Reposted from our friends over on Amityville Now
Remember our drinking game? New character, take a drink. New power for the Dome, take a drink. 180-degree character reversal, take a drink. Well, be prepared to get falling-down drunk this week, because all bets are off, baby. Or rather, Barbie, with more new characters, subplots, questions, and reversals than ever before…and not an answer or resolution to be seen.
Up front note: This episode’s pretty much all about Barbie, so let’s start with him; he’s looking pretty jacked up from all the fist fights and gun battles. If he keeps getting beaten at this rate, he’s going to be nothing but a moist little wad of flesh by the end of Season 2.
Don’t know if this deserves a drink or not, but notice how former psycho-killer kidnapper Junior is now just one of the Scoobies again. Yeah, the Scoobie with a gun.
We had this whole screed about how stupid it was for Barbie to go look for Sam’s body, but…screw it, it doesn’t matter. It was just a plot device, like everything else this week.
Mike Vogel as Dale “Barbie” Barbara
Domeland is really just a lazy writer’s paradise: Lexi Luthor, who does little but look concerned and/or scared this week, examines the bottomless pit and says “How is it possible?” Barbie spills the beans: “The same way the dome’s possible,” he says…meaning ANYthing can happen, ANY time! Crap, the world of Adventure Time makes more internal sense that this damn thing.
Julia screams good!
“How could my own uncle murder Angie?” says the son of the town’s insane tin Hitler, who stalked, kidnapped, and imprisoned the same girl? Yeah, how?
Hey, dude! That’s not a tower! That’s an obelisk. And it’s in Zenith, which is not only Amnesia Girl’s hometown, but Barbie’s hometown. Which must man something. Mustn’t it? Because, like, one of our staffers was born in the same town as Brad Pitt, so…that means something. Right?
Karla Crome and Mike Vogel
Ahh, so the bottomless pit’s bottom is in Zenith. Doesn’t that mean it should actually be called Nadir? Anyway: a new power for the Dome (or Dome-related mysteries). Drink #3!
Let’s face it: Dean Norris is the best actor on this show, and just plain scary. Okay, second best. After Norrie. Who barely speaks this week.
Whuh? Not enough that Barbie gets a one-way ticket out of Dometown…but now we find out he’s some kind of corporate espionage guy who was supposed to steal from the ‘Acteon” Corporation, which we’ve never heard of, and …HIS DAD IS THE CEO OF ACTEON! Whoa! How many drinks is that?
Oh, and Joe as the president of the Robotics Club in a high school that seems to have had, like six students…and he’s got this super-sophisticate camera-mounted drone! DRINK!
And as if the writers aren’t jerking us around enough already: it’s a totally cheap shot to lead Uncle Same to a psychiatric hospital…and ominously say that Junior’s Mom is in…the locked ward!…and then ‘reveal’ that, yeah, she’s an ART TEACHER in the psych ward! Heh! GOTCHA! Must’ve had a good laugh around the catered lunch over that one!
Dean Norris as James “Big Jim” Rennie
So Dwight Yoakam took a day off his concert tour to come show us how Lyle, inexplicably and unnecessarily, is not a basket case. “That’s all he does,” Junior’s Mom says, “Eat, sleep and say ‘Melanie.’” Yeah, one of our guys had a year in high school just like that. (He still loves you, Melanie!) Oh, and for Lyle’s 180-degree reversal: DRINK!
Wow, for a woman who’s been having visions of the Dome for twenty years, Junior’s Mom is way clueless about Melanie’s resurrection, bottomless holes into Nadir, and the state of her much-beloved psycho-sun. And did anyone else notice, her reason for abandoning her family, hiding just one town over for twenty years, but sending enigmatic post cards to Lyle made absolutely no sense at all? But Sherry Stringfield says it with such conviction. That’s acting.
Okay, now we know WAY too much of Barbie’s backstory, including some really awful exposition with his Dad (played by Brett Cullen, the same guy who co-built The Machine on Person of Interest. Man, does he get around!)
L-r: Colin Ford, Rachelle Lefevre, Grace Victoria Cox,
Mackenzie Lintz and Alexander Koch
Okay, we are now officially tired of transcribing cheesy, melodramatic, embarrassingly mawkish dialogue/monologue from this show. ‘Cause it’s more than 70% of the show. Norrie didn’t even get off any good ones this week.
And we end, to all intents and purposes, with an underground light show revealed another hologram of the Zenith Obelisk, which the kiddies immediate means (a) there’s a way out o the dome, and (b) Barbie may still be alive. And his is because…?
