Episode Title: “Manhunt”
Writer: Adam Stein
Director: Paul Edwards
I hate to break out the “Lost” card so early in a show’s run, but “Under The Dome” made so many missteps in this episode that I need it to make a point. The main reasons that “Lost” became a huge hit was that it had engaging characters and a compelling mystery.
“Under The Dome” has an amazing premise, but it doesn’t really have characters. At best, most of the people trapped in Chester’s Mill are caricatures. At worst, they’re live action cartoons. Only two of the players on this board are remotely interesting, but Dale “Barbie” Barbara (Mike Vogel) and James “Big Jim” Rennie (Dean Norris) can’t carry the show by themselves.
There are full spoilers ahead for “Manhunt,” so if you haven’t caught the most recent episode of “Under The Dome” then you should probably skip this review. Or better yet, skip the episode entirely.
Picking up shortly after last week’s episode, crazed Deputy Paul Randolph (Kevin Sizemore) is led to the local jail by Deputy Linda Esquivel (Natalie Martinez), who can barely keep the crowd from going full lynch mob on Paul even with Big Jim’s help. I want to like Linda and Martinez is not bad in the role. But the script immediately undercuts Linda’s credibility as a deputy when she locks up Paul in a cell and then immediately lets him escape and leave her locked in his place!
Even Linda’s role in the resolution of that crisis doesn’t quite undo the damage of her apparent incompetency. Although Linda is far from the only person in town who’s kind of shitty at his or her job. The other female lead, Julia Shumway (Rachelle Lefevre) makes a few boneheaded moves of her own when she decides to follow Junior Rennie (Alexander Koch) under an abandoned cement factory as he looks for a way out of the dome.
Do the people of Chester’s Mill really not see Junior’s mental illness? Even when he’s not terrorizing his ex-girlfriend, Angie McAlister (Britt Robertson); Junior comes off like a budding psychopath. And yet Julia completely ignores or misses the sense of menace coming from Junior when he realizes that she’s followed him. Julia even tells Junior about her scandalous past as a big city reporter… for no reason!
There were three of those ugly infodumps of pointless exposition in this episode that were all amazingly clunky. And all three of them sucked what little air there was out of the story. The second instance occurred when Junior shared his frustrations with Julia… and she let the last match go out while listening to him!
But even that wasn’t the stupidest moment of the hour. That honor belongs to Big Jim and Barbie. In the middle of the manhunt for Paul, Big Jim literally stops to tell Barbie why he’s called Big Jim… allowing Paul more than enough time to get a drop on them. Fortunately, Linda is there to blow Paul away. Nevermind the fact that Linda’s tracking skills were hardly depicted onscreen.
As a villain-of-the-week, Paul was horribly underdeveloped and cliche crazy. There was nothing to his character beyond his descent into survivalist nut job. Yet all of that was gold compared to the episode’s C story of Norrie Calvert-Hill (Mackenzie Lintz) hiding out from her “Moms” at the home of Joe McAlister (Colin Ford).
The teenage characters on this show don’t work on any level. Their dialogue is especially bad and their performers aren’t convincing at all. Although the writer should get the bulk of the blame here. The house party charging scenes made the rest of the episode look good by comparison. And when one of Joe’s “guests” starts charging people to use Joe’s electricity, Norrie actually breaks out the Sherman Antitrust Act. Seriously?!!
Those scenes only exist to form a budding romance between Norrie and Joe. But the only interesting thing about them is their shared seizure and synchronized cryptic words at the end of the episode. In the meantime, one of Norrie’s lesbian moms, Carolyn Hill (Aisha Hinds) spent the episode looking for her, while Alice Calvert (Samantha Mathis) was nowhere to be found. And Carolyn finally encounters discrimination for being gay from some of the locals… because of course she does. That seems to be the entire point of Carolyn and Alice on this show. They get to experience the best and worst of small town America. But it would have been better if they had anything to contribute to the story beyond that.
About the only subtle touch in this week’s episode displayed was when Big Jim didn’t even bother to ask Barbie why he beat up Big Jim’s son, Junior. Big Jim seems to think that Barbie is useful to have around. And it would be interesting to see them develop a friendship of sorts before inevitably being at odds with each other.
In all honesty, my faith in “Under The Dome” was badly shaken in this episode. The premiere was solid and it showed a lot of promise. But this was borderline unwatchable. It doesn’t matter what network it’s on, this is just bad television on every level. However, as long as people keep watching, it won’t be going away anytime soon.
