I guess this was a show about some aliens?

September 15, 2015 5:10 AM

"Right around the time I first joined the cast of Under the Dome, I was smoking a bowl with the Monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey."-a review of sorts of the final episode and series of the American tv show.
posted by Brandon Blatcher (38 comments total)

Under The Dome was like watching a tv show written by a new team of writers every episode. Which, if you were doing it on purpose, would be a pretty neat concept.
posted by Ray Walston, Luck Dragon at 5:41 AM on September 15, 2015 [2 favorites]

I didn't watch this because I am still on Oceanic Flight 815.
posted by srboisvert at 6:08 AM on September 15, 2015 [10 favorites]

I liked the first episode of Under the Dome. There were all these touching little moments that were obviously written by Brian K. Vaughan, that really made me care about the characters and their plight.

And then all of that was thrown away the very next episode. Sheesh.
posted by 1970s Antihero at 6:08 AM on September 15, 2015 [1 favorite]

I'm ashamed to admit that I watched the whole series, even though I kept mumbling "WTF" under my breath with every plot twist and turn. I've come to believe that I was waiting for Walter White to come along and kill his brother-in-law (AND his idiot son)....
posted by HuronBob at 6:44 AM on September 15, 2015 [1 favorite]

I loved this show. It was so dense with absurdities. Like Arrested Development was layers and layers of jokes and you watch an episode a seventh time and there's still a joke you didn't see the first time? Under The Dome was like that with ridiculousness. Watching the actors phone it in, desperate to be done with it so they could do something with dignity, like a toothpaste commercial...it's a comedy gold mine and everyone should watch it and I'm bereft without it.

I am fairly certain that it is the absolute worst television show in history. That is an achievement.

Long live the dome.
posted by A Terrible Llama at 6:45 AM on September 15, 2015 [5 favorites]

I watched the first season with mild curiosity. As I was watching the last episode of the season, I remember thinking, "Boy, they're not leaving themselves a lot of time to wrap this up. Huh. Only 20 minutes left. Get to the explaining. Last ten minutes. Is there going to be another episode after this? THERE'S ANOTHER SEASON OF THIS HORSESHIT?! I'M OUT!"
posted by ColdChef at 6:57 AM on September 15, 2015 [3 favorites]

Well, I admit I got further into the first episode of Under The Dome than I did the first episode of Lost, but I came away with the same opinion. I never went back for more. I recall someone dubbing it Under The Dumb. And, that's about how it hit me, too.

I was, frankly, shocked when I saw it had been given a second season.
posted by Thorzdad at 7:12 AM on September 15, 2015

ColdChef, that was exactly my experience of it. Watched season 1 with my son, then we ditched it. We could't even muster the will to hate-watch the next season for laughs. It was on the other day as we were flipping channels and he just rolled his eyes when I said "hey, Under the Dome!"
posted by chococat at 7:18 AM on September 15, 2015

I am fairly certain that it is the absolute worst television show in history. That is an achievement.

Worse than Terra Nova? I finally have a reason to check it out!
posted by under_petticoat_rule at 7:21 AM on September 15, 2015

My roommate watched this all the way through. "Why are you watching it if you hate it?" "I'm too invested, I wish it would just end."

I think this may be the only show my roommate has ever watched where I started to ask the standard "what's going on" and then stopped myself and said "forget it, it won't make sense."
posted by Hactar at 7:41 AM on September 15, 2015

So the dome is an alien egg. No, I never would have guessed that. Did anybody see that coming?
posted by scalefree at 8:02 AM on September 15, 2015 [1 favorite]

Hey now. This last season wasn't horribly bad, there were some good one-liners for Big Jim. But yeah, Jeff Fahey getting killed off in the first episode should've been a red flag.
posted by TWinbrook8 at 8:27 AM on September 15, 2015

There's no place like Dome.
posted by infinitewindow at 8:34 AM on September 15, 2015 [1 favorite]

Worse than Terra Nova? I finally have a reason to check it out!

and the awfulness of Terra Nova was a mutated version of the abruptly cancelled BBC show Outcasts.

Seriously, these days if you watch any new TV series before they end you are just asking to be driven out into the middle of a field, stripped naked and left there.
posted by srboisvert at 8:36 AM on September 15, 2015 [2 favorites]

It would have been perfectly fine if they had stuck to the book plot, making it more of a miniseries, instead of trying to make it go on for season after season.
posted by cass at 8:55 AM on September 15, 2015 [1 favorite]

I only watched the first season, and didn't think much of it. I kept thinking "Man, they really must have a blown a bunch of their budget on that half-cow scene. Because I think I've seen it TWELVE TIMES"


I guess they were...

