The Dome Abhors A Vacuum...Of Power!

Back In The U.S.S. Dome

Try to imagine how these KY Jelly-coated former cocoon fillers feel about squinting their way into the sunlight and seeing that they're back in the Dome. Actually, you don't have to imagine, because none of them is apparently capable of conveying that with subtlety.

"Also She Was Cocoon-Pregnant Byeeeeeeeee"

Situation: When Barbie was in the cocoon coma -- hereafter known as the "cocooma," so get on board -- he had another girlfriend.

What makes it awkward? Though she's KIND OF trying to hide it, Julia is being ridiculous about Barbie's having cheated on her even though in the cocooma she was dead. That said, Barbie's not helping by being all taciturn about it -- particularly the part where Eva was pregnant. And Eva also doesn't help when she runs into Barbie just as he's pulled a gun on Big Jim in the hallway outside a Town Hall meeting (as you do) and runs away in an extremely suspect fashion. Oh, and also, Barbie is very dubious about the allegations Julia's made about what Melanie got up to in the actual world while he was snoozing, including killing Barbie Sr. and trying to kill Julia.

How is order restored? In the usual way: Barbie stalks off on his own, finds Ben's corpse, decides it corroborates Julia's account, and professes his love. Still doesn't tell her about Cocooma Baby, though!

All This Otherworldly Sphere Needs To Crumble Is A Good Haymaker Probably!

LOL JUNIOR WHEN I SAID YOU WANTED TO PUNCH THE DOME I WAS JOKING!!!

Sorry that you can't punch your way to freedom, big guy. Have you tried painting?

Jim vs. Jim

I've joked before about how Big Jim's motivation changes from the start of an episode to the end; here's an example of it changing IN THE MIDDLE OF A SCENE. Remember how earlier on this same day we're still in Big Jim shot Junior? Well, now that Junior's emerged from his cocooma, Big Jim wants Junior to come home with him. Junior's so committed to not making amends that he refuses Big Jim's offer of an energy bar and starts listing Big Jim's many past crimes, including the thing with the tree that we saw last week, I guess so that someone could justify having hired a kid actor to play Little Junior if the scene's significance stretched over multiple episodes? Because like, I don't think we need to look so far down Big Jim's rap sheet when HE SHOT JUNIOR LIKE SIX HOURS AGO. IT'S STILL LIGHT OUT. As Junior rhapsodizes about his cocooma and how much better he was as a person after cutting ties with Big Jim, his father's mood re-darkens and he flips his switch back to abusive bully: "You're still weak, and pathetic, and afraid." This makes Junior real mad!

Winner: ...Jim? Just kidding, obviously they're both losers.

Rapid-Fire Exposition About Why Christine And Eva Are In Chester's Mill (And FEMA Has Nothing To Do With It Even Though This Series Is Definitely A Disaster, Amirite?)

• They were in their cocoons for three weeks -- so, since Dome Day, I guess?
• The last thing Eva remembers is "finding that Egg."
• "None of this makes sense."
• They're anthropologists.
• Cocooma Eva was "an aid worker"...who hires mercenaries who shoot co-operating detainees? Cool.
• Christine doesn't know why they both had different jobs in the cocooma.
• They came to Chester's Mill on an Egg hunt.
• Hektor is behind it.
• Eva doesn't think Actaeon knew what would happen when they find it (meaning, I guess, the Dome's coming down? or their cocooning? or both?).
• There's a Town Hall meeting tomorrow.
• Eva wants to skip it (she doesn't want to see Barbie and Julia together), but Christine thinks it'll be suspect if they don't show up.

If You Can't Write Something Smart And Original, Why Not Hang A Lantern On Your Dumb Ripoff?

Egg Council Goons

Who called the meeting? Christine.

What's it about? Melanie has proven herself to be a shitty Egg steward and she is in Big Trouble.

