Under The Dome's Resistance Tries To Put Emotions In Motion

Fit In With Humans By Doing Things Humans Do

Eva the alien has finally convinced Barbie to bone her, but if anyone were wandering by, he or she might notice something a little odd about her.

WEAR A BRA. Wear one of Eva the human's -- you know she packed them! Is seeing Eva's totally naked back supposed to be titillating? Did Kylie Bunbury have a no-bra clause in her contract? Why can't this character put on ALL her clothes?! AND THE WEEK OF NATIONAL UNDERWEAR DAY, NO LESS!

Christine gets out of her cocoon, a lot less gooey than you'd think, and is pleased to see Junior still holding Sam for her! Sam is unrepentant about trying to kill Christine -- as he should be, since he didn't try that hard! Junior offers to kill Sam, but Christine says it's okay: she has other plans for him! Sam tells her she might as well just kill him: "I'll never help you." "Don't worry," says Christine. "I can bring you around!"

And then she kisses him like a creep! He doesn't like it (or pretends not to; you know he must be lonely)!

And then Junior chokes him out so that Christine can deliver some exposition: "I'm not fully healed. I used most of our energy supply and oxytocin just to get back on my feet." She's not sure it was worth the cost, but Junior promises her that it was, since The Kinship was lost while she was gone, and that she made the right choice: they need her!

After sex, Eva looks at her weird reflection! She asks Barbie whether he feels different, and he comes over to kiss her and smile at his completely normal reflection! "I feel like a weight's been lifted," says Barbie serenely, which we know is the wrong answer!

Eva then tries to start things up again, I guess on the assumption that Mirror Barbie is still normal because she didn't bone him enthusiastically enough, but they're interrupted by weird noises and flashes outside, which they go out to investigate!

"Dale, what's happening?" asks Eva. THIS IS YOUR TEAM'S DOING, DUMMY, SHOULDN'T YOU KNOW?!

Mr. Blue Sky

Joe, Norrie, and Julia are driving into town in the car that she's hidden from all the drones and that they somehow haven't found: sure, why not. They're on their way to do various Resistance errands when Norrie notices that the sky is acting all screwy, like switching back and forth between TV channels, something I imagine viewers do a lot during this show:

Julia pulls over, and they get out just in time to watch Christine get helped out of the cave. The sky finally locks on to perfect blue, and Christine gets ready to address the troops hive, Julia surmising that Christine went into a cocoon to heal from her stab wound since she remembers that when Barbie came out of his cocoon in the season premiere, all his wounds were healed: sure. They hear as Christine launches into her explanation: "I know that there's been a lot of confusion over the past twenty-four hours, but the destruction that you witnessed outside the Dome wasn't real. It was an illusion. I projected it onto the Dome as a crucible meant to bring us all together -- to strengthen us for the task to come." Joe mutters that he wishes the Resistance could show the drones all the times Christine's lied to them, but Julia replies, "They're accepting everything she says without question." I mean, they are? But I've seen the rest of the episode so I know the projection part actually is the truth? Maybe this reaction could have come out in a second draft if any writer on this show did those.

Dear Mister President, There Are Too Many Metaphors At Work In Domeology. Please Eliminate Two. I Am Not A Crackpot!

I know I already complained about this last week, but the above-quoted speech is a pretty effective distillation of how confused all the Dome mythology is: we've got a dome (shape?), an egg (organic/biological material), some amethysts (minerals), and of course all the drones who've been drawn to this place to be reassured by their queen (bees); she didn't mention cocoons but we know she just got out of one. I'm not saying a sci-fi show can't be about fictional items/substances/concepts/beings; I'm not an idiot. I'm saying that before you start populating and dramatizing this world we're supposed to buy into, you should give some thought to the otherworldly elements so it's not as hard for your viewer to buy in on the stuff you made up and go along with your storytelling. I can almost give you that egg/butterfly/cocoon was a reasonable metaphorical through-line AT ONE TIME, but how long has it been since we saw a goddamn butterfly? If the writers were going to go hard after all this bee shit this season, maybe we could have found out everyone was in a huge hive? Bees don't make cocoons but they do hibernate, TO PROTECT THE QUEEN. As soon as the amethysts got into the mix, everything broke down -- I know, I know, but more than before. An egg like a battery was already a reach. But EGGS AND MINERALS HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH EACH OTHER. AN EGG THAT'S A BATTERY THAT CHARGES AN AMETHYST IS COMPLETE NONSENSE. Someone at this show needs to do some very serious editing on all the ideas swirling around about WHAT MAKES DOMES GO. I AM NOT A CRACKPOT.

Tell Me More, Tell Me More, Did You Get Very Far?

Who called the meeting? Christine, informally.

What's it about? Whether Eva finally boned Barbie.

