In Which Our Love For The Dome Will Be Forsaken

Inappropriate

by DICK CHENEY

I have so many things to say about the portrayal of mental illness on television and only 20 percent of it is thinly veiled jokes about Matthew Fox's acting ability. But first I have some pertinent questions, all of which you must answer without delay.

1. In We Bought A Zoo, was Matt Damon's character supposed to be slightly less than all there?

2. Chris Pine in everything, same question.

3. Norrie on Under the Dome....what's happening there? She just makes some dude be her boyfriend? I don't think that's allowed.

4. Have you guys seen Diane Kruger on FX's The Bridge? She makes Matt Damon look like the guy in Plano performing an all-cowboy version of Glengarry Glen Ross. (She's incredible, reminding me of myself were I a lithe blonde woman.)

sonya at her high functioning best

My apologies to Chris Pine's family. Before now, if you did not know all the pertinent elements of Aspberger syndrome, you could be mistaken for thinking that Sonya Cross, a homicide detective investigating a series of murders by a serial killer called the Beast, was simply eccentric.

A prevailing lack of social skills is the pervasive factor in Sonya's life. When the son of her Mexican colleague approaches her romantically and she finds herself unable to deal with it, she turns her entire body to face in another direction. In another scene, she meets a junkie mother who cannot care for her children. In a matter of seconds she has alerted everyone else in the room to this state of affairs. Sonya's illness does not limit her very much as a police officer, for the simple reason that police are always saying the obvious.

this man should have been the new doctor who

Set in El Paso and Juarez, The Bridge pairs Sonya with a Mexican cop named Marco Ruiz (the awkward Demián Bichir) to investigate the murder. He is slightly more ethical than other Mexican police, but not very. He cheats on his wife with great frequency, but at least he does not outright lie to her when she accuses him of it. He and Sonya make a good team because he is sorely in need of a person in his life who accepts him for who he is, and she has no other way of understanding the world.

Sonya has made me realize how often I do not say exactly what I am thinking, for example that I think all barbers are arrogant pricks, or that Chris Pine looks like he got his face smashed in by a car door. The violence that runs through El Paso and Juarez is extreme, but no more than the smaller violences Sonya has to conquer simply by existing. The Bridge reminds us that these horrors are equal. It also suggests, like no other show on television, that most people who do destructive things do them for entirely valid reasons, and that makes their crimes all the more repulsive.

Your eye shadow disgusts me Norrie

Repulsive is a word I never use lightly. I guess in my heart I was really upset by Norrie because she blamed Joe for the death of her mother the same way that Lynne once blamed me for the death of non-combatants in Iraq. Joe should have told Noreen what I told Lynne then: "Eventually you'll thank me."

Under the Dome is truly running off the rails now as the showrunners desperately find ways to extend painfully thin premises now that it's a hit. It was funny when Big Jim killed one person, but now that he's basically a serial killer I have a lot harder time taking things seriously. This week he killed Mare Winningham; it would have been emotional except she had been introduced to Under the Dome twenty minutes earlier. Then again, all he did was dump her, handcuffed, into the middle of a lake. Possibly she could breathe underweather like the semen of Hugh Jackman.

at least she's not spending 90 percent of her time complaining Timothy Olyphant works too hard

Big Jim's latest adversary is Mare's daughter Maxine (Natalie Zea), who is running some kind of fight club where she sells drugs and other vices (presumably the GoT DVD sets that are all the Domers have left). Maxine has threatened both Big Jim, historically a questionable move, as well as Dale "Barbie" Barbara with the secrets she has on them. Now that her mother is swimming with the fishes, this plan may well have been put in jeopardy.

at least throw on a caftan b4 you summon a god

The women of Under the Dome are the forgiving sort. Angie got over being kidnapped and imprisoned in an underground shelter within the space of a single episode. Norrie lost her mother and returned to the boyfriend that inadvertently caused Mom's heart attack without a second thought. Maxine was betrayed by Dale Barbara (military customs dictate he must be referred to by his full name or playstation handle, Brbie420, at all times) and in the very next scene she was shoving her forked tongue down his throat.

he looks relieved he didn't have to put her down as well

The magically gorgeous Julia Shumway (Rachelle Lefevre) found out this week that the Dale Barbara she had been sleeping with, because why not, lied about killing her husband. Since she discovered that her husband was just trying to set her up with a sweet life insurance policy, she forgave Barbie his lie. He was incredibly surprised by this, but since there are very few Jewish-American ingénues imprisoned under this dome, he was unable to contain his excitement for what she may allow him to do in the bedroom next. Most likely both are suffering from an undiagnosed case of narcissism.

