior is still keeping vigil at Christine's...cocoonside, and that Eva is still being a good Deputy Queen patrolling the dorms, people start getting up out of bed and walking, as if drawn, to the front of Town Hall. We cut to Barbie, out on the front lawn, to see what they're all doing: why, they're leaping to their deaths from a third-storey window!

Barbie is, understandably, freaked out, and when he hears Eva screaming for him, he runs inside and tries to stop more people from jumping. At the front of the line is Audrey, who explains, "There's no one to guide us. I need to do this." And then everyone gets distracted by a larger commotion outside.

I get why Eva, in her current state, is agitated by this: she's on the upper echelon of a hierarchy that requires the effort and obedience of lots of unthinking labourers, and while she might not care on a personal level who ends his or her life, she can't have her workforce significantly reduced. (By the way: though the metaphor we've started with this season for the alien power running shit is butterflies (cocoons, rebirth), and then moved on to cows as a shorthand for the docile, easily led populace, as of this week it's all about drones serving their queen, so: now it's bees. Can we maybe choose one phylum and stick with it? THANKS.) But Barbie, as someone who hasn't been jumped in to The Kinship's steering committee yet, should have some sense. If these people -- currently really just mindless bodies using up scant resources and contributing nothing -- want to do the unselfish thing and stop being a drain on supplies, doesn't it make a lot of sense for him not to impede their progress? I am not a crackpot.

Kill 'Em All

Julia and Big Jim are out looking for Indy when Julia notices the same crazy astronomical event Barbie did.

They agree that they can't be looking at shooting stars, since those burn out. "Did that star just hit us?" asks Julia. Then the shit REALLY hits the fan.

"Looks like a meteor!" yells Big Jim before they both start running. Does this...? Are they...all going to die? CBS got my letters?! BEST COLD OPEN EVER!!!

Evie Hits The Skids

So if you loved last week's half a bottle episode with Christine and Big Jim using their incarceration to have philosophical conversations, you're going to love this episode, which takes us through the early morning hours with four different sets of characters. How will their experiences of this apparent apocalypse differ? Let's find out, starting with Eva and Barbie.

It's 1:13 AM. Once the pink stars/meteors have, for the time being, put everyone off their suicide plans, Eva tells Barbie he needs to do something to keep the town safe so...why don't they both climb up the fire tower and...see...stuff? I fail to see what this is going to do: there isn't any firefighting equipment in the Dome, so at best it would just give them an idea of what parts of town they should avoid if they start burning? Also, just because the people living at Town Hall have stopped trying to kill themselves for the moment, maybe someone who still has higher cognitive function should stick around to try to stop them doing it again?

Whatever: at 3:57 AM, they're both in the fire tower, seeing fires burn outside the Dome, which is apparently unaffected by whatever just happened. Eva lays out what will happen outside the Dome now: "Yes, some will survive the initial impact. But then the debris that was kicked up into orbit? That'll rain down. And then the sun will disappear behind a dust cloud, and then comes the firestorm." Barbie -- rather more suspiciously than I would like -- asks how she knows this, and she reminds him that she's an anthropologist who's studied extinction-level events. After some talk about what a surprise it is that the apocalypse actually hasn't been caused by human activity, Barbie says they've spent so much time trying to figure out how to get out of the Dome, but now they need to try to get people in; he remembers the red door and announces that he's going to Bird Island, since Aktaion had to have been communicating with the outside world from its command post there. But when he goes to leave, the key to the hatch is gone!

At 7:15 AM, Barbie's trying to pry up a floorboard. "Maybe it's a good thing we're stuck," muses Eva. "How is that a good thing?" Barbie demands. She says that if he could get a message to the outside world, it would be chaos: "People would do horrific things to one another to get through that door." Barbie says they can't just let everyone outside the Dome die: they would definitely not be able to feed any refugees from the outside. And then, since she has a captive audience, Eva decides to peel back a little bit of her person suit (metaphorically speaking) and give Barbie a peek at what he's dealing with: "So many burdens. So much weight on your shoulders. It can all go away....I'm talking about no more worry, no more fear. No more doubt. You can be free like me -- in the process, join something greater. You can evolve." She's oh-so-seductively...unzipped her hoodie and taken off her t-shirt (I know it's the apocalypse, Eva, but you still have to wear a bra) and put his hand on her heart/boob when he hears a tinkling sound: duh, it's the key she hid from him. Barbie is furious at her and stomps off to Bird Island!

