TV Review: Under the Dome 1.2, "The Fire"
rating: 2.5
Under the Dome's second episode wasn't quite as effective as its first, but it still has plenty of opportunity to stand out. I'm not thrilled so far with the execution of the still captivating premise because I felt like The Fire was sorely lacking in good momentum, but we're only into the second episode so I'll avoid nitpicking too much. This is a series about examining how communities work so each episode should be contributing some sort of statement on that topic. While there's been some thematic contributions of fear giving way to poor outcomes, the only clear statement I remember from The Fire is Caroline and Alice's exchange while they were working with residents to put out the fire. The couple remarks how they couldn't imagine their neighbors banding together the way the people of Miller's Crossing have to fight the fire and that they don't even know their neighbors. Between that and their daughter stealing that candy bar city folk ain't lookin' none too good. I'm hoping this was meant to be more of a Hey, wouldn't it be nice if we weren't so afraid of one another, than an anti-big city statement, which is how it came off to me. The other fear and panic contributions came from the radio station and the police. Dodee and Lenny Kravitz in the 90s DJ Phil are still busy trying to decipher military radio signals to discover any information on the dome to broadcast to Chester's Mill. Not everyone realizes it's a dome until Julia invites herself into the situation and breaks the news to the town. Whereas Phil and Julia are all about, The people have a right to know, Dodee's all, Panic isn't helpful, so it looks like Joe Let's map the dome with trigonometry instead of check on my kidnapped sister McAlister has some competition in the smart character department. I wonder which of these two will die first? Speaking of trying to let cooler heads prevail, Deputy Linda Esquivel has definitely become the defacto peacekeeping authority not only for saving the creepy reverend from the house fire, but because not only is Sheriff Duke definitely dead (I didn't think a little thing like his pacemaker exploding in his chest could possibly stop Frank Lapidus, but I see now that was unrealistic of me), but so is the only other officer so far that showed any sign of intelligence, Linda's brother in law, after getting hit by a ricocheted bullet from the gun of Officer Panic Paul who pulled a gun on the crowd and shot the dome. Again, we get a clear anti-panic PSA, but that's about it which is pretty disappointing. The other all-star of the house fire situation is Big Jim Rennie. Granted we know he's tearing down the house with a bulldozer in part to cover up any evidence of his involvement with the nefarious propane dealings, but considering all the talk the character has made of how great his town is it's safe to say he'd do whatever he could to help anyway, which is interesting because despite Jim coming off as the bad guy, as Linda says earlier, they're all in this together. On the other end of the spectrum, Barbie continues to get more interactions with other characters than anyone else bumping into Joe, Norrie, and Junior in addition to helping with the fire. The episode starts right off with Barbie recollecting via an expository dream how he came to be responsible for Julia's husband's death. It looks like Barbie is just a straight-up loan-shark enforcer and the husband couldn't pay his debt nor did he respond well to being very forcibly told to do so. The situation seems very simple which is kind of disappointing, but I suppose the show didn't want to keep audiences in the dark about the protagonist's accidental murder. I wouldn't have minded there being a bit more mystery to the whole thing, but hopefully this just frees things up to get more weird and interesting or it'll be a boring and predictable time watching Barbie make a silly 'I DUNNO' face every time Julia mentions her missing husband. Also, what shady dude wears his dog-tags to potential crime scenes? He finds at least one at the scene but I'm sure the other is with the body. Then junior shows up and provides a pretty solid means by which Barbie and Jim might eventually butt heads. By the way, Junior has definitely never heard the saying about if you love something, let it go. On the more sciencey than charactery side of things I'm curious as to how the dome being porous enough to act as a sieve as Joe describes it will ultimately factor into the plot, but for now these little breadcrumbs are sitting well with me. I'm still quite curious to see where this series goes but hopefully the next episode will have a greater sense of urgency and better focus than spouting vaguely about the evils of panic and propane.