....milking it

*puts on sunglasses*
EYAAAAAAAAAH
posted by lumpenprole at 8:57 AM on September 15, 2015 [11 favorites]

A few episodes of The Dome were on TV in the background right around the time I was playing through XCOM with the Enemy Within expansion, so the two have been somewhat mixed up in my head: I tried to pay attention and watch some more, but I kept waiting for some sectoids to pop up out of the woods or a squad of MEC Troopers to come in and blow some alien stuff up real good and it never happened.
posted by Dr Dracator at 9:03 AM on September 15, 2015

In the real world the would have all either starved to death or slaughtered each other (or both) by about episode 3.
posted by gottabefunky at 9:15 AM on September 15, 2015

Truly the worst show on television that I ever watched to completion. And not even "so bad it's good" funny ironic bad TV. Just bad, and yet somehow compelling. Many thanks to our support group on Fanfare for getting through this show together. On second thought, fuck you guys, you kept me trapped Under the Dome with you. It was a lot of fun watching with you.

What I love about the show is its straight-up ignoring what rational humans would do in order to tell a story. For instance, actually they wouldn't starve to death Under the Dome, because until the last few episodes they'd only been there for two weeks! Yes, two weeks, as the voiceover kept reminding us. And in that two weeks we went through entire crazy stories like "we must kill the weak people so that the strong have enough resources to survive". I dunno about you, but I could live for two months just on the old cans of creamed corn I have lying around in my pantry. Also Big "Big" Jim murdered like twelve people in those two weeks. Also there were no children Under the Dome other than the Mystery Machine gang who were the unappealing main characters. Except that one episode where suddenly there were a lot of kids, lambs to the slaughter, just because they needed another plot device.

This last article by The Dome is sad, his realization that he was just another plot device. If the show were even a little bit popular I could imagine a second column, a competing column, written by the Styrofoam Amethyst. That became the new baffling mystery mineral this last season and it had way cooler powers than The Dome.
posted by Nelson at 9:30 AM on September 15, 2015 [3 favorites]

Great recap from Domey. Still can't believe the show lasted three seasons.
posted by davidmsc at 9:33 AM on September 15, 2015

Loved this cheese SO hard, looked forward to it every week. Perfect escapism, you could make as much (like our correspondent The Dome does in the article) or as little as you wished of it. Great actors makin' cheese for three seasons, that is so rare, I believe I'll begin rewatching now.
posted by riverlife at 9:44 AM on September 15, 2015

Seriously, these days if you watch any new TV series before they end you are just asking to be driven out into the middle of a field, stripped naked and left there.

Learned that lesson with Alcatraz.
What happened to all those 1963 criminals who time-travelled to 2012???!
I'll never know.
posted by chococat at 9:46 AM on September 15, 2015

Stephen King was on Colbert's show Friday night. I haven't seen it yet, but I assume he spent the entire 10 minutes disavowing any connection to the show.
posted by oneswellfoop at 10:31 AM on September 15, 2015

I imagine he'll paraphrase Michael Caine on Jaws 4: “I have never seen it, but by all accounts it is terrible. However, I have seen the house that it built, and it is terrific.”
posted by Sangermaine at 10:43 AM on September 15, 2015 [4 favorites]

"Why are you watching it if you hate it?" "I'm too invested, I wish it would just end."

That was me with True Blood.

I have a hard time imagining ANY show could be worse than that.
posted by Windigo at 11:24 AM on September 15, 2015

(They make a special kind of bong for alien mega-artifacts, which is part tesseract and part vape and part flying prehistoric bone. You can only really smoke one of those if you were created by super-advanced aliens long ago, that’s just how these things are.)

That would be a great cartoon: everyone arguing about what kind of pizza to order (V'Ger insisting that it had to have pineapple, everyone else saying they'd have anything but), trying not to giggle when the Reapers from Mass Effect "just happened" to show up and kept knocking to be let in, being too stoned to sync up Dark Side of the Moon with The Wizard of Oz, stoned-texting Michael Crichton's Sphere...
posted by Halloween Jack at 11:45 AM on September 15, 2015

you are just asking to be driven out into the middle of a field, stripped naked and left there.

I've watched that show. It was better than the three(?) episodes I made through of Under the Dome.

Mostly because of the "really fit people + unpixelated butts" aspect.
posted by psoas at 12:27 PM on September 15, 2015

I liked the part where they briefly get wifi in the dome so they could feature their Surface tablet more prominently.