Rejected again! Eva is really proof that even very beautiful people can suck at seduction if they're boring and dumb. Long story short: Eva overplayed her hand, and it looks like she and Barbie are quits. So sad.

Just Let Hunter Die Already!

At 1:13 AM, Norrie and Joe are having their own discussion about the meteors and whether this is going to wipe out humanity like the one that killed the dinosaurs did when Hunter wheels out and yells, "What the hell's going on?!" They try to explain about the apocalypse outside, but he DGAF about that: he's still on them preventing Eva from euthanizing him like they wanted her to! "The pain's making you say this," theorizes Joe, but Hunter denies it, saying he's not in pain, and that if they weren't so selfish, they'd understand where he was coming from! Nora's finally like, Fuck this, gags him with a tea towel, and shuts him up in the walk-in freezer.

At 3:57 AM, Norrie's still moping that Hunter's so ungrateful to them about having saved his life, and after a break for Joe to explain our episode title -- "Secondary impacts, when debris from the first impact comes down; it's called ejecta" -- Norrie gets even MORE morose about their situation: you know, even if they survive the infection, the world outside is gone, they have nothing to live for or look forward to, yada yada yada. Then they hear the door jingle and Sam comes in and they determine that he's not a drone. Then, even though Norrie was all for Joe killing Sam to get retribution for Angie's murder, like, two days ago, that was two days ago: "We're all fugitives from The Kinship, and there's not many of us." Friends for life? However long that is? Sure! Soon enough, Hunter starts having another hissyfit, but when they wheel him out, he's a totally different person: "I won't yell. I don't want them to find me. Thank you for saving my life." Sam (somehow) diagnoses Hunter with a couple of broken ribs, and when Norrie and Joe say they didn't bring any meds for him, Sam produces one of the incriminating Jessie Gordon prescriptions and gives Hunter a pill he says will get him through the next few hours. Hunter explains that he doesn't remember anything about what happened; he wasn't thinking at all -- he just cared about The Kinship. But now The Kinship can go fuck itself, apparently: "I don't want to die." See, this is why you don't just let bandwagon-jumpers into your cult; they never have any staying power. Then they see flashlights outside; Sam tells them all to get in the freezer and not to come out no matter what they hear. I wish I could tell Joe and Norrie how good Sam isn't at fatally stabbing people!

SOMETIME LATER, they crawl out of their hidey-hole; Sam's gone, and the place is empty. And hey, Bitter Hunter is back! When Norrie gives him a glass of water, he smashes it and waits for them to turn their backs to try to open a vein with one of the shards. Eventually they tough it out, and when his pill starts to wear off, the tearful, apologetic Hunter comes back. "I think it's fear," he suggests, telling them about watching his mother die after a car crash when he was a kid and how, ever since then, "dying young" has been his biggest fear. WEIRD FEAR? But this gives Norrie a lightbulb moment: she came back to herself after she got pissed at Sam for standing up Joe at their appointed reconciliation meeting: "It's not the pain. It's the emotion." Her trigger emotion is anger; Hunter's is fear; and Joe's must be grief, which is why Christine had such a boner for him forgiving Sam. "We have a way to fight back," Norrie announces on VERY LITTLE evidence. "A way to fight The Kinship." And when the coast is clear, they're going to go find Julia!

Hey, here's a thought: maybe one of the many times Hunter tried to kill himself, they could let him? And not just for the reasons the mass suicide at the top of the episode was kind of a good idea, but also because they're trying to keep themselves alive in extremely sketchy circumstances and Hunter is a complete liability in his current state. Furthermore, he wasn't such a great pal to them even before he went all drone, so WHO CARES if he sacrifices himself for a stupid cause? He's said he wants to die like fifty times. Quit wheeling him away from the inevitable and get on with whatever may be left of your lives!