How'd it go? "You had a job," says Christine, standing on the corpses of thousands and thousands of dead butterflies whose "cycle came to an end." "To lead the people to be cocooned so that the Egg could infuse them with the life force." Of all the HR performance reviews I've ever borne witness to, this one is starting in the top 1% of awkward. After apologizing, Melanie expositorily asks, "Why were we chosen to do this?" "You and I made first contact with the Egg," says Christine. "When we touched it, we gained a complete understanding of the Dome's agenda: survive and propagate." Wait. Who's surviving and propagating? More Domes are coming? Do I have to FEAR THE WALKING DOME now?! Melanie points out that she touched the Egg first, twenty-five years ago. So she...is Barbie Sr.'s daughter? Or did she say she's not because she's mad at him for knocking up her mom and ditching her? GAAAAH. "But you died during the download," says Christine, like she's embarrassed for Melanie that Christine even has to repeat something so obvious. "Three weeks ago, I came along. From inside my cocoon, I could see that this town was on the brink of destroying itself." She swipe a hand along the goo on the outside of an abandoned cocoon and, at Melanie's question, says it's oxytocin: "It, plus the alternate reality [cocooma], was essential to shape these humans into a functioning collective, so that we could gain a foothold -- except the transfer of the lifeforce was interrupted." "Because Big Jim destroyed the Egg," says Melanie defensively. "Because you didn't protect it," needles Christine. "Everyone who was cocooned has a role to play. We need to finish what we started. Quickly." Melanie whines that she can't go up there, and that she's surprised Julia hasn't already come looking for her. Christine says she's going to get a read on where the townspeople are, mind control-wise (I'm paraphrasing), and that if Melanie sees Julia, she should kill her.

So how'd it go? Poorly thought out and incomprehensible -- THE USUAL.

A New Monarch Arises

Okay, so after Eva and Barbie have their awkward re-meeting, Christine has to smooth things over with Julia and Big Jim -- as far as we know, the only two non-cocoomite Chester's Millions (since Junior did succumb eventually and would crawl back into his pod right now if he could, he doesn't count) -- and convince them that it's totally normal that she's there even though they've never seen her in the past three weeks the Dome's been down. After recapping the parts of her cocooma story that we know from last week, she claims that, three weeks ago, she and Eva ended up in the Dome because they wandered off a trail on a hike, fell in a sinkhole, and got cocooned like everyone else.

JULIA AND BIG JIM ARE NOT BUYING IT. Also I guess Christine is very confident in her ability to hypnotize people just by staring at them or whatever because if anyone follows her and Eva back to their motel room, it's going to be pretty clear from how lived-in it is that they've been living there for a while. Plus there's a bunch of stuff strewn about concerning their actual Egg assignment which even a stupid Chester's Million couldn't be so lazy and incurious as to ignore. Anyway, once she's sold her backstory, more or less, to Big Jim and Julia, she marches into the Town Hall meeting and totally takes over from Julia -- not hard to do given that Julia's advice regarding the current housing crisis caused by the Dome's contraction is that everyone who still has a home should open their doors to their neighbours. GREAT PLAN, JULIA, I REMEMBER HOW ALTRUISTIC THESE PEOPLE ARE FROM THE TIME THEY BLEW UP THE FOOD BANK. Christine nominates Joe to build traps for wildlife and to raid Andrea's food hoard (that thing's got to be down to canned black olives by now) and announces that she's going to set herself up in an office in Town Hall for anyone who wants to talk. Julia:

GO TELL A BUTTERFLY, HOT ROLLS.

Dear Mister President, The Number Of Suicidal Chester's Millions Seems Unusually Low Under The Circumstances. Please Add More. I Am Not A Crackpot!