Has no one ever thought of touching their penis to the dome? In my experience, doing that makes a lot of things go away.

trying to find a way to break it to her that there is no room for a french braid under this dome

Finally, Breaking Bad. All this Walter White backlash is starting to get to me. The greatest man alive was threatened by a DEA agent who didn't know there was a criminal mastermind in his own family? Pssshtttt. The confession video Walt made was a hilarious stroke of genius, and the first true surprise of this final season. Hank's resigned look and ensuing, "You killed us Marie" was a fantastic callback and twist.

don't talk back to your father. really. don't.

The reason I can't abandon my feelings for Walter is this: he never, absolutely never, destroys those who respect him. The things that Jesse Pinkman said to him, the things that his brother-in-law said to him...when he never did a single thing to disrespect either man. This means that whatever Walt decides for them is righteous and correct. Some vain and immature people think they can control others, even those they know are powerful, because this is just their way of life. Walter White is the end of their fantasies, and they must wake up to survive. 

Dick Cheney is the senior contributor to This Recording. He is a writer living in an undisclosed location and will be manning a F-15 to take care of this Syria problem personally in the very near future. He's thinking Tuesday. You can find an archive of his writing on This Recording here. OK see you guys

"Until I Am Whole" - The Mountain Goats (mp3)

"Until I'm One With You" - Ryan Bingham (mp3)

In Which The Important Thing Is To Get In The Dome

Dome Touching

by DICK CHENEY

Under the Dome
creator Brian K. Vaughan

People are constantly touching one another Under the Dome. Last week, a bearded blonde veteran named Barbie (Mike Vogel) was for some reason walking all alone one night as it was pouring. Even then, an intrepid ginger reporter (Rachel Lefevre) accused of copyright infringement by the Japanese executives who own the rights to the April O'Neal character finds him in the rain. She tells him, "Waah I had a hard day Bahbie" so that he will do the thing where he embraces her then makes a quick transition to putting his tongue in her mouth.

they look like two pelicans but I was moved by their romance to be sure

In the morning they are in her bed.

She gives him a variety of looks there, each of which I have broken into discrete parts. (Examining the range of post-coital facial expressions was my thesis at the U of W.)

1. Mild disgust
2. Approbation
3. Sunlight in her ginger eyes
4. Total comfort and acceptance

wiping the last barbecue sauce in chester's mill off his lover's face

5. Where are you going?
6. You're leaving?
7. Just for water?
8. Starting to have some regrets?
9. Pretty happy to be interrupted by my pregnant neighbor, huh?
10. Will I see you at home?

every morning in the Bezos home
Meanwhile, men feel a very different set of emotions after sex. They can run the gamut depending on exactly how gentile the man in question is, a 1 being David Paymer and a 10 being Kevin Costner. Here is what I outlined in 1973, and it is no less true today than it was the day I woke up my wife Lynne with breakfast in bed, you know, just because...

1. Where am I and who did this to me?
2. These sheets are redolent of lavender.
3. I wonder if Alex Rodriguez addressed the media.
4. One day we will all need performance enhancing drugs.

Crest. Colgate. Sensodyne. Tom's of Maine.

5. My penis feels like a tube of toothpaste.
6. When did I romance a ginger newspaperwoman?
7. Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post. I hope he fires E.J. Dionne first, and meanly.
8. She probably thinks I want to get out of here, because the rest of the Dome is so fun. Instead I'm going to assuage those doubts with my Crest.
9. I wonder if later in the episode we will lie on the couch saying absolutely nothing to each other.

curling up and listening to "Silent Night" UTD, it does not get any better
10. Yep.

please god not Richard Bachmann
Fortunately romance in Under the Dome is not confined to women and the men who killed their husbands. Norrie (Mackenzie Lintz) and Joe (Colin Ford) went searching for the exact middle of the Dome, and when they got there, they found this year's hatch from Lost. But no, it was like a small dome this time, and underneath it was a black egg. When Norrie touched it, she saw Samantha Mathis in the woods, possibly the most disappointing thing to ever happen when someone touched the Dome, and that includes a fatal heart attack.

