Welcome to the Terrordome

Under the Dome

Episode Report Card

Daniel: B | 6 USERS: B-

YOU GRADE IT

Welcome to the Terrordome

By Daniel | Season 1 | Episode 1 | Aired on 06.24.2013

In a hurry? Read the recaplet for a nutshell description!

It’s difficult to get a feel of how this series is going to go, since by necessity the bulk of the first episode is spent meeting the main characters in the town of Chester’s Mill, residents and otherwise, who are all trapped together when they’re suddenly sealed off from the outside world by an invisible barrier. Oddly, I would have thought much more of the time would have been spent on people freaking out and/or wondering what the hell is going on, but everyone seems to accept the existence of the invisible wall with grace and aplomb.

The characters are pointed only in broad strokes at this point, which is fine for now, given that I read the book when it came out nearly four years ago and only remember the broad strokes about the characters and the plot anyway. That might be a good thing in the sense that I won’t get hung up on the differences between television characters and novel characters -- like I don’t think Julia Shumway was the “new” editor of the local rag, and I’m also fairly certain she wasn’t married to someone being buried by drifter Barbie (Mike Vogel, late of Bates Motel), whose motives seem a little more grey than they did in the book. So the series is keeping the premise and some major characters -- like Big Jim Rennie is played by Dean Norris (you know, Hank from Breaking Bad!), the corrupt local politician and businessman who runs the town... although I think his creepy son is new, the one who has fallen in love all stalky with a waitress and is keeping her captive in a bomb shelter by the end of the episode. And Jeff Fahey is Chief Duke Perkins. In the book, he’s killed when his pacemaker explodes as he nears the invisible wall. Here, the pilot ends with that exploding pacemaker, Perkins lying on the ground while his deputy wails. How you gonna bring the Lawnmower Man into this and not keep him around for a while, right?

So: Not much plot. The dome itself is dropped on the town rather effectively, splitting homes and barns in two and separating people from their limbs. A cow is hilariously bisected, and a semi-trailer impressively flattens itself on the wall when it hits it head-on. Maybe “Pilot” isn’t just the traditional title of a series’ first episode but a reference to the plane that crashes on the inside. The loose story outline is: Hey, Chester’s Mill never used to have a dome encircling it. Now it does. And people have secrets! There’s a stockpiling of propane by Big Jim (with the knowledge of Chief Perkins) for some secret purpose, but we won’t find out just yet. “There’s a lot I’ve tried to protect you from, about this place,” Perkins tells his deputy, right before his pacemaker explodes. So: intriguing enough to continue. My main criterion for judging a show is to decide if I’d watch it even if I weren’t being paid to, and the answer to that one is yes. I have to confess to being intrigued by how they’ll keep this an open-ended show, since the story has -- quite literally -- limits.

Daniel is a writer in Newfoundland with a wife and a daughter. They’ve got beer under the dome, right? That seems important. Follow him on Twitter (@DanMacEachern) or email him at danieljdaniel@gmail.com.

Want more? The full recap starts right below!

We slowly pan down on a darkened dome. Wow, they've already started! No, it's an egg, with a bird slowly hatching, and the mother bird flies to take us into the next shot of a man -- Mike Vogel, recently on Bates Motel -- burying a body in a bedsheet. The body is loosely wrapped, the better for the sheet to fall open and reveal the face of the corpse as dramatically as possible.

Over to the local gaol, where a deputy awakens her boss, sleeping in an open cell, "testing the accommodations," as he puts it -- to tell him that Sam Virgil, even though he's apparently a drunk, heard a bang. The chief -- Jeff Fahey, always and only from Lawnmower Man -- less-than-enthusiastically wants to know if it was a backfire or if Tommy Henderson "finally" shot his wife. "You never know with this damn place," he says. Get ready for much dialogue that's about more than just one thing!

Now over to breakfast at the Sweetbriar Rose diner, where "Big Jim" Rennie (played by Dean Norris of Breaking Bad) is reading a book on Churchill and paying a hundred dollars for his breakfast because the diner is hurting ever since a Denny's opened in the next town over. He's the small-town big shot, who ignores Rose's protests that he paid too much. "We're all in this together," he says.

Next up on the carousel of character introductions: A young couple having sex, him more into her (literally as well as figuratively, I suppose) than she is into him. Her name is Angie, his is Junior. "It's been a fun summer," is her response to his "I love you." She tells him he's going back to school, and he reveals that he dropped out, because college is "just another pyramid scheme." She gives him shit for giving up his free ride out of this town, and things get tense when she goes to leave for her shift at the diner. He grabs her wrist, she slaps his face, and they stare at each other for a moment. This would be Junior, Big Jim's son -- to correct what I said in the recaplet, he was in the book. I'm not sure if the changes -- some slight, others bigger -- are making me forget who was there and who wasn't.

Julia Shumway, the new editor of The Independent, is visiting a Mrs. Grinell on a Sunday morning on what she assumes is a subscription problem, at least until Mrs. Grinell sets her straight by sassily telling her she gets her news online like everyone else. Aw, and here were we all thinking she was just a dumb hick here in Varmint Gulch! She's actually got a news tip for Julia, and points out a propane truck delivering a load across a field, one of several the last couple of weeks. She's figuring it's a terrorism thing -- "If you see something, say something," and all that -- and Julia's skeptical, until Grinell says she asked the sheriff to look into it, and he told her it was just the city replenishing its emergency stock. But he was nervous when he told her, says Grinell, so that's why she thinks something's up, and that's what convinces Julia, who says she'll look into it. Grinell wants Julia to keep her name out of it, mistakenly thinking that "small-town busybody old lady who doesn't actually know anything" is such a valuable and rare source.

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