Junior apparently walked from his spat with Big Jim right back to where he was, except now he has a gun and he's trying to psych himself up to kill himself with it. When he can't pull the trigger, he curses himself out -- "He's right, you're weak, you're weak, you're pathetic" -- but then along comes Sam, following Christine's direction that he should roll with his cocooma calling and start a support group, which he's prepared to do having been in AA in imaginary prison. I mean, whatever, she's got her own project and doesn't actually care what any of these people do, but Sam apparently thinks she's on to something and that the first person he should counsel is the nephew who already tried to kill him once for having killed said nephew's girlfriend. (JESUS, THIS SHOW.) "What's so bad you gotta end it all?" asks Sam, like a goddamn idiot, and instead of shorthanding it with "Everything's bad all the time, or haven't you been paying attention for the past three weeks?," Junior pules, "The life we had? In the cocoons? I saw the world, I knew what it was like to be my own man, to be free from my father, and I can't be back under this Dome with him again! I'd rather be dead!" Sam:

Seems...kind of inappropes? But no, Sam congratulates Junior for "hitting bottom": "You've gotta get there before you can change. Whatever you found in that other life can help you here." Except for the part where Cocooma Junior got to travel to Marrakech and have cool drinking contests with Barbie and Eva?

But all that aside: how has there not been a suicide epidemic since Dome Day 1? They've had every kind of resource crisis. A bunch of them are now homeless on top of everything else. They have no idea from moment to moment what the Dome "wants" or what it's going to do -- expand, contract, rain blood, send a swarm of locusts, cause a tornado, snore, collapse, explode, implode, start singing show tunes off-key -- and all evidence points to there being NO KIND OF EFFORT, private or public, to get them out. The only reason I can think of that this hasn't turned into a show about a suicide epidemic is that the residents of Chester's Mill are all too stupid to understand how dire their circumstances are. EVERYONE IN TOWN SHOULD HAVE KILLED THEMSELVES BY NOW. I am not a crackpot.

Good Job?

So after settling into the Town Hall office she's going to squat in, Christine sends Eva to go get the one piece of evidence that could blow their cover, and Eva's like, "I don't even know where to start," and Christine's like, "We have found the remains of ancient civilizations -- I'm sure we can handle this," and it turns out that Christine was right to believe in Eva because it takes her about six seconds to find a particular log and dig up a camera she and Christine had buried under it (while Big Jim, who's tailed her, watches and almost gets his cover blown by that dog he can't shake). Maybe next time don't bitch so much about such an easy mission, Eva.

Also, the camera that these anthropologists buried three weeks ago is still on.

Tri To Make Me Care. You Can't.

I guess it wasn't so gross in the cocooma that Hunter was about to bone Norrie because a year had passed and she was in college. But in actuality she's still in high school and he's in his twenties and that makes it kind of difficult to invest in this new love triangle, though that would also be true if they were all exactly the same age. Norrie is heartbroken about the sorority life she lost, and Hunter -- a carefree Frank Churchill type who encourages her basest instincts, like dragging Andrea's corpse unceremoniously to her porch and listening to her "NYC PUNK!" cassette while they go looking for what remains of her food hoard. Joe tells them he'd known Andrea his whole life and is aghast that they'd just leave her out on the porch "like trash," as though this is really the time for a funeral, plus neither of them knew her. Long story short: Norrie is drifting away from Joe and his poor opinion of her means less and less by the second.

The Best Detective In The (Motel) Room

Remember how I said even a Chester's Million would, if he were to get into Eva and Christine's motel room, notice all the Egg-related items that are EVERYWHERE? Shows what I know! Big Jim follows Eva back and ignores all that stuff; however, he at least determines, from the path of her muddy footprints, that she hid the camera in the dresser, and easily finds it. I HAVE SOME QUESTIONS.

• Why is the camera safer in their room than in the woods someplace where no one would have any reason to look for it?
• It never occurred to Eva maybe to hide the camera and the memory card in two different places?
• Have they previously established that whoever runs the motel has been outside the Dome since it came down? Because if not, that person could certainly blow their cover by making public when Christine and Eva actually checked in, couldn't s/he? Or were they just passing through town when the Dome came down (...or their Egg-handling brought it down)?
• If they were Domed as soon as they arrived, basically, why is their room so lived-in?
• Why am I trying to impose logic on this show?