And no one will be seated during the Painfully Deliberate Electric Car Plugging In scene.
posted by drwicked at 2:00 PM on September 15, 2015

The first two episodes -- parts 1 and 2 of the pilot -- were the oddest pair of pilot episodes I've ever seen. The first was quite decent -- workmanlike, but fast-paced, set up the characters, raised some mysteries, etc -- and we enjoyed it. Part 2 was literally incredibly bad -- we just couldn't believe what was happening. It was like someone had suddenly given the writers a mad-libs challenge to string as many cliches together as absolutely possible -- linguistic, story, character, ethnic, political -- with almost not a single uncliched word in between. It was like that pitch-test in the other post -- not only did they not seek to avoid cliche, they seemed to actively seek it out, to revel in it. Often when we watch middle-brow TV we shake our heads and say to ourselves, if they just gave us 10 minutes with a red pen, we could make this so much better. With the Dome, there would have been nothing left. Hopefully the pair of pilot episodes are being used in some USC writing class to show people just what writing means. On the other hand, 95% of TV used to be like that, so I do have some sympathy for the petulant Dome-as-putupon-writers metaphor, as they see their way of life and notions of narrative gradually put to pasture.
posted by chortly at 3:35 PM on September 15, 2015

Oh the Microsoft Surface product placements were delicious. I mean first let's just consider the perfection of it. Microsoft desperately trying to make Surface a real thing, a successful product. And so they buy lots of TV product placements! On Under the Dome, the worst television show on the air. Oops.

Even better was because a big part of the show's premise was that wifi didn't work. So most of the scenes featuring the Microsoft Surface™ by Microsoft were of the damn thing not working. Nerdboy trying desperately to make a connection, load a web page, download something. And failing repeatedly on his Microsoft Surface™. Hilarious.

(Also: you could see through the dome. Why didn't one of the dummies set up a visual network link? Did all of Chester's Mill forget about the existence of IR ports on their Microsoft laptops?)
posted by Nelson at 4:16 PM on September 15, 2015 [2 favorites]

Oh the Microsoft Surface product placements were delicious.

That and Toyota. I think that was a big part of why such a clearly awful show continued to exist, it was essentially sponsored content, as you'd see wearing a Groucho Marx mask on a website. It cost a lot to produce that show, though you wouldn't know it looking at the 1974 level special effects. There's a thing in Breaking Bad about how a shitty newspaper is more profitable than a good newspaper.

I think there is something in there that explains the economics of how Under The Dome existed for three seasons.
posted by A Terrible Llama at 6:03 PM on September 15, 2015

Also, and I will not disavow this: I loved every. minute.
posted by A Terrible Llama at 6:04 PM on September 15, 2015

It would have been perfectly fine if they had stuck to the book plot, making it more of a miniseries, instead of trying to make it go on for season after season.

Well, it would have been okay.
The ending of the book was not great.
But was still better than what they did to the TV.

I admit, I loved the book, even it was was King's reheated leftovers.

It was also better than Terra Nova.
I made it three eps into Terra Nova, six into Dome.
posted by Mezentian at 4:09 AM on September 16, 2015

Nelson: Many thanks to our support group on Fanfare for getting through this show together. On second thought, fuck you guys, you kept me trapped Under the Dome with you. It was a lot of fun watching with you.

Something weird happened to me when the final episode of Parks & Rec aired: I didn't watch it. Still haven't. Even though the show had really run its course and was ending on a high note, I wasn't ready for it to end. So I live in a private fantasy world where the show isn't cancelled, it's just on hold. Then I did it for Letterman. And Colbert. And Stewart. And now I've done the same with the FF thread. Not the show, I watched that. I haven't commented on that last episode yet. I did consider immediately posting a "." but I couldn't do it. That thread will never die.

What happened to all those 1963 criminals who time-travelled

And who kidnapped the senator's wife?? (Vanished, a show so unloved that Fox eventually aired its last episode...on the Internet. Not fancy YT/smart tv Internet, 2006 internet. Meaning after a few weeks I finally figured out a way to get it to work in RealAudio...for Mac.

Nelson, I know you were joking about building a dome in Minecraft, but I think we should do this! In fact, someone just found a village with villagers....
posted by Room 641-A at 6:17 AM on September 16, 2015 [1 favorite]

Oh I was not joking about a Minecraft dome, not at all. We need a lot of glass, then we can glass in a village and see what hell erupts inside! Then again instead of building it out of glass maybe there's an easier way, one involving an egg.
posted by Nelson at 8:17 AM on September 16, 2015

Yay! The dragon egg is so fitting! I don't know much about the new stuff (since an old beta) but if this is too hard, the new glass panes are a huge time-saver because you get 16 panes of glass for 6 glass blocks. It adds up quickly.
posted by Room 641-A at 9:29 AM on September 16, 2015

RIP Norrie's army wig.
posted by Room 641-A at 11:09 AM on September 16, 2015 [2 favorites]

Norrie being good at archery, learning how to shoot a gun and then joining the army as a sharpshooter is the closest thing to a character arc this show had. Everything else either made no sense or had people making face/heel turns so fast the WWE would have thrown out the script.

The best character overall though was Indy the Dog. That dog was the best part of every episode he was in.
posted by Gary at 12:01 PM on September 16, 2015