Under the Dome uses crisis management to lurch from episode to episode and this is just predictable and boring

I think Under the Dome, at least for me, has jumped the shark. This television series, which airs on Monday night, continued what has to be some kind of "alien experiment" that started in season one. Now, I haven't read the enormous book that is the source material for this show. But the reason I say it has to be an "alien experiment" is because...well what else could it be? King, who is the mastermind behind the show, has given little to no evidence that there is magic in this world. In fact, it's pretty close to ours, even employing a scientist to explain away events that are occurring "under the dome" from the red rain to the plague of butterflies.

And I suppose that "realization" that it is just aliens screwing around with humans to see how they would react if isolated from others of their kind is just stupid because humans don't act any differently when they aren't under a dome. I know that the whole "shock" is supposed to be at how cruel human beings are to each other. That at the end of the day, the monster you should be fearing is your neighbor. But here's the thing: without any kind of dome humans visit the absolute worst atrocities on one another anyway.

You want examples? Let's look at Chicago, which periodically vies for most violent city in the nation with its many gun shootings and murders. Or let's go out of the U.S. to Mexico and see what drug cartels are doing to people. Or let's go abroad to Syria and look at how the dictator, Assad, treats his people. How about North Korea? Yeah, I'm pretty much sure that cruelty and fear of cruelty is what keeps everyone in line. Ever hear of the Killing Fields? Ever wonder what took place at Auschwitz? What about on the top of an Aztec temple? What happened there? My point is that if aliens needed evidence that humans are cruel, all they had to do was observe the world for a single day.

So what does that leave for aliens to discover about the people living "Under the Dome?" In my opinion: nothing that couldn't be observed anywhere else. In a way, the television show is even more annoying with the dome than it would be without it. The Dome compresses what could be a "meh" moment into busy work, and we as viewers are expected to swallow these "challenges" as a substitute for actual story telling. Here's an example of what I'm talking about: a building has a fire so everyone has to come together to put out the fire because they all live in a dome and there's nowhere to go. Everyone starts running out of food so they've got to figure out how to allocate resources. And on and on and on. Each episode is just the "challenge of the week." You could do this kind of thing forever and keep a series like this going forever, but it's not really stimulating. Here, I'll give it a whirl: someone goes missing and the town folk have got to spend all episode finding said "missing" person. But what to do next week? Oh I know...town folk find "missing person" and they are dead. So now we can have a whole episode on how said person ended up dead.

The first season of this show, I was intrigued. But now, it just drags on and on and is nothing more than the most basic methods of storytelling: cause and effect. I guess that the people that continue to watch Under the Dome either don't expect much from their programming and just want to watch an episodic t.v. show that lurches from crisis to crisis with some kind of eventual "alien" money shot, or they are just die hard fans of Stephen King (which I am not). I guess that's maybe why this show runs in the summer, because there's very little competition for it in its chosen time slot and rather than be bored on a Monday night, I've been tuning in with the hopes that it'd get moving and that eventually I'd like one of the characters.

Ah well. With August here, the fall tv season is just around the corner.

Stephen King's second tweet basically sums up all the #FAIL of twitter

Stephen King's second tweet basically sums up all the #FAIL of twitter. How on earth this social network is worth $40 billion and yet can't turn a profit is something I'll never be able to understand. 

On Twitter at last, and can't think of a thing to say. Some writer I turned out to be.
— Stephen King (@StephenKing) December 6, 2013 

I think every single one of us has felt this at some point unless of course you're on twitter to spam people to read your blog or to buy your book. I think with this single tweet, Stephen King finally earned me as a fan because having something worthy to say is where nearly all of us fall short.

I'm hooked on Under the Dome, but I wish it had something a bit more positive to say about people

I watched Under the Dome last night right after I watched the Blackhawks clinch the Stanley Cup on national television (for the record, this Blackhawks fan never had any doubt). It'll be nice though next season to see the guys clean-shaven again. I know it's superstition, but not a fan of the Grizzly Adams look.

