Under the Dome - Series Premiere - Recap: Living In A Bubble

Even with the way the pilot sets aside the overarching plot to focus on the individual characters and their intersecting stories, some of which spring from the reaction to the dome that's suddenly appeared out of nowhere (though you might be surprised just how few actually do spring off of that central plot point), the pilot does an excellent job in setting the tone for the series. This will probably be a more character-centric mystery series than similar genre shows, in which the goal is centered more around answering why this is happening. I just don't get the sense that it matters why the dome appeared, beyond depicting how this single community responds to the disaster. And I'm fine with that, if only because I can't imagine the explanation being all that satisfying (at least if the explanation is in any way similar to the other "supernatural incident happens in small town Maine" novels). I didn't read the novel upon which the series is based, so I can't really comment upon how well the show adapts the book (but if you have read the book, please sound off in the comments and let us know how well you thought the pilot captured the feel and tone of the novel). But from what I've seen in the pilot, I'm very optimistic about the show's prospects, even while I can admit that there was just a little too much going on here.

The dome appears within the first eight minutes of the episode, and while this doesn't allow for much table-setting to establish the town of Chester's Mill pre-dome, the early appearance of the phenomenon allows the rest of the pilot to deal with the fallout. This has the benefit of allowing us to get to know these characters via their reactions to the dome's appearance. Though confusion is quick to set in, followed immediately by panic, the characters generally respond in even-tempered ways. The mysterious Dale "Barbie" Barbara (Mike Vogel) immediately springs into action, helping a woman whose arm was sliced off by the dome. He teams with town journalist Julia Shumway (Rachelle Lefevre) to rush the woman to the hospital, and that's only one of the acts that cements him as the ostensible hero of this story. Barbie gets a message out to firefighters on the other side of the dome to contact the FAA to restrict airspace over Chester's Mill, in order to prevent any more planes from crashing into the transparent dome, as Barbie had to rescue a local teen from a falling plane that crashed against the side of the structure. How he can even string two coherent sentences together after witnessing a cow get bisected by the dome (in one of the weirdest visual effects I've seen on TV in years) is beyond me, but Barbie stakes his claim as a character worth following, although his purpose for being in Chester's Mill remains ambiguous, if not slightly sinister.

Of course, the dome has a wide-ranging effect on the entire town. First and foremost, car salesman "Big Jim" Rennie (Dean Norris), a town councilman, attempts to take control of the situation. With the mayor presumably outside of the dome, Big Jim is one of the town's central figureheads. He releases a distress message through the town's independent radio station, and then tries to get several townspeople deputized. However, the chief of police isn't exactly keen on the idea of giving badges to a bunch of amateurs. Rennie attempts to solidify his hold on power by threatening the chief of police with the reveal of why they've conveniently stockpiled tons of fuel right before the disaster. Rennie is hardly the only person who faces significant changes as a result of the dome. Several of the townspeople experience seizures in which they foam at the mouth and recite a phrase about (I believe) the stars falling. Among those victims are Howard "Duke" Perkins (Jeff Fahey), chief of the police department; an angsty, emotionally-troubled teen named Norrie (Mackenzie Lintz); and the teen Barbie rescued from the falling plane, Joe McAlister (Colin Ford). Joe had been looking for the "power source" for the dome at the time of his seizure, while Nori had just witnessed a cataclysmic (and visually spectacular) crash in which a truck slams against the dome. Duke, meanwhile, was about to confess a closely-hidden town secret to his young partner, Deputy Linda Esquivel (Natalie Martinez), whose fiance is trapped on the other side of the dome. These are developments that compound the mystery, yet the series benefits by having stories that don't particularly have much to do with the dome (not centrally, anyhow).

Take the case of Angie McAlister (Britt Robertson), for instance. She's a nurse with big dreams of escaping the small town monotony of Chester's Mill. Angie has also been having casual sex with a guy named Junior (Alex Koch), and it's this choice that ultimately creates problems for the dreamer. Junior is a strange case. He doesn't take the sex at face value, and insists that he and Angie share a deeper connection. He has an intense fight with Angie moments before the dome falls, and Junior has a harder time dealing with the fallout from his fight with Angie than with the whole dome incident. He stalks Angie at her job and threatens Barbie after he sees him chatting Angie up. His possessive tendencies reach a fever pitch when he actually breaks into Angie's house and abducts her, since hers and Joe's parents are trapped outside the dome. Junior then stores her in the family's fallout shelter and insists that he's the only person in town who knows what's going on. He tells Angie that she'll thank him for doing this someday, yet somehow, I doubt that. Of course, since Junior is crazy, he had to have come from crazy stock, and the final moments of the episode more or less confirm this, as we learn that Junior is the son of Big Jim Rennie. This is a fascinating development, even if Junior and Big Jim come across like overly obvious, over-the-top villains. But with a genre show like this, subtlety might not be the route to take this -- thus, this is probably the right approach. Father and son are certainly the two most memorable characters of the pilot, even more so than Barbie.

The pilot for Under the Dome privileges character development over the establishment of the central premise. The dome looms over Chester's Mill, yet there's much more going on beyond the issue of dealing with the town's entrapment. In many ways, it's like Lost for how it puts the emphasis on character-grounded storytelling over straight-up plot. Time will tell if that's an approach that will work as the series moves forward, but for now, it's pretty effective.