Tweetable Takeaway: IT’S OVER, AND WE’RE LEFT KNOWING THAT THIS ENTIRE SERIES MADE ABSOLUTELY NO SENSE! Tweet
Airtime: Thursday 9 PM CBS
By: Paul Gulyas, Contributor
Well, it’s all over. The three-season stretch of CBS’s UNDER THE DOME made it’s final curtain call last night. The show will not be returning for a fourth season, so it’s third season finale served as a series finale. But you get the impression they thought they were coming back when they made it as there is little to no closure whatsoever, and in fact quite an elaborate set-up for what the series would be if it had lived to see another summer.
I wasn’t expecting anything satisfying out of the conclusion, and I didn’t get anything satisfying, so I’m even money right now. The Dome came down just as the CBS executive announced it would weeks ago, so no shock or real pay-off there. We saw the likes of several main characters killed off (and a couple brought back to life after being killed). Sam and Junior are now fighting for who will be the new queen Dawn’s “alpha.” Sam and Junior physically tango a bit before Junior sticks a rusty pipe through his uncle’s abdomen. Bye, bye Sam.
Later, Junior and his father Big Jim predictably come face to face one last time, only for Junior to not snap out of his spell and force his father to shank him in the chest with his knife to death. Bye, bye original cast member Junior!
So from what I gather, (this part has been a little fuzzy for me throughout the season–for a show that is about 98% exposition it’s not very good at it) the Kinship was trying to bring the Dome down by something something schematics something something amethysts something something whistling. That’s right, whistling. The particular frequency of a whistle hitting an amethyst would somehow shatter the Dome. For some reason Joe was the only one who was able to do this whistle, but it meant he would die. So he stood in the middle of the amethysts, whistled, and brought down the dome. By whistling. That would be like if they took down the Death Star by covering it in doilies. Very anticlimactic, silly, and just like… why? But anyway: bye, bye original cast member Joe!
A huge problem was that the episode didn’t take any time at all to let the characters be mourned or even give them character-appropriate send-offs. It was just pipe through the sternum, knife in the chest, and whistle. Boom, done. Even Barbie didn’t hesitate to take out his “daughter” the Queen (as he shouldn’t have because she’s clearly bent on destroying Earth and she was literally still a fetus about 36 hours ago).
But for the big bad guy of the series finale, she didn’t really go out with a bang either, much like the other characters. She and Barbie somehow got on a wooden plank over a dark bottomless pit (I missed why that existed) and Barbie stomps his foot on it, snapping it in half, sending them both toppling into the chasm. Barbie survives somehow (I missed that too), but Dawn, the Queen was killed off. So add “flimsy plank over convenient abyss” to the list of murder weapons in this “action-packed” finale!
In the last five minutes or so, we cut to a year later. Big Jim has been elected to congress. Hunter is working for the NSA. Norrie has joined the military to look for Joe (who ends up being still alive, but a prisoner of the army). Julia and Barbie have been traveling the country on his motorcycle and he’s about to propose to her when a couple government SUVs roll up. It’s Big Jim. He takes them back to his office and explains that facial recognition tools Hunter set up detected Dawn the Queen somewhere in Wyoming! The final scene of the series is three children squatting down and looking at something. Dawn, now a teacher somehow, finds them and tells them to run along. Pan down to see it’s the egg that caused the Dome over Chester’s Mill! THE END.
These poor, poor writers didn’t know they were fated to not be renewed. So they had to leave themselves something. And they left a tattered cast of weak characters banding together to somehow fight the military cover-up and, as the title of the show would still be “Under the Dome” in a hypothetical fourth season, presumably enter a new Dome put up over somebody else’s town. Okay. Fine. At least it’s outside the box. But it still leaves us with a burning question we’ll never get the answer to now (because there isn’t one):
WHY ARE THE ALIENS PUTTING DOMES ON EARTH THAT BRING WORLDWIDE ATTENTION TO THEIR PRESENCE? ESPECIALLY WHEN THEY ARE JUST GOING TO NEED TO DO A WEIRD WHISTLE THING AND BREAK OUT OF THEM EVENTUALLY, ONLY TO FIND THEMSELVES SURROUNDED BY ENEMY MILITARY? WHY ARE THE ALIENS WHO HAVE ADVANCED TECHNOLOGY AND SOME SORT OF GROUP TELEPATHIC CAPABILITY SETTING THEMSELVES UP FOR FAILURE???
THIS ENTIRE SERIES MADE ABSOLUTELY NO SENSE!
Hope you enjoyed these reviews more than I enjoyed the show!
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Paul co-created and writes for SHOWoff, a game that lets players predict what happens next on their favorite TV shows, earn points for what they get right, and see where they stack up against friends and the world (free in the iOS App store). Check out the SHOWoff app at playSHOWoff.com
Twitter: @paulgulyas
Tumblr: paulgulyas.tumblr.com
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