Under The Dome - Episode Two: The Fire - Review

Simply put, Under The Dome has quickly revealed itself to be a soap.

I have this idea that there's just one thing that it takes for a viewer to make an investment in a TV show. Just one, and I'm going to share that with you right now. That one thing is character realism. And by that I mean making your characters, at least the primary ones, actually seem like real people, rather than two-dimensional plot devices. It worked for The Wire, and it certainly worked for Breaking Bad, but the creators of Under The Dome just don't seem to have a grasp on that. I mentioned last week that I enjoy shows that indulge themselves in their own silliness, but there's a difference between being knowingly silly and being downright annoying.

Not one of the characters in Under The Dome seems to have any essence of realism. Big Jim Rennie (Dean Norris) is the staple town councillor, seemingly nice at first but soon-to-be turned power hungry as we previously witnessed small-town beard-clad chief of police Duke die after his pacemaker malfunctioned. Then there's the poor-man's archetypal American Hero Dale Barbara, who's in possession of about as much personality as secondary antagonist/control freak Junior Rennie, who's convinced he can keep his ex-girlfriend locked in an underground bunker in order to convince her to get back together with him. Brilliant.

During this weeks episode, the majority of the main cast also managed to establish that they are, in fact, living inside of a dome. Which is a strange coincidence, because the name of the show is... Wait a minute... Also brilliant.

What also angered me was the fact that the military seemed to be presented as a group of half-wits who don't have the capacity to acknowledge what's right in front of them. There's a scene in which two teenagers, Joe McAlister and Benny Drake are stood on the inside of the dome while 'top-secret' members of the military spray water against the dome, likely to be a pretty covert experiment. And yet the military just stand there and carry on. In almost exactly the same situation, Barbie and Julia throw tennis balls against the dome and wave their arms about while soldiers on the other side stand there like buffoons. But then I guess it is America, where 'they' don't tell the public anything. Ever.

Another problem I had was when Barbie and Joe meet each other while Joe is measuring the dome; this logic comes shortly after it's mentioned that the dome has a diameter of ten miles, so I found it pretty unlikely that they would just so happen to 'run into each other.'

On top of all this, the episode really did save the best till last. After the town grouped together to put out a house fire that could have potentially suffocated them all, we saw one of the token cop characters go a little off the rails and shoot the wall of the dome, only to have the bullet bounce off and hit one of his co-workers straight in the chest. This is where I return to my previous point about character realism; the moment just didn't get to me. The character, Freddy, was Deputy Esquivel's brother-in-law, who had a grand total of around four lines in the whole episode. It didn't get to me that he had been shot, it was just a thing that happened. I've always admired shows like The Walking Dead and Spooks, where it's true that just about any character can die at any time, and all bets as to who will get picked off next are a shot in the dark. But those shows succeeded in actually making you care about the characters in said situations. Under The Dome has a serious lack of that.

Here's hoping episode three will be an improvement, or I'll seriously consider having to abandon it.