How'd it go? It starts awkwardly, while Barbie's still there: poor Marg Helgenberger has just delivered that howler of a speech, and then Christine and Eva have to re-exposit to Barbie that if the Dome loses its power source, it'll calcify and everyone inside will suffocate. But then he leaves to go set up the mining operation Christine wants to haul up the amethysts, and things go better, since Eva did bone Barbie, and Christine the creep is happy.

Eva's worried that Barbie hasn't completed his transformation yet, but Christine tells her it's just a matter of time. That's what I tell myself too. FIVE MORE EPISODES, SUCKAS.

Lily Out In The Field

Julia, He's Just Not That Into You / Humans

Julia having lied to Joe to get his walkie, she makes herself visible to Barbie just as he's winding up directing the efforts of Christine's mining project, something he's apparently qualified to do -- sure, why not. Barbie gives chase, and soon hears her voice crackling out of the second walkie she's left for him. He reminds her that she's not welcome there, but she's not trying to hear that, and desperately tries to get through to him, already forgetting the whole "we're going to break the infection by inspiring emotion" by appealing to his logic instead: why would his cocooma fantasy be that she was dead and he was in love with Eva? Julia, I'm not sure I'd draw attention to that in case his fantasy is HIS ACTUAL FANTASY (as well as mine, when it comes to Julia and living). "Jealousy doesn't suit you, Julia," Barbie tells her sternly. But Julia won't be swayed: she tries to get Barbie to put together the pieces -- her fake death; the forces pushing Barbie and Eva together -- and realize that he's being manipulated into joining The Kinship: "The man I love? Should see right through that." "What we had is in the past," Barbie grunts. He likes what he has with Eva: "There's no more tension, no more drama. We can just be." To be fair to Julia (for once), I think a lot of the tension in their relationship MIGHT have been caused by THE FACT THAT THEY WERE LIVING IN A DOME? But I'm no Barbara De Angelis. Off Barbie's weirdly bland endorsement of his relationship with Eva, Julia asks, "But do you really love her?" Barbie takes a pause long enough for him to find a gun hanging out under a twig (weird), and then for Eva to show up behind him all stalkery, and I guess Barbie still likes Julia a little because even though he's been darting around the woods looking for her with his gun drawn, as soon as Eva rolls up he's all, "I thought I saw a deer." Julia is sad, in more ways than one.

What A Drip

Alert Type: Blood Alert.

Issue: Christine is still determined to turn Sam back into...whatever Eva is, I don't know.

Complicating Factors: He doesn't want to.

Resolution: Christine has Junior bring Sam to the old bomb shelter -- oh, the times we had there! I can't believe that set still exists -- chain him to a bed, and then draws a bunch of his blood, after which she transfuses him with her own, telling him she's Type O: universal donor. (Where did Christine get blood bags and all the accoutrements for this inside a Dome where people die like every day and which has presumably run through all its medical supplies a VERY long time ago? Don't worry about it.) I guess that's it for Sam and his free will.

Spoiler: This one is TO BE CONTINUED!!!

Zzzzzzzap!

Joe and Norrie pull into the lawn in front of a conveniently empty Town Hall, Norrie noting that they're almost out of gas, to which Joe replies that if they charge the battery, they can make it last longer, and as soon as he shuts it off, he connects it to the convenient charging station. NOW. I assume the reason this exchange was included at all is because Julia's Prius was product-placed and it was important to someone at Toyota that this feature of this particular model -- which I sure hope was on the market in 2013, WHEN THE DOME CAME DOWN -- needed to be highlighted: fine. But where is the power in this charging station coming from? Even if you give the show the benefit of the doubt that it's the solar panels Joe rigged up a couple of episodes ago, in between then and now there was a thing where the sun wasn't shining, as far as anyone knew. If the answer is that the skies are clear now, they've only been clear for (by my estimate) a maximum of a few hours -- surely not long enough to charge the cells with anything like enough power to juice up a car. If the answer is that the apocalyptic skies were just an illusion and the sun was still shining through the Dome even if no person in it could see it, then holy crow, that's some illusion, if Christine has that kind of power then HOW COME A BONEHEAD LIKE JULIA KEEPS FOILING HER PLANS? But never mind: Joe plus in the car and none of the drones sees them! HOW LUCKY!

Also Julia's car is REAL clean, so I guess she's been taking time out from survival to give it a good wash each of the past three weeks.

Paper Moon

And THEN Joe and Norrie go into Christine's office looking for the schematic Julia's sent them to find even though wouldn't it make more sense for Julia to have gone to look for it since SHE'S THE ONLY ONE WHO'S ACTUALLY SEEN IT AND THEREFORE KNOWS WHAT SHE'D BE LOOKING FOR? Ha ha, silly me: here's exactly how long it takes for Joe and Norrie to enter the room and find the sketch:

Wizard.