Like The One You're With

The thawing of relations between Julia and Big Jim is by far the weakest of these storylines -- yes, even weaker than the Junior one we're about to get. After she decides she's not going to get anywhere with the computer, Julia joins Big Jim in drinking to the apocalypse; they seem to be the only ones who think the Dome might crack. When Big Jim opens one of Aktaion's cases and reveals a small arsenal of big guns, he suggests that they make a stand against Christine and her drones, but Julia thinks there are too many of them, plus they don't know how to cure any of the infected. Big Jim doesn't care: "Listen, I say we take these, take out as many of those body snatchers as we can -- you know, make a last stand, like Butch and Sundance." "Including the part where they die?" asks Julia ruefully. "Since the Dome came down, that's the only outcome there was ever going to be," says Big Jim. Julia hates to say it, but she admits that he's right. Big Jim is relieved that she's finally knocked off her "sunny side up, Pollyanna routine" and all her crap about how the Dome was there to save them. At this, Julia says she wasn't wrong: "It's here to protect. It's just not here to protect us."

Then at 8:22 AM, Indy finally comes home...

...and just like Chumley predicted, there's a wall of flame.

For God's sake, someone get Indy a Thundershirt!!!

Caving In

After Junior finds Sam at the diner and convinces him that he needs Sam's EMT skillz to fix Christine -- who got stabbed by someone, and Junior definitely does not know who!!! -- Sam has no real choice but to follow him (eventually), and fake like he's down with all the real crazy shit Junior's talking as if it's totally normal.

Junior vs. Sam, I Guess?

So Junior talks Sam into going into the cave, and then gets him to a clearing, turns off his flashlight, and while he yells at him about Sam's having stabbed Christine because of course he knows, he somehow keeps managing to punch Sam in the face because I guess his amazing cocoon powers give him night-vision? This entire fight happens in near-complete darkness. Cool radio play, CBS!

Winner: ?????

Barbie hauls ass through the forest and gets to the Dome just in time for a small group of refugees to get to the other side and start pounding on it, begging Barbie to help them get inside and away from all the...uh, death! Barbie yells at them to stop (panicking, I guess, not that he says that) and that there's a way for him to get them in, but then all of a sudden Eva's behind him saying he can't help them at all! "The world outside, it's the past. Humanity, with all its terrible flaws, all the mistakes it's made. If we're going to survive, I have to let it go." Barbie doesn't think he can. "Dale," says Eva wearily. "When are you going to admit what you already know? You're one of us." She touches his chest, over his heart, and tells him, "We're part of something greater." Barbie reminds us all that Julia gave his dog tags back to him (weird non sequitur, dude), which Eva seizes on as a relic from his past life that he has to give up: "You can't save that world. You can save the one you're part of now. The one right here."

A cherubic little blonde girl outside puts her palm on the Dome just as Eva tells Barbie, "Please, Dale. Join us. Save us." And that's it! He holds his hand out for her, she takes it, the blonde girl somehow knows that means she's fucked and drops her own hand, and then Eva and Barbie are walking back to town, Barbie SYMBOLICALLY ripping off his dog tags and his old life all at once! Welcome to the hive or colony or herd or WHATEVER THE FUCK! (By the way, all these idiots trying to punch their way into the Dome is just a reminder that the people in the surrounding area are very aware that a Dome just plopped down a few miles away from their houses one day for NO REASON and they DID NOT GIVE A SHIT FOR THREE WEEKS until the world started burning. THIS SHOW!!!)

Underground, Junior holds Sam next to Christine's cocoon, which I guess means Junior won that fight? He tells Sam that when she comes out, Sam will have to answer for what he did to her!

Julia's barely had a chance to laugh hysterically about the fact that it's HER and BIG JIM left as "the last living humans on earth" than they hear a knock at the door! It's the kids, and they can't wait to tell Julia their big plan to fight the aliens with EMOTION! Well, Big Jim's apocalypse just got even worse! And Hunter better not wheel over Indy's tail!!!

Christine's hand comes out of her cocoon, but that's it, because I guess Marg Helgenberger wanted to spend this week at the spa!

The last living humans on earth gather around the gun case, because they've all agreed: "The resistance starts here!" Big Jim hands out guns! Please give Julia one that fires non-lethal ammunition!

And then the computer Julia gave up on for no good reason comes to life with a female voice asking, "Is anyone there? Please confirm! I repeat, is anyone there? PLEASE CONFIRM!!!" Oh, honey. Even if they do, you'll wish they hadn't and envy the dead!!!!!