Whatever: Big Jim takes the camera to his prowler and watches a video on it, in which he sees what happened when Christine dug her first intact Egg -- the one he smashed yesterday -- out of the ground.

Ouch. If that's what the Dome does to people it trusts to carry out its agenda, everyone else is really fucked.

Burn, Rennie, Burn

Who's causing a family crisis? Junior.

How? He's finishing in actuality what he started in the cocooma: burning down Big Jim's house.

Which relatives have a problem with it? You're not going to believe this, but Big Jim is not wild about seeing his home consumed in a terrible CG conflagration.

When Big Jim confronts Junior about it, a blank-eyed Junior informs him that he's not Junior's father anymore, and wanders off literally whistling.

Who's an unlikely ally? Christine, who told Junior to do it.

Spoiler: Maybe Big Jim's better off in a lot of ways.

Melanie vs. Julia

After their reaffirmation of their mutual love thanks to Ben's strangled corpse, Julia and Barbie make their way out of the hole...but they don't get far: Melanie yanks Julia out and looses the ladder from the ground, sending Barbie hurtling back to the tunnel floor. From there, Barbie hears a gunshot, but after a brief struggle, Melanie gets the gun out of Julia's hand and ends up straddling Julia and choking her out...for a while.

I scoffed at Christine's talents as a fake therapist, but she must have some kind of insight: after only knowing Julia for a few hours, she correctly intuits that Julia would imprint on anyone who did her a kindness, like a duckling.

Guess that's a wrap on Julia's completely reasonable suspicions!

Winner: Christine.

Barbie's moping over Melanie's and Barbie Sr.'s just-buried corpses, which...fair enough. "Now we'll never know why she did that to us," Barbie pouts, speaking of Melanie. Uh, now you'll never know a lot of things, like WHY SHE APPARENTLY CAME BACK FROM THE DEAD?

Julia finds Big Jim loading a rowboat so he can leave town for...Bird Island, apparently? He's not feeling too bullish on all the ex-cocoomites: "You know what happens inside a cocoon? That fuzzy little caterpillar liquefies. And when it comes out? It's something else. Those people, they're, uh-- They're not the same." "Of course they're not," says Julia. "Think about what they've been through." "No, I mean THEY'RE NOT THE SAME," says Big Jim. "They've changed. Junior, he burned down the house and whistled while it blazed, all dead behind the eyes." "He finally stood up to you," gloats Julia. Um, yeah, that's great, but people are living in tents in the park, Julia: could you be a little less happy about a fucking idiot burning down a rather large house just to make a point? Christ, no wonder you're not in charge anymore. Anyway, she continues being smug about Big Jim's having been "run out of town," and he darkly warns, "I'm right about them, just like I was right about everything else." He's definitely more right than Julia is right now!

And then the dog shows up and hops right in the boat and now that I see this dog is okay with him, I'm fully Team Big Jim (although when he stared into its eyes I was very sure we were on the cusp of him deciding this dog is the reincarnation of Pauline)!

In her office, Christine creepily rolls her geode on what I assume is what's left of the Melanie-creature's blood (or "blood," maybe) on her giant knife and monologues over some b-roll of the Chester's Millions wandering, zombielike, to the lawn in front of her!

"James was the closest, a seed ready to sprout, once he shed his fear. With the right amount of nurturing, Sam could be next. They came when I signaled without knowing why."

"The lifeforce has taken root. Some are compelled to serve their duties."

"Some will require cultivation."

"Others must be pruned away."

"Weeds are stronger than they seem, a threat to what must blossom."

"But with careful tending, this kinship will grow into what we need it to be."

LOOKS LIKE THEY NAMED THE WRONG ONE "EVA"!!!!!