Hurtful References to Domes
by DICK CHENEY
Under the Dome
creators Brian K. Vaughan & Stephen King
Do you know what hurts the most?
Lost. Do you know what hurts the second most? Puns on bald men. Under the Dome joined an uneasy fraternity of titles like Powder and Baldlands. There is a bald man in Under the Dome, Big Jim (Dean Norris) and he is the second most evil man there is. (The first most evil is his son.)
When the only slightly porous dome slices through the town of Chester's Mill, the bald man's son abducts a woman and stores her in his fallout shelter. This is the Hatch of Under the Dome, and if it doesn't interest you, would you be more into a redhead-type reporter?
Print ended for this woman a long time before the Dome made her husband disappear. I was so hoping that her husband would be played by Matthew Fox that I smashed a jar of vaseline I was holding in my left hand; I was holding it for reasons.
Suddenly cut off from the internet, people start going legit crazy in 48 or so hours. People made a lot of racist and misogynistic comments they planned to post on messageboards, but instead they sat around in a diner and said them to one another. Many perished.
Still, things are maybe calmer than they should be because none of the residents of Chester's Mill heard about the Trayvon verdict. In the opening episode a pilot from Lost who plays the police chief (um this is a clue right?) has his pacemaker explode. As a friend wrote to say, "This whole show was made for us to realize Lost sucked right?" Yes.
Then again, there was something to be said for a show that ensured that every black father-son combination will be called Michael and Walt. I still don't get what the deal with Walt was supposed to be, was he in the closet or something? Or was he in heaven the whole time? His power sucked.
There are three black people in the Dome, and a solid 33.3% percent of those individuals are DJs. Let that sink in. Now realize that Samantha Mathis is 63 years old. It's like quicksand, isn't it?
Watching Under the Dome is a kind of death, because although the bald man is very good, and his bald reverend friend is also not bad (as an actor), that's the extent of the casting prowess exhibited here. It is unfortunate that the rest of the cast simply cannot act at all. For some dramas, it's best to choose relative unknowns, but for a show like this that demands... so little of everyone? Oh forget it, I guess they wanted to make it like a B movie, established as Abrams' favorite genre.
Instead of adapting mediocre Stephen King diarrhea, I don't understand why Brian K. Vaughan wouldn't just do Y: The Last Man. About 50 percent of all scenes in Under the Dome involve someone putting his or her hands on the surface of the dome itself and observing some familiar quality of it. These two kids just go around the dome looking for weak points, it's like don't be naive Domers. Then, another person nearby says, "STOP TOUCHING THE DOME." (The subtext that you should not stroke a bald man's head intimately is completely unappreciated.)
Behind it all is the sneaking suspicion that Lost was just a series of Los Angeles apartments and forty minute long beach scenes. I feel like I was let down somewhat by the promotional material for Under the Dome. There was talk of a dog being on the outside of a dome and wanting to get in, but I have seen no such motivation from canines so far.
If you are caught in a dome, it is far more likely than your dog will tell you to go fuck yourself and become the dog of someone who was having lunch at Denny's when the dome fell. Such a lazy portrait of small town America is only possible from someone who lives in a fortress in the middle of Maine. Have you ever seen Stephen King's house? It looks like a bad tattoo, or, alternately, the place where you would go to manslaughter a teenager. (This is now legal in our country.)
We really don't need to redistribute wealth in this country, we simply need to redistribute Stephen King's wealth. Everyone else at least did something to deserve it. (Pseudonyms are mere cowardice.) Since I'm not lazy enough to look up the book version of this trash and discover that the Regulators were responsible for this dome all along, and since it will probably just be re-explained later on in a Richard Bachmann novel serialized for supermarket shelves, I will have to wait to see if that poor girl can escape from her underground prison, and who made the Dome. If you do you just start missing everybody.
Dick Cheney is the senior contributor to This Recording. He is a writer living in an undisclosed location. You can find an archive of his writing on This Recording here.
"The Last In A Long Line" - The Leisure Society (mp3)
"The Sober Scent of Paper" - The Leisure Society (mp3)