Under the Dome

“The Enemy Within”, Season 3 Episode 13

Requested By

.· Ben ⬩ Salvidrim! ·. on our Discord server. Thank you for supporting the Substack!

What do I know about this series going into it?

My wife is a massive Stephen King fan, and owns virtually all of his books. I know that the book this show is based on involves aliens who, for reasons entirely unknown to man, stick an impenetrable dome over a small town.

According to what my wife has said¹, the dome is just a plot device to provide the environment in which the characters operate: an isolated town with dwindling resources. The motivations of the aliens are never explored. She said that the series is mostly faithful to this… at first. But then it takes a sharp left turn, delving deeply into how the dome works and who the aliens are and why they did this, and that’s when the quality of the show really starts to suffer.

Previously On

The dome crashed down on Chester’s Mill four weeks ago, according to Big Jim the narrator². Unusually for a previously, he’s talking directly to the viewer in the present tense, saying things like, “The dome tested our limits and now we have to fight the enemy within”.

The dome is “calcifying”. They need to “amplify the tones from the device”. A guy’s baby comes out of a cocoon. One woman throws another into the dome, which kills her, and she shouts, “I’m the queen now!”

Recap

Dawn, the aforementioned queen now, addresses her people, whom she calls “the kinship”. She is challenging “Christine’s” reign, she says, and they need to take down the dome. It was put here to protect “their species” (so Dawn and her people are the aliens in human form) but they’re tired of being protected and now they want to escape.

Somewhere in town, Big Jim and two teenagers have a transmitter. One teenager is going to use the transmitter to take down the dome, but they need to keep the transmitter from overheating. Unfortunately, they are soon surrounded by gun-wielding kinship.

In the forest outside town, a shovel-wielding man and woman are burying the body of “Dr. Bloom”. Shovel Woman asks Shovel Man if they should really be doing this right now, but he says it’s a matter of principle: “We’re not the kinship, we bury our dead.” But they too are quickly surrounded by the kinship³. They try shooting their way out, but are vastly outnumbered and quickly surrender. The kinship introduce the gravediggers to their new queen, Dawn, who is in the body of a human named Eva.

Opening credits.

A man wakes up near the edge of a ravine with steam coming out of it. He is bleeding from the back of his neck.

Eva/Dawn puts Shovel Man and Shovel Woman in a jail cell. Shovel Man tells Dawn that she looks like her mother, but she mocks him for his human sentimentality: “I’m nothing like Eva or Christine.” She leaves, but Shovel Woman points out that Dawn can’t be entirely without sentiment if she’s keeping them alive.

What they failed to notice, though, is that Big Jim is in the jail cell too, directly behind them.

I can see why you’d miss him. He doesn’t really stand out.

Big Jim reports that Dawn took “Joe” (I assume one of the two teenagers) because she needs his help, and she is only keeping them alive as leverage over Joe. And indeed we see Dawn in the other room threatening to torture the prisoners if he doesn’t help her bring the dome down. But Joe says that threat won’t work: If the dome stays in place, all the kinship and humans will die anyway.

So Dawn and Joe come to an agreement. Big Jim and “Julia” must stay in the cell because they were never part of the kinship (so there must be a way to expel the alien from inside you), but everyone else can go free. Dawn trusts Joe, since he “used to be kinship” and Dawn still senses the kinship-ness inside of him⁴.

Back in the cell, Shovel Man and Shovel Woman discuss the situation. Turns out Eva is their daughter, and they believe there’s still some Eva left inside Dawn. But time is running out: if Dawn takes down the dome, the kinship will be let loose upon the world. At the same time, if they don’t take down the dome, they’ll all die. So the only solution is to bring down the dome but kill Dawn before she can leave.

Joe and Dawn arrive and, as they agreed, let everyone out but Big Jim and Julia (Shovel Woman). Before they leave, Jim asks Dawn to let him have his dog, calling him “the key to my heart”. Based on the meaningful look he gives Joe when he says this, I bet it’s an attempt to communicate something in code⁵.

As Shovel Man is leaving, Julia pulls him aside: you have to kill Dawn. He still wants to appeal to the Eva inside, but assures Julia that he’ll kill Dawn if that doesn’t work.

Elsewhere, there is a confrontation between two members of the kinship. One of them is angry at something Christine did (“Christine’s no longer one of us”), but the other informs him that Christine’s gone anyway; there’s a new queen. One of the two - I can’t tell them apart - reports to Dawn that “Barbie and the others have the amethysts.” He wants to be Dawn’s Alpha, but she says he needs to earn it. Which he starts doing right away: when you take down the dome, you’ll need to get past the military that’s surrounding it, so here’s a plan to do so (something about a cement factory?). Otherwise they’ll capture and experiment on Dawn just like they did to Christine.

Interesting. So the dome hasn’t been truly impenetrable; Christine made it out at least once, and presumably back as well.

Another member of the kindred overhears Dawn and this guy making the plan. Based on his expression, he’s clearly jealous and wants to be the Alpha himself.

Meanwhile, Big Jim and Julia escape from the jail cell.