Break On Through To The Mother Side

Situation: Joe and Norrie's very fruitful trip to Town Hall has not just yielded the schematic: Norrie's also spotted her mother and wants to try her emotional attack: "If we get my mom alone, we can convert her. We want her on our side." (Why is Carolyn just farting around in the dorm all by herself? Moving on!)

What makes it awkward? Norrie's conception of this infection antidote is kind of poorly thought out, and when a tender appeal to a sweet memory doesn't work, Norrie immediately downshifts to screaming hurtful and shocking things in Carolyn's face, ranging from the special bond she felt with her other (now-dead) mom given that she gave birth to Norrie, to tales of drugs she did and the sex she and Joe are having.

How is order restored? Carolyn stays calm, starts whistling that creepy tune, and summons a bunch of drones to carry Joe and Norrie off to the cave to start mining. A little hard work never hurt any teenager, I say!

OKAY, so Aktaion, this evil, Halliburtonish corporation, has responded to Big Jim's demand of explosives in exchange for Dr. Frank Whaley by delivering the explosives and hoping he comes through! Sure, why not! Big Jim gets Julia to agree that they're going to have to kill some of these drones, and she's fine with that, and this lunch break is the perfect time for them to enact their plan: she drops a smoke bomb thing somewhere in the woods in the hopes that it will distract a majority of the three guys Barbie deputized to guard one of the entry points of the cave...and it does! Two guys run off, leaving a third to get stabbed by Big Jim!

After wiping the blood of his murder victim on what I have to think is one of the few shirts Big Jim still has after Junior burned his house down, Big Jim heads into the cave, finally planting most of his bombs directly under and around the spot where the last three surviving amethysts are clinging to the cave ceiling!

Junior and Barbie are apparently the only people other than the cave mouth guards who still have the capacity to notice smoke, so they run off to check it out and see the dead guard! Barbie figures out that the smoke was a diversion because he has a military background! He tells Junior to guard the top of the cave mouth -- because if three guys couldn't do it, definitely this one, who is Junior, totally can! -- and goes down to investigate!

Big Jim sees Barbie, covers the light on the last bomb he's planting with his hand, and makes it back to the cave exit without crossing Barbie's path...only to come face to face with Junior -- the last guy you'd want to see under any circumstances but especially this one!

Two Bad Rennies

Who's causing a family crisis? Junior.

How? Letting an alien smear mind control goo all over his lips and, presumably, wiener, turning him into this dopey muscle -- and he wasn't so great to begin with!

Which relatives have a problem with it? Big Jim, who never had an especially high opinion of Junior before (and with good reason) but at least understood what he was on a species level.

Who's an unlikely ally? The other members of the Resistance who did get through to Big Jim with their cockamamie "emotions" talk, because after talking all tough about the bombs he just planted, the next thing Big Jim does is try to appeal to Junior's feelings: he reminds Junior that he had demanded an apology of Big Jim which Big Jim never gave, but he'd like to say he's sorry now. Junior's not interested: Big Jim's not his father anymore, and all Junior cares about now is where the bombs are. Big Jim sadly tells him to follow him, and then...

Spoiler: Junior's going to find out where the bombs are, but not in time to be of any use to anyone, as usual.

Julia vs. Eva

Julia's run far enough away from her smoke bomb that she thinks it's safe to radio back to Hunter at the house and tell him, Joe, and Norrie to get out, but Hunter reports that Joe and Norrie aren't back yet. Julia doesn't have time to react to that before she hears Eva behind her, gun drawn, telling her she shouldn't be here. Julia, like an idiot, tries to appeal to Eva's sense of pride, I guess? "Are we gonna gun each other down in the street?" Eva says it probably won't come to that since she's pretty sure Julia's a shitty shot. Heh, good guess. She then gets into some typical "get yo hands offa my man" stuff, adding that Julia's kind of stuck: Eva and Dale are "bonded" now, so if Julia kills Eva now, "the man [Julia loves] will never forgive [her]." Julia gets calculating, asking if Eva loves Barbie, or if she even can, to which Eva sniffs, "Love is a human construct. It has no value for The Kinship." They go back and forth like this for a while until Julia tries a Sun Tzu move, putting down her gun and announcing that she doesn't have to kill Eva: "When Barbie finally breaks free of this, he's gonna choose me." Kind of a weird gambit given what Eva's just said about love and can reasonably extrapolate about Eva's whole deal: she doesn't get that Eva's going to do whatever is best for the collective, which in this case means eliminating Julia?

Winner: Draw, dammit. We'll get there in a second.

Putting The "Boo" In "Kaboom"

Let's go ahead and add "disarms bombs in seconds" to the impressive list of skills Barbie boasts.

Unfortunately for Barbie, even as fast as he is, he can't disarm ALL the dozens of bombs Big Jim somehow carried and then planted, so he just starts yelling to anyone who might still be down there to get out!