So here's my confession regarding Under the Dome. I haven't read it. I've only read a handful of Stephen King books. They are Needful Things, The Shining, Dark Tower, and Eyes of the Dragon. I never went "nutso" over Stephen King. He was just one of those authors that I enjoyed every once in a while, but not more so than most any other author that writes speculative fiction these days.

So I go into the pilot episode of Under the Dome without any preconceptions of what's going on or what to expect, and I find myself asking: are people really crazy like this? I realize it's just a fiction, but Mr. King is a profound observer of human nature, and I think he provides us with a "boiled down" reflection on an ugly truth: a lot of us are only civil toward one another because the law makes us behave. All you have to do is check the Yahoo Finance page articles for comments left by people, and you'll see more hate speech and ugliness than you can probably stomach. Just an example: people referring to democrats as "libtards", which is not only a terrible insult but shows the depth of how people 1) are always looking to blame someone else for a problem and 2) how much people hate others that do not share their political views. On a recent article, there were several comments calling for civil war (this basically spurned by the recent drops in the stock market due to panic and fear over the notion that the Federal Reserve may seek to taper its bond-buying program if the economy shows it can stand on its own--a thing that should be welcomed as good news).

In a science fiction setting, it's easy to lose track of the message that people are scum, but it's there if you look for it. Take Berk in Aliens when he screws over everyone with his plan to get the alien xenomorph impregnated in Ripley and Newt and then, he gets caught. Well do people really screw over other people for money? Yes, yes they do. Just this weekend a man was killed over a pair of Lebron James basketball shoes. Let me repeat that because it's a sad sad thing in our country: A MAN WAS KILLED FOR A PAIR OF SHOES. Like WTH?

Of course the news tells us of the Adam Lanza's who murder a school full of children, they tell us of the mad men who drive planes into skyscrapers for the promise of an afterlife that fulfills every one of their desires, they tell us of the Ponzi schemer who bilks people out of their money to live high on the hog, and the list goes on and on and on.

There are so many horrible things that people do to others out of jealousy, anger, hatred, contempt, greed, and fear that I suppose the veil of civilized society is a more delicate thing than I could have imagined. Maybe I've lived under a dome all my life having come from a small town. Now living in a big city, the blindfold over my eyes has been removed. That and I'm in that stage in my life where I absorb a ton of information every day on things that I previously ignored.

So in Under the Dome is it any surprise that the boy athlete from college in love with his girlfriend decides to imprison her in an underground bunker so that she'll realize she loves him (and probably to make sure her vajayjay doesn't go wandering)?

Am I shocked that we are introduced to a drifter named Barbie who kills a man for money, disposes his body in the woods seemingly without guilt and then drives into town only to turn around and save a few people? How can someone demonstrate compassion and be a killer in the same day? I've heard stories of the Juarez Cartel employees in Mexico. Apparently they can behead people that the cartel wants killed and go home and have dinner with their families and children and go to church the next day.

Am I surprised that a reporter whose husband is missing instantly leaps to the conclusion that her husband is having an affair instead of saying, "Oh this is unusual that he's missing"?

Or what about the council man who hints at something illegal that he's been doing while the Sheriff has been looking the other way? I guess we should just expect that corruption in politics goes all the way to the roots. If you run for any kind of public office, you are corrupt. Let's add ambition to the list of things that motivate people to screw over and hurt other people.

Is the Earth just one huge Dome? Are we all trapped?

I'm hooked by Under the Dome, but I wish it had something a bit more positive (naive of me I know especially given that King is a horror writer) to say about Americans or maybe people in general (I only say Americans because it takes place in a fictional America). But it makes me question if the Earth is a dome. As it becomes increasingly more crowded with people, and resources shrink, are we all going to be able to get along with each other? There's going to be fewer and fewer places for people to run to in order to escape other people. I just hope the legitimately good people in the world don't all end up like the poor fat kid with the glasses in The Lord of the Flies.