



In preparing for the upcoming season of Under the Dome, my brain said, "Tim, make a list of the 10 dumbest things Under the Dome did in its first two season," and I was like, "That's a great idea, brain." But then a funny thing happened! I started looking over all 26 episodes of the series and dumb things were all over the place. Ten quickly became 13, which quickly became 18, which quickly became 1,494.

But in the interest of you not turning into a skeleton in front of your internet-abled device, I've cut it down to a reasonable 22 items. That's long enough for me to prove my point that this show is really dumb, but not long enough for you to relive all those dumb things and become dumber yourself.

So please, put on a helmet and let's revisit the domest things Under the Dome ever domed.





Reverend Coggins tries to put out a fire, ends up starting a huge fire (Season 1, Episode 2)





After one mostly successful and mostly undumb episode, it didn't take Under the Dome long to show off its true dumbness, and Episode 2 was dumb, dumb, dumb. Remember this guy? He was the crazy pastor who was on drugs and helped Big Jim cover up his illegal propane trade. One thing he did to help Jimmer was to get rid of some incriminating documents, so he lit them on fire and threw them into a trash can that had other flammable things. Inside of a flammable house. Then he basically lit the entire house on fire by trying to put fires out with flammable things. It was a Keystone Kops moment that was played straight, and a sign of dumbness to come.





Junior holds Angie hostage in the basement for way too long (Episodes 1-5)

Under the Dome foolishly figured that not everyone would be tuning into Under the Dome for a story about people being trapped under a dome, so they created something else people might care about. You know, like how some people watch Game of Thrones for wedding planning. To make things its definition of interesting, Under the Dome stuck some girl named Angie in a bomb shelter where she was held captive by local sociopath Junior for five episodes. Meanwhile, an awesome magical dome was cutting cows in half outside. And for some reason, when she was finally released and free of her psycho captor, Angie actually sought out Junior and blew his brains out cuddled with him. Masochist much, Angie?





Everyone gives Junior a gun (various episodes)

Junior is a mentally handicapped sociopathic firecracker with anger issues, so obviously the best thing to do was for morons to give him a huge f'ing gun at every opportunity. Remember when Big Jim gave him a shotgun to hold all those senior citizens in the hospital waiting room so they didn't spread meningitis to the rest of the dome? And he yelled and waved his shotgun around instead of telling them why they were being quarantined? And then he was promoted to police officer for his heroism? And then Officer Linda gave him an assault rifle and he *surprise* shot people? And then the third time someone gave him a bazooka or a fusion cannon or something and you were just like, "Yeah, that's Chester's Mill for ya, go get 'em Junior."





The military tries to blow up the dome with a mega-missile (Season 1, Episode 5)





Each episode of Under the Dome roughly translates to a day in dome-time (not that the writers bother to keep a timeline or even mark off days on an "Odd Animal Friends" calendar), and by Day 5, the military had had it with this dome and decided to nuke it with little explanation other than it was messing with monarch butterflies' migration patterns. Blowing up the dome didn't work, and instead all the wildlife around Chester's Mill, including that gaggle of butterflies, was vaporized. Oh yeah, and Big Jim finally released Angie from her bomb shelter prison when the bomb shelter was actually where one wanted to be because, well, a bomb was coming.





Julia says she's happy she was stuck under the dome (Season 1, Episode 5)





Under the Dome has dialogue that would make a deaf man jump headfirst off a roof, but every once in a while an exceptional clunker smashed you over the side of the head turning your teeth to ash. And Julia Shumway, Chester's Mill's brave journalist and the show's Strong Female Lead, said about 200 percent of them. At this point in the show, she found out her husband was murdered after he ran up a gambling debt that wiped out their bank account, the dome killed a bunch of people, the citizens were on the verge of ripping each other to shreds, and several dome-related catastrophes threatened their very existence. So Julia, in a moment of what passes for clarity inside that pea-sized brain of hers, actually said the following words: "I didn't understand this place before the dome came down. Now, after everything we've been through? I'm glad I got to be part of it." OH REALLY?







The dome makes some lady have a baby and we saw her water break (Season 1, Episode 7)





WHAT!? WHY DO WE HAVE TO SEE BABY JUICE SPLASH ON SOME PAYLESS KICKS!?





Underground fighting for toilet paper (Season 1, Episode 10)





Once Under the Dome figured out that it would be sticking around for a while, it needed clever alternatives to stretch the series out and postpone any big dome answers. So it came up with a plot that saw Barbie's former criminal cohort and possible bed buddy come to town and start an underground fight club where people literally bare-knuckle fought like animals for staples such as toilet paper. Read that last sentence again, I dare you. It actually happened in this show.





Dome logic (Episode 1, Season 11)

This is one of those "you had to be there to really appreciate it" moments, but when the Dome Kids Clubhouse was having a meeting to brainstorm some dome answers, the dopes formed a line of reasoning that my brain is still upset about almost two years later. What started out as a simple stupid thought (the dome doesn't want people to know about the mini-dome) turned into a line of abstract reasoning that made absolutely zero sense (the dome trusts Julia) but was necessary to push the plot somewhere. The principal from Billy Madison really should have come out and made his "everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it" speech.





This clock! (Season 1, Episode 13)





Millions of dollars go into the production of just one episode of this show. None of that goes into hiring an effective prop person, apparently. Look at the time on that clock (which got its own closeup, so it HAD to be important). That is not a real time that exists in our universe. That is literally, "I dunno, 4 or 5 o'clock." How does someone put a camera on that and not fix it? Everyone should be fired for this.





The ending of Season 1 (Season 1, Episode 13)





Julia threw an egg into the water and then a pink fireworks show went off. Yep!





Julia saves a drowning person without a boat (Season 2, Episode 1)





More adventures of Julia Shumway! She gets an A+ for effort, but she probably could have been more efficient in her execution. Unless she's a mermaid? She must be a mermaid.





Next: Angie falls down, caterpillars attack, and the Microsoft Surface tablet