Previous Episode: 2.09 Red Door
2.10 "The Fall"
(Directed by Eriq LaSalle. written by Alexandra McNally & Mark Linehan Bruner)
Rating: 4.5/10 (D)
Next Episode: 2.11 Black Ice
Under the Dome does more wrong than it does right. It doesn't succeed at a lot of things but what it accomplished in the last few weeks is quite hilarious: It gave us one of its best episodes only to show us how bad it can be the following week. Not only once but twice now as "The Fall" is everything we come to expect from this show: Nonsensical craziness and poor storytelling.
The episode starts with Big Jim reuniting with his wife Pauline (who, by the way, doesn't look like she just emerged from the middle of a lake a few minutes prior). While he's under the delusion that they can be a family again, she wants the opposite: And that is to grab Junior and get away from him as far as possible. The reunion between Junior and Pauline fell flat and felt emotionally void. It looked more like Junior just returned from a field trip rather than having his mother back for good after believing for almost a decade that she is dead. And that he would would rather kill his uncle rather than spend time with his mother was another head-scratching moment.
Halfway through the episode, absolute craziness ensues:
Barbie and Melanie realize they are half-siblings. How this is important to the story or if it’ll ever become relevant, is anyone’s guess because right now, it isn’t particularly interesting nor does it anything to the show, other than enforce the show’s idea that everyone and everything is connected. Barbie and Julia argue about how to get the whole town out from under the dome and who should go first and they agree to let Big Jim be the lucky one. Pauline starts getting her visions again and paints a cracked dome with Big Jim, Junior and her running around in terror. Now that is something I wouldn’t mind coming true.
When he finds the egg, he knocks himself out (much like Linda in the Season 1 finale) and upon regaining consciousness again, he finds Norrie and Joe (who got to the egg with some device Hunter built) with the egg and threatens to kill them if they don’t go to the cliff with it. I stopped trying to figure out where Big Jim’s characters is being taken because I’m at a complete loss here. Once they get there, he throws the egg down, resulting in an earthquake and Pauline’s visions to stop.
Junior confronts Sam about killing Angie but her ghost appears just in time to prevent him from doing so. Both guys have also been tasked with taking care of Melanie who collapsed during the earthquake which makes for one awkward situation: Undead girl pines over guy who is the nephew of her ex-boyfriend who is now twice as old as her. Oh, and he killed the other guy’s ex-girlfriend. But I suppose Junior will forgive Sam for it because after all: It’s what the dome wants.
But the worst part was that an aspect that has been introduced just recently came to an unsatisfying conclusion: During the earthquake Phil escaped from his cell intent on escaping the dome as well. Although they had more pressuring issues at their hands and no reason whatsoever to follow him, Barbie and Julia still chased him, only to find him impaled by one of the spikes that have suddenly appeared on the other side of the cliff. The passage is blocked and pretty much renders most of this episodes useless.
As someone who dislikes the format of weekly crises on this show, I despised the few minutes spent with setting up the upcoming one: a snowstorm. Rebecca notices the leaves are turning brown and that the temperature has been falling and just to make sure we know what is going on, we have Julia pointing out that it’s actually summer (I reckon Joe was too busy gushing over hunter to throw some obvious exposition into our direction. Some other characters acknowledge this change as well but beyond that, it isn’t mentioned for the rest of the episode. It really doesn’t surprise me that they revert to this format again since they have written themselves into a corner with this episode. The Egg is gone, so is the way out of the dome. For some reason, they refuse to show us more of the outside world which is far more interesting than what is actually happening in Chester’s Mill. This season is dubbed “Season of Tranformation” and yet an awful lot remains the same and that really shouldn’t be the case after ten episodes.
Other thoughts:
- Melanie has been a rather bland character and the one time she cracks a joke, it’s about Junior locking her up in that bomb shelter. That was pretty funny
- “Melanie is probably sitting on it in a nest she built somewhere.”
- Andrea only trusted Julia wth her husband’s food and now she wants Big Jim to approve Julia’s plan?
- “I thought you went to take photos”? Really? He just saved your girlfriend’s life. How about some gratitude?
