Everyone In This Room Is Now Domer For Having Watched It

Quick sort-of-tangent before I get into this. A few days ago, Jonathan Franzen trolled the world -- though he would almost certainly claim ignorance of the term -- by publishing an essay in the Guardian titled "What's wrong with the modern world." If the combination of that author and that title was enough to keep you from clicking the link as though your hand and your mouse were magnets repelling each other, I get it, and whatever crankery you can imagine Franzen (a great writer whose novels I dearly love and wish were the only kind of writing he did) having committed in the piece is probably pretty close to what actually appears; short version: he's mad at Salman Rushdie for being on Twitter. The great James Poniewozik of Time mused on Sunday:

Franzen's Internet essay=textbook example of how progressives can be big cultural conservatives. Another: Aaron Sorkin, esp THE NEWSROOM.

— James Poniewozik (@poniewozik) September 15, 2013

("Cultural conservative" not in sense of anti-gay marriage &c, obvs, but belief in hierarchy; suspicion of change, tech, modern attitudes)

— James Poniewozik (@poniewozik) September 15, 2013

This analogy is, in my opinion, dead on, and in the early going of last night's Under The Dome, I thought that a third name to add to the pantheon would be Stephen King's. Obviously, readers of his old EW columns will have been very familiar with his folksily hectoring tone with regard to...everything, and he already wrote a whole novel where the villains are cell phones. But as the episode reminded me yet again how much it has frustrated me this whole stupid season that this show hasn't considered that people within and without Chester's Mill would have interconnections so deep that no one on either side of the Dome would just accept Dome life without trying tirelessly to de-Dome the town, it occurred to me that King's inability to fathom that even a very small town can't be completely self-contained in the year 2013 for thousands of practical reasons is due to the fact that he hasn't updated his idea of small-town life since he was a kid growing up in one, and he hasn't had to consider how regular people operate and behave because he's been incredibly rich for most of his life. Like, if you were a resident of Chester's Mill, as soon as someone drank the last Diet Coke in the Dome, you'd start a riot. Stephen King hasn't had to think about how Diet Coke gets from the bottler to his desk because he probably hasn't shopped for Diet Coke since Diet Coke was invented. But then it turned out that the point of Under The Dome was not unsustainable insularity à la King: it's just aliens.

By far my biggest problem with Under The Dome is the way the show just straight up dropped the notion that people inside the Dome would try to get out, and that people outside the Dome would try to get in. I mean, if this were, somehow, to happen in reality, trying to escape would be all that anyone inside the Dome would be doing all day until they passed out from exhaustion against the Dome, you know? What else gives this poster image its poignancy?

The reveal that the Dome has been the work of aliens all along -- while dumb (though I don't know if any explanation would have been satisfying) -- could have given producers a free pass to retcon the townspeople's passivity. Say the reason that most Chester's Millions were, apparently, staying at home playing Scrabble most of the past two weeks is that the Dome was filling the atmosphere with airborne Xanax, and only the people hand-picked by the aliens to help put said aliens' plans in motion were immune somehow. I'm not saying that's a good write-around for the only-intermittent panic of the sub-Dome residents, but it would be something; instead, the show decided to blow its budget for day players on the finale and suddenly produced dozens of Chester's Mill residents who only got concerned about the fact that there's a gigantic Dome over the town when it got super-dark in the middle of the day, and responded by trying to "get right with God," apparently also accepting as part of that effort the idea that the town's lone authority figure should have the unquestioned right to order summary executions in the public square (on a gallows, with a trapdoor, that only took two hours to build, in the dark, rrrrrr).

But that's the thing -- the problem with Under The Dome is that it's all problems! Pulling at any of its plot threads unravels the whole thing instantly. Max (Natalie Zea) was trying to start up a fucking yakuza or something inside the Dome -- why? Even if she amasses all the material goods that are worth having inside the Dome, once she uses them up, they're gone forever, because she's trapped in a Dome and can't add to her supply. Big Jim (Dean Norris) announces that the Dome can't come down -- why? Because its sudden arrival has allowed him to seize what amount to war powers? What's he going to do with those after he executes Barbie (Mike Vogel)? The aliens decide to send an emissary in the form of Alice (Samatha Mathis) -- why? Were they seeing how far the mini-Dome crew could get in figuring shit out on their own because two of the aliens had made some kind of Trading Places-esque gentlemen's wager but then (like the rest of us) got sick of watching these idiots bumble around and decided to intervene, finally? This butterfly from the mini-Dome is the thing that identifies Julia (Rachelle Lefevre) as the Jesus of the Dome -- why? Because the aliens just fell in love with the symbolism? You think the egg might be the Dome's "generator" -- why don't you smash it and maybe destroy the Dome? Okay, turns out the egg's not a generator at all, and that the right way to protect it is to drop it in the lake that suddenly exists -- why is that the right place to put it? Light has to be "earned" -- why now? The aliens have apparently selected which town residents are going to have special powers -- why is one of them Junior (Alexander Koch), the one who, if we may safely surmise that they're omniscient, they know quite well is a kidnapper and murderer? The Dome isn't a trap but a sanctuary -- WHY SHOULD CHESTER'S MILL BE SAVED FROM WHATEVER IS GOING TO BEFALL THE REST OF US?

Unfortunately, Under The Dome was made on CBS, a network that's great at making lowbrow shows for which audiences have apparently inexhaustible appetites (see: Two And A Half Men, next week, when it kicks off its ELEVENTH season); some of us may have been intrigued by Under The Dome because of the promise that it was a "limited series," and the expectation that shit was going to wrap up by the end of its one and only season, but we should have known better than to think CBS would ever leave money on the table and end it as long as its ratings were still so good -- and thus, we'll never know how the story would have evolved if producers had to end it in only thirteen episodes. As it is, the effect of all the nonsense that has larded it since the kind-of-interesting series premiere -- Barbie's military past and the possibility that drones are still monitoring him; the town's drug problem; Junior's dead mother and her clairvoyant outsider art; every damn thing to do with the mini-Dome -- seems to suggest that the people writing the show felt they had to complicate the show's mythology in order for the story to support a second season, and also that they believe that just because a plot element is inscrutable, that automatically makes it intriguing. I don't agree.

Admittedly, the season finale did dispense with some elements that have been imbued with huge implied significance -- the mini-Dome, the egg inside the mini-Dome. But since the former just disintegrated when the right four hands touched it at the right time (those other times the same four hands touched it were premature, apparently), and the latter served its purpose by being dropped into a lake, it feels less like they ever really had any significance and more like people got sick of thinking about what characters should do with/about/around them. All light in the Dome got blacked out all of a sudden, and then a few hours later, it got fixed, so the season-ending cliffhanger wasn't whether Monarch Julia would figure out what she was supposed to do as Designated Alien Egg Steward, but whether Barbie, left standing on the gallows with the noose around his neck, is going to hang or not. But he's the Monarch's boyfriend: doesn't she probably have special powers that will allow her to save him? Also, that butterfly flew around him for a while before turning its attention to Julia: maybe that means he's, like, vice-Monarch? Even if he hangs, he brought her back to life when she died, or whatever: maybe she can do the same for him? ...You see the problem, right? When the show's mythology has been so sloppy that anything is possible, it's really hard to care about any of it. And now that "aliens did it" is the official catch-all explanation, shit's only going to get worse. I know, I know -- "How could it get worse?" They'll find a way. Actually, they'll probably find about fifty all-new ways.