An egg is controlling the dome. Think about this.

The main thing that bothered me about Under the Dome was the ongoing storyline where psychotic ex-boyfriend Junior (Alexander Koch) locked Annie (Britt Robertson) up in his Dad's fallout shelter.

He told Angie that it was because she had changed and the Dome was doing something to her and he wanted to keep her safe, but that entire time I suspected otherwise. Every single episode I watched I was consumed by the desire to know when Angie would free herself from this underground prison until finally Junior's father decided to let her go, assuming everyone would be dead after the U.S. military leveled a missile strike on the Dome. (Everyone survived except for common sense.) When Angie finally made it home last night, her brother did not even ask where she was or what she had been doing since the Dome fell.

crossing my fingers this parcel becomes the UTD WalMart

Under the Dome is kind of like watching a car accident in slow motion. You know it's going to be bad, so you have to know just how bad. It actually shocks me that Stephen King was never involved with Lost in the first place; he is the master of setting up some overblown mystery until it turns out, "That was just an earthquake doing it," or "Something evil made that happen." I believe the antagonist in one of King's recent books was actually a copy of The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon. Children ran away in fear because it was on their summer reading list.

Do you ever feel like a black man, maybe a close friend who HAPPENS to be a black man, is narrating your life? No?

I don't want to make this all about how much Stephen King sucks, but let's face it. The Green Mile was about a magical black man who heals white prison guards by touching them. The Shawshank Redemption was about a magical black man who heals white prison inmates through superior voiceover work. Besides former Boston Red Sox closer Tom Gordon, these are the only black characters in all of Stephen King's work. Don't get me started on The Stand, it's so fucking stupid my head hurts just thinking about it. The distinguishing feature of Stephen King's work is that he never stops to think if an idea is good, he just believes in it because he had it.

WALT

Since Under the Dome has been renewed for a second season, it's guaranteed to be dragged out much longer than it should. The show deserves praise for killing off Samantha Mathis, although in an ideal world she would have been vivisected by some kind of alien blade. Instead she died of a heart attack roughly the same time that her daughter touched the small dome and asked the egg to speak to her. Unfortunately since a number of characters/helicopter pilots on Lost have already perished, this just increases the screen time given to the black DJ of Chester's Mill and the Asian radio station operator. I hate token minority characters even more than I hate The Newsroom.

Jeff Bezos will want someone inside the dome. That's when I strike.
To get your news Under the Dome you have to find the right frequency. In the future, all newspapers will be owned by white billionaires as vanity projects; they won't even have advertising; they will simply be a public service provided by the very rich to the very poor. I can't even imagine what people from low socioeconomic backgrounds think when they read The New York Times.

I forgot about the black female lesbian Hollywood agent stranded in a New England town. So many stories to tell. Through six episodes, she's had one line that wasn't, "ALICE!"
This could, however, be the saving grace of the media. Instead of having to drive pageviews by offering stupid shit like, "The Top Ten Things He Thinks After Sex", maybe they'll actually do some reporting on, you know, the government or private sector instead of writing long editorials about sports teams and Amanda Bynes. When you wake up Under the Dome, there is no newspaper. When you turn on the radio, all you hear is a DJ playing Nina Simone and Nat King Cole. There is no Jeff Bezos Under the Dome. There is no Tina Brown Under the Dome. There is only the corpse of Ezra Klein and sex without birth control.

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. You can find his first Under the Dome review here.

"Crazy for You" - Madonna (mp3)

"Lucky Star" - Madonna (mp3)

In Which There Is A Relaxing Feeling Under The Dome

we were told there would be no subtle touches of reassurance under the dome

Hurtful References to Domes

by DICK CHENEY

Under the Dome
creators Brian K. Vaughan & Stephen King

Do you know what hurts the most? 

oh no the pilot from lost isn't here to take charge what will we do WHATEVER YOU HAVE TO BIG JIM

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.)

king has 3,000 bad experiences with women so we get this?

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?

what is she going to post these pictures to, a bulletin board?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.

Lost did not have Samantha Mathis or ridiculous eyewear, so there was that

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?

guys, just so you know, this is making us all friends forever

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.

try doing this in the window of a bank, always fun

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.

there are no small children in the town of Chester's Mill for some reason, this poster was a lieIf 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.)

logically it might be best to burn down the home of whoever wrote "The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon"

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)