Joe and Norrie hear Barbie's panicked screams, as does Carolyn, who yells at them to drop everything and move!

Eva shoots!

There's an explosion!

Julia gets away, booooooo!

More explosions! WHO SURVIVES?!

R.I.P. Carolyn

Well, Carolyn gets trapped under some fallen rocks, but in her last moments, as she comes back into her right mind, she and Norrie actually have a nice scene (almost entirely due to Aisha Hinds's impressive talents) in which Norrie apologizes for the things she said and explains why she said them, and Carolyn says she loves Norrie. Joe -- who tries to get the rocks off Carolyn but of course can't with those noodle arms of his -- tells Norrie they have to get out before the tunnel collapses. Norrie refuses to leave her mom, and Carolyn smiles, "That's my girl, such a fighter," but then is like, seriously, Joe, get her out of here. Norrie sobs, but Joe does manage to drag her away JUST ahead of the pile of rocks that falls and crushes Carolyn. Farewell, Carolyn, but more importantly, Aisha Hinds, congratulations on putting this mess in your rearview. We were lucky to get you as long as we did.

Julia is standing in the rowboat looking pensive/stupid when she hears a noise behind her and draws on...Big Jim! After telling her that the blood on his shirt isn't his, he drawls, "Look, as much as I'd like to stick around and watch the people of Whoville cry about their precious tunnels going boom, we've got to get back to Bird Island," but she says they can't: Joe and Norrie are missing!

Junior (dragged away from the cave mouth by Big Jim when Junior was unconscious) comes to at the explosion! Barbie is winded but fine! And then Joe and Norrie are climbing out! Barbie is shocked that anyone was actually down there while he was screaming for anyone down there to exit, and asks who else is down there. "My mom," chokes Norrie. Barbie goes down to investigate without Joe or Norrie telling him he probably kind of doesn't have to bother -- but then, they have their own problems, as the drones gather around and Joe yells at Norrie that they have to run!

Hunter's flirting with Lily about his old computer, which she's now using, and that the hentai files she found is actually hiding his password-cracking algorithm -- something he needs now to try to crack Christine's voice recorder! Lily agrees to send him the info, and then there's an alarm on her end! "They're here!" she tells him mysteriously. She tells him she needs him to keep some files for her for a while, and then takes off...with a gun!

Joe and Norrie run through the woods to the road, but Norrie can't go any further because she has to collapse and bawl! "When I came here, I had two moms that loved me. And now I have no one." "You have me!" yips Joe, who adds that he loves her. Looking through him, Norrie sighs, "Well, that's just great"...but of course she's referring to the drones who've swarmed up behind them! Before they can argue about there to go, Julia zooms up in her car, Big Jim in the passenger seat, and yells at the kids to get in! She ran from the dock to town and just somehow knew where her car would be and Joe didn't have the keys on him and she knew where to drive to find the kids? SURE, WHY NOT.

Christine having unlocked Sam's chain and given him the choice as to how he's going to live, Sam gets off the bed! He passes a mirror...but we don't see what kind of reflection he sees!

Julia exposits that she's stashed the car at Sam's, and says he could be a possible ally! Big Jim is dubious, but Julia insists that people are worth saving and that she's not giving up on Barbie! This segues to everyone recapping their individual experiences trying to make emotional appeals to the meaningful drones in their lives! And then Joe says he and Norrie barely got out of the tunnel with their lives, like, didn't you all talk in the car at all? Big Jim and Julia both look REAL guilty as Norrie describes her mother sacrificing her own life for her child's -- "What could be more human?" -- which is how Joe figures out that they were the ones who set the bombs and yells at them for being heedless, as if Julia or Big Jim would have any reason to think they'd be so dumb as to be down there, and insolently drops the schematic at Julia's feet! Everyone climbs into the boat and Big Jim rows alone because Julia sucks at it!

DOME GETTIN' CRUSTY!

And then Christine is freaking out about the amethysts that went boom thanks to Big Jim's bombs! But not so distressed that she can't take a second to exposit that the pint of blood she gave Sam was his own -- she was just playing mind games with him! I guess when your resources are running low, you have to try cheap parlour tricks like that! But back to amethysts! There's only the one left! Eva and Junior say that Julia and Big Jim were behind the sabotage! Then Eva lies that it was Julia who shot at her! "I barely got away! She's obsessed with you, Dale! She's not going to stop!" Barbie blames himself for not, I guess, murdering her when they were fucking around in the woods earlier, and jumps to exactly the conclusion Eva wants him to: "She didn't care if I died in those caves!"

Christine speeches to the drones for a while, all about how they need to strike back against the Resistance and kill them all (which I have to think will be easy since there are only five of them and one has a physical impairment). There must be a more concise way to put that? Oh right, there is!