Under the Dome 2.01 “Heads Will Roll”

No, UTD, no. You have learned nothing in your seasonal hiatus. Barbie and Julia are still super heroes. Joe is still a perennial victim (a nail actually pulls itself through his hand and out the other side, after affixing it to a table). You’re still pulling new characters out of nowhere (it’s a sealed dome, right – that has had numerous town meetings and riots — the only people left are true misanthropes who stay trapped underground in caves? You ran out of islands in the lake last season!). You’re still killing people abruptly, for shock value (this week Linda and Angie, two main characters of Season One?!).

And your main character, Big Jim, is still completely inconsistent and lost, while acting like he knows everything and always has the answer. He doesn’t, he’s a power mad idiot. Which the dome knows, but how stupid does everyone else have to be to not see it? When you have your own characters commenting on how poorly the plot lurches around (“Everyone was out to get you just seconds ago,” observes the ever emotionally flat Julia), the plot is a bubbling stew of mess.

There are some good things still there. When Carolyn and Alice’s house is destroyed by magnetism (the magnetized dome is a pretty scary special effect, and I did like how the knives flew across the kitchen without hurting anyone, because THE NAILS were coming), Carolyn keeps her head on her shoulders as usual and accepts Big Jim’s eventual offer of lodging, so as to “keep your enemies close” she whispers to her daughter.

Sam, the alcoholic EMT guy living in the woods, is family to Junior and Big Jim, and has a semi-creepy vibe that must tie into something. And the girl who falls into the lake, and figures in Junior’s mom’s sketchbook (which Sam has), and wonders around town in a trance, definitely has a creepy witchy vibe.

She also allows Stephen King a moment of horror, as Angie follows her into the high school to meet her demise, giving us five seconds of a horror movie at the end of our sci-fi soup. Don’t know what that’s about, but it’s not really a problem.

Julia being able to swim and rescue the drowning girl in the lake with a bullet wound in her arm? Not the problem. Junior dithering overlong over whether to pull the lever to hang Barbie? Not the problem. Dodee’s ghost (or whatever) coming back to haunt Big Jim into doing even one right thing to appease the Dome? Nope, that was cool, and the blinding white dome (last season’s “cliffhanger”) equaling angry magnetism also not the worst (though please stop with the bloody handprint and the bisected cow, really, 500 times is enough for those two pilot moments).

No, the worst is that Jim, foiled in hanging Barbie (his scapegoat for his own crimes), sees Junior felled by the magnetic pulses (explained by the 3^rd new character, high school science teacher Rebecca who thinks she’s got this shit figured out, but is wrong) like most of the town, and suddenly feels he must sacrifice himself to save his son. His son he’s tried to have killed at least once since the show began, and whom he constantly berates. His son he seems to despise at times, blaming him somehow for the mother’s death. His son who frequently has been a dangerous lunatic kidnapper and who has tried patricide himself once or twice.

There’s just no motivation for Big Jim putting his head through the noose and trying to die. Not after he’s been discounting all responsibility for everything all episode. It was too quick of a plot shift, there only so the dome would turn off the FX until next week. That’s the kind of crude nonsense the show has to get away from if it ever wants to actually be good.

Junior does have a dream while he’s unconscious, though. Where he sees his “dead” mother. The dream sequence is suitable spooky (okay, probably another Stephen King moment peeking through), showing that the mother is outside the dome, near an obelisk, and still alive and painting away and in love with her son. Best of all, she’s Sherry Stringfield (of ER and Guiding Light!), so I’ll give you another week, show. There’s nowhere to go but up.