‘Under the Dome’ 3.12 Recap: “The World’s Better Off Without You”

Julia opens the penultimate episode of ‘Under the Dome’ by telling Barbie, “Our next move has to be smart.” It’s like she’s never watched this stupid show at all.

Barbie is upset about leaving his new daughter behind and wants to go back for her. Julia has to remind him that the child was conceived and born in three days. What’s your point, Julia? That’s not normal. The girl isn’t human. Oh, right, I guess so.

Lily likewise tries to talk some sense into Big Jim about not killing everyone in town. She obviously doesn’t know him very well. Jim agrees to help convince Hektor to come up with a new game plan only if Lily will destroy all the surveillance footage recordings she has of him murdering people. When the dome comes down, he doesn’t want to go to prison.

As soon as Barbie and Julia arrive at the day care center currently being used as Resistance HQ, the Aktaion scientist Dr. Bloom asks them to turn right around and go back to the motel. She needs the stem cells from the baby’s umbilical cord for her research into making another attempted cure.

Christine drains some of the already dwindling energy from the dome in order to cocoon the baby. As a result, the dome starts calcifying faster. Great job, genius.

Hektor wants to poison the food supply in town in order to kill all the Pod People. Jim informs him about the dome calcifying. Somehow, this is enough to talk Hektor out of the poisoning plan, though the logic (ha ha!) of Jim’s argument escapes me at the moment. Hektor dumps the poison. Unfortunately, Dr. Bloom overheard the conversation and knows what her boss was going to do.

The dome is about 10% calcified. People in town, especially the children and elderly, have already started suffocating, thus demonstrating that the writers of this show have no idea how air works. The skies above the town are still wide open and clear.

In any case, the heat in town is rising. Christine estimates that they have 24 hours left before the dome fully calcifies. To get him to work on his dome-busting invention faster (as if not-suffocating-to-death weren’t incentive enough), Christine promises Joe that she’ll let Norrie live after the dome comes down.

Julia and Barbie return to the motel and find Eva’s dead body. Conveniently, no Pod People have stuck around to see them. Barbie vows to kill Christine. They grab the umbilical cord out of the trash and head back to HQ.

In order to preserve oxygen, Junior proposes to kill off the weak in town and reduce competition. Christine thinks this is a swell idea and orders him to take all the elderly people to the lake and, “Do what needs to be done.”

Norrie walks into town again, unseen by anyone, to talk to Joe. He tells her about the dome’s rapid calcifying and explains his plan to use the radio station’s transmitter to power his dome-buster.

Using a drone to monitor the town, Hunter and Lily spot Christine and a large group of Pod People walking to the old cement factory. That can’t be good. They radio Barbie and Julia, who agree to head over there and check it out. But what about the umbilical cord? Jim says he’ll meet them half way to pick it up, but after he does so, he just tosses it on the ground. He has no interest in curing anybody.

Christine announces that her cycle is almost up and she’ll die soon. (Alien menopause is a bitch, huh?) As a final sacrifice for the new Queen, she transfers her life force and knowledge to the baby’s cocoon. However, she gets interrupted before the process is complete when Barbie charges in and murders one of the townies, then yanks Christine off the cocoon. (Where did all the other Pod People go? They’re nowhere to be found.)

Suddenly, the cocoon explodes and gushes goop all over Barbie. Something bursts forth and speeds away like the Road Runner. Meep meep.

Barbie demands that Christine tell him what the hell’s going on and where his baby is. Christine looks troubled and mutters, “What have I done?” The wound on her stomach is healed. She’s human again. The baby sucked the alien out of her, just like it did to Eva.

That thing that ran out of the cocoon was your baby, Barbie. Duh.

Dr. Bloom confronts Hektor about his plan to poison the townspeople. It seems that she has a concern about working for a genocidal maniac. Go figure. Hektor kills her to save his own ass so that she won’t tell anybody else, but Lily walks in immediately afterwards. He tells her that he can’t let the infected people get out of the dome. He’s going to kill Joe to prevent the dome from coming down, even though that will mean that he and everyone else in town will suffocate. Preventing this contagion from spreading is worth dying for.

Christine suddenly remembers, “I’ve done something terrible.” She, Barbie and Julia rush to the lake. All the elderly people in town have already willingly drowned themselves, and Junior wants the kids to go next. He and Sam, who’ve been competing to be Christine’s “Alpha,” fight over this.

Hunter and Norrie find Lily tied up. She tells them that Hektor is headed to the radio station to kill Joe. They radio Jim, who grudgingly agrees to go stop Hektor.

Christine convinces Barbie and Julia that she’s good now and that she can save the children. Pretending to be her old, evil self, she arrives at the lake and orders Junior to stand down. The children are the town’s future, can’t he see that? Christine sends all the kids back to town with Sam, but Junior suspects that something is up and attacks her. Barbie rushes in to fight him, but Junior has super alien butterfly strength. Finally, Julia knocks him unconscious with a crowbar.

At the radio station, an Aktaion goon shoots up the place and kills a Pod Person assigned to work with Joe. Norrie arrives in time to kill the goon, and Jim shoots Hektor. When he’s got him helpless on the ground, Jim finishes him off with a headshot, execution style.

Barbie cries when he realizes that Dr. Bloom is dead and there’s no hope for a cure. Also, his baby is a monster. That kind of sucks.

Having had a long day, Christine settles down for a rest when she’s suddenly grabbed by something and dragged out to the edge of the dome. It’s Eva wearing a blonde wig! She looks ridiculous. This is Barbie’s daughter?

Eva, Jr. tosses Christine onto the dome, causing her to disintegrate. The baby announces, “I’m the queen now.”

Sigh. Aside from the final scene, this episode is kind of a drag and barely has any of the outrageous silly insanity that made last week’s episode tolerable.

Just one more of these to suffer through. Can I make it?

3 comments

  1. Bill

    Hang in there Josh. I’m dying to see how next week can wrap this mess up and reveal all as the network is promising. If the series was really only canned at the end of August isn’t it a little strange to have not a season finale but a series finale already recorded and ready to go? My theory – the series was actually killed by the network months ago but they kept that fact a secret to keep all the fools watching for another summer.

    • Josh Zyber
      Author

      I’m sure that the finale will have no resolution at all. The network has promised that the dome will come down, but that was no doubt planned for this finale all along. Regardless, the episode will leave off on some kind of cliffhanger, probably involving the pink star aliens coming to Earth to get the butterfly aliens just like Christine warned. The fates of all the characters will be left up in the air, and we’ll never get closure. The network will call it an “open ending” and pretend that it’s how the show was always meant to stop.

      • Bill

        Well if you’re correct, Under the Dome joins Revolution, Terra Nova, Unforgettable and Alcatraz to name just a few recent series that in the end had no resolution. I guess it makes the ending of The Mentalist last spring something we should more appreciate.

        Looking forward to your final comments Josh.

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