Under the Dome. The premise is that a transparent dome suddenly covers the town of Chester’s Mill, Maine, cutting off the citizens from the rest of the world and letting them settle their squabbles on their own, while others (maybe including aliens) watch. The Pilot aired June 24.
King always populates his novels with diverse, skilled but troubled characters, and this is no exception, as the pilot opens with a man doing something in the woods. We see a couple of young couples and people and troubled families, and soon a female reporter visits an elderly woman who wants to give her a news tip about propane tanks being filled nearby.
The scene where the Dome appears is quite well done. Some characters are outside, and some bizarre wind gusts come up, despite the cloudless skies. Animals behave oddly and some fall out of the sky. Suddenly, a cow is bisected laterally, as the invisible barrier slams down. Soon, there is a small plane crash, and various auto accidents.
Early, there is a 'foreshadowing' of the Dome, with a transparent plastic hemisphere covering a pie in a restaurant.
It’s always interesting to wonder how a town, and authorities, will deal with a happening that simply cannot be explained by anything we understand.
The previous episodes can be watched free right now on Amazon, without commercials. They run about 43 minutes.
Reports indicate that the show has started out pretty well in the Nielsen ratings, story.
This one may generate a narrative hook. The series is actually filmed in North Carolina. Later episodes would play with Marxism as the community struggles to survive.
It appears that CBS concluded it’s 'Under the Dome' series, as an increasingly loose adaptation of Stephen King’s 2009 novel, with a finale called “The Enemy Within”. The town will have a 'new queen', born under the Dome just before the end.
In some departure from the book, an “experiment” surrounding the complex 1980’s alien artefact (after a fatal fight) creates a chain reaction that brings down the “calcified” Dome. In another scene, we see some characters “go up” (just as in “Whispers”).
The government has the typical duty to hide the extraterrestrial truth. In one scene, an Army general is advising a young man to sign a 'confidentiality agreement'. The camera focuses on the young man's arms, which suddenly become hairier as the face transforms into an older character.
Then it seems that some of the characters in the “morgue” survived after all. In the final scene, what looks like a female alien is supervising some boys at play near one of the alien 'eggs'. The fact that the series was shot near Wilmington NC is shown by a palmetto in the scene, out of place in Maine.
It’s already been reported that CBS canceled the series, as of the end of this season. That’s a problem with taking a novel and trying to make an open-ended series, which varies from the book. Authors sometimes have little control of what happens to the integrity of their work after it is adapted. One reason that this novel is serialized is the huge number of well-developed character with complicated back stories (some reaching back to the earlier hidden 1980’s alien contact). I wonder what will happen with Clive Barkers 'Imajica', with its comparably sized list of characters (and doppelgangers).