The Breakdown
Under the Dome opens with Junior confronting his father at the Rennie house. Big Jim tells his son that Junior reminds him of his mother before she died. He then informs Junior that he’s no son of his.
Barbie is digging a grave for Alice when Julia remarks how the woman died in the same house as young Alice was born. “Circle of life,” she says.
Joe questions Angie on where she was for the week she was missing. Angie deflects on what happened just as Norrie enters the room. Norrie tells Joe that she doesn’t need his help.
At the diner, Angie confronts Big Jim over Junior’s appearance at the diner. He promises to keep Junior away from her. Big Jim also tells Angie that he’ll talk to Ollie Dinsmore about making an arrangement for more water so she can re-open the diner. He warns that the time is coming when they will have to farm their own food.
The show pans back to the metallic egg; it changes colors to a hot pink.
Big Jim tries to negotiate with Ollie over the use of his well, but Dinsmore refuses. He wants to see Big Jim lose the town. Rennie comes up with a new idea: claim eminent domain. He and the police show up to confiscate the land, but Dinsmore and his men defend it. Carter is shot in the kneecap, and Junior joins up with Ollie.
Norrie blames Joe because it was his idea to look for the center of the dome. She thinks that it caused her mother’s death, and Joe helped because he led her there. Julia later tells Joe that Norrie didn’t mean it. He then tells her about the metallic egg at the center of the dome.
Big Jim decides to come up with a larger force to confiscate the well. Barbie and Linda insist that there must be a diplomatic solution to this, but Big Jim refuses to back down. Barbie then looks over the city maps and comes up with an alternate plan: blow up Ollie’s well, which would then sweep water back into the old dried up wells surrounding the town and the city reservoir. Big Jim refuses to listen to Linda and Barbie.
Ollie tells Junior that his mother killed herself. Junior doesn’t want to believe this, but Ollie seems to convince him that he’s telling the truth. Rennie requests to be the one who kills his father.
Julia touches the small dome and another Joe appears. He tells her that the monarch will be crowned. A stunned Julia doesn’t know what to think of what she saw. Joe tells Julia that they saw Alice when they touched the dome.
Barbie sneaks onto Ollie’s farm and makes some explosives to bomb the well.
Norrie and Angie have a girl-to-girl talk. Angie goes from blaming Joe to blaming her mom for the own death. Angie shows Norrie her collection of snow globes. Originally, she planned on visiting all of those places because she felt that Chester’s Mill was a prison, now she truly understands what a prison is. The young women throw the collection of snow globes at the dome. When Norrie comes across a snow globe labeled Los Angeles, she breaks down and blames herself for Alice’s death.
A gun battle ensues on the Dinsmore farm. Phil is shot just as Barbie blows the well. Most of Dinsmore and Jim’s people flee after the exploision, but Junior finds his father and knocks him out with a rifle. Big Jim wakes up to Junior pointing a gun at his face. The elder Rennie breaks down as he confesses that Junior’s mother killed herself. He chose not to tell Junior because he didn’t want his son to be hurt by her decision.
Ollie enters the room and prepares to kill Big Jim. Junior quickly chooses to believe his father and shoots Ollie.
Norrie hugs Joe and apologizes to him for her behavior. They finally bury Alice.
Barbie confronts Big Jim about the well. Five people are dead, and Barbie reminds him that it all could have been avoided. The well operation was successful; the town has a reservoir now. Barbie accuses Rennie of taking action to control the town. Rennie replies that Barbie doesn’t want to make an enemy out of him. Barbie counters that there’s “two sides” to that as well.
Junior tells Linda that he killed Ollie before Dinsmore could shoot his father. He explains that it was a “Trojan horse” operation all along. Linda replies that he should go home. “I don’t have a home,” Junior says.
Barbie visits with Julia in her bedroom. She asks him what he thinks of when he hears “the monarch will be crowned.” The camera then shifts to a monarch butterfly tattooed onto Angie’s shoulder as she watches Joe and Norrie talking in the front yard.
Analysis
This was an interesting episode. Under the Dome killed yet another character this week in Ollie Dinsmore, and I have to wonder when it’s going to stop. Seriously, aren’t the writers confident enough in the story they’re telling to avoid the shock factor of killing off people nearly every single week? It seems as if every death on this show (except for Perkins) has been nothing more than a plot device. It’s hard to care about characters when you don’t have enough time to get attached to them.
It was good to see Big Jim and Barbie finally clash. The two characters are on different sides in the book version of Under the Dome, so it was only a matter of time before issues formed between them.
Finally, there was an awful lot of stupidity in this episode. Why on earth would Ollie and Big Jim think it’s a good idea to shoot at each other inside the dome? Haven’t they already seen some of the problems the dome wall would cause with that? Furthermore, why would Ollie blindly trust Junior to come over to his side? Come on, how about some common sense already?
Overall, it was a decent episode, despite the issues mentioned above. The episode moved well, and the situation in Chester’s Mill was certainly different when it ended. I just wish the writing would have been a bit more creative instead of reliant on the same old plot devices.