Outside, Joe activates a dirty old transmitter. The signal is going to bounce back and forth inside the dome, heating up the transmitter⁶; his two friends need to keep it cool for as long as possible so that it doesn’t overheat and explode, until the signal is strong enough to take down the dome. Joe says something mystifying about the dome “turning to dust like in the Matrix” - but I’ve seen that movie dozens of times and have no clue what he’s referring to.

In the forest, Dawn’s kinship are bringing the amethysts into a clearing. They’re having trouble, because these aren’t tiny gemstones but rather enormous rocks a quarter the size of a person. She shoots one of her minions dead to provide the others with motivation. Her father, Shovel Man, is dismayed at this behavior, but she strikes back at him: You think you wouldn’t take a life? Of course you would - don’t you remember when you were in the Matrix, and it gave you a dark personality that reflects your inner self?

Well, at least that explains the Matrix reference earlier. There’s something in this show that is referred to by that name.

Meanwhile, there’s a fight between the two jealous kindred who both want to be the Alpha. One stabs the other to death, but which is which doesn’t seem to matter; they seem pretty interchangeable to me, and for all I know they’re brothers.

Big Jim and Julia collect guns from a bunker somewhere, along the way killing a member of the kindred who gets in the way and threatens Big Jim’s dog.

The kindred have set up solar panels and microphones in the clearing.

“Gooooooood evening, Chester’s Mill!!!!”

Once everything is ready, Dawn tells Shovel Man she’s letting him go. Love is a foreign concept to the kindred, she says, but we know it’s important to you humans, so go be with Julia.

“James” (the victorious of the two interchangeable kindred) arrives. Dawn accepts him as her Alpha, choosing him over the other interchangeable kindred, named “Sam”. Trouble is, Sam was the one with the cement factory plan - and Dawn doesn’t yet know that James killed him. Is she going to discover when the dome comes down that she has no escape route?

Dawn gives James the details of her plan: destroy all the competing eggs that have been laid on Earth, build a new dome for her own eggs, and start a new birthing cycle for the kindred. Apparently something the humans did while trying to figure out how to get out of the dome interfered with the lifecycle of the kindred who were born here, so they’re messed up in some way I don’t understand. Dawn plans on leaving them behind but claims (probably lying) that she’ll come back for them.

Dawn whistles a specific note at each amethyst to activate it, but the “song” has one more note than there are amethysts. The missing element is “a human who saw the pink stars”⁷. Dawn is going to put Joe’s girlfriend⁸ inside the ring of amethysts, but Joe - who is for some reason certain that whichever human does this will die - throws her outside the circle and takes her place. This was Dawn’s plan all along, it seems, since Joe also “saw the pink stars”. Joe whistles the last note, and there is an explosion of pink from the ring of amethysts that sends everyone flying off their feet. And thanks to some combination between the amethysts and the transmitters are doing and Joe’s whistle causes the dome to burst.

Just outside the clearing, Big Jim has been trying to shoot Dawn with a sniper rifle - but James tackles him. Dawn flees, and Julia chases after her.

Joe’s girlfriend gets up, and is dismayed to see all the amethysts shattered and no sign of Joe⁹. But before she can really do anything, she is grabbed and handcuffed by an American soldier, as are all of the kindred.

Big Jim stabs James to death, during which he calls him “son” (this is probably meant literally, but I’m not sure).

Dawn starts crossing a wooden board laid over a ravine (what?) but when she’s halfway across Shovel Man appears on the other side. He threatens to collapse the board and let both of them fall to their deaths. She starts telling him that she loves him, imitating human modes of speech, but Dawn is a terrible actress and he sees through it immediately: there’s no Eva left in her. He leaps onto the board and they both smash through it, plummetting into the ravine. Julia, who arrived just in time to miss his, shouts “Barbie!”, which is confusing - does Eva have yet a third name?

Luckily for Shovel Man, there was a metal chain on his side of the ravine, which he highly improbably catches and uses to climb back up. He survived, and Dawn didn’t.

Timeskip. Shovel Man is being interviewed by a military officer who calls him Mr. Barbara, which explains who “Barbie” is. The interview recounts how Barbara was “cocooned and infected” by the kinship ten days prior, though it’s not clear how he was cleansed of the infection. The aliens had basically taken over almost everyone in the town, and those who weren’t infected were (contrary to my assumpton so far) basically limited to the characters we saw, who were vastly outnumbered.

But the army has decided the world isn’t ready to learn about body-snatching aliens, so they came up with a cover story about a company called Aktaion and its CEO Hektor Martin, who accidentally created the dome and killed everyone else underneath it. To that end, the army forces the survivors to sign an agreement saying they’ll keep quiet about the aliens.

The captured kinship can’t reproduce without a queen and aren’t a threat¹⁰, so the military isn’t going to just kill them. They’ll be held until a cure can be found.

Big Jim refuses to sign, though.

“Awww, shucks. I bet you say that to all your detainees.”

He comes up with a better idea: why not, instead of keeping quiet, I go out and enthusiastically tell the army’s version of events? And if you want me to do that, I want to be paid handsomely for it.

One year later. A woman gets a call from a man who got a “hit” three weeks ago; sounds like another alien infestation.

A soldier, Jenkins, searches through and steals something from the desk of a superior officer.

Julia and Barbie are together and discussing getting married.

“Are you about to confess to being another kinship queen?”

Just as he proposes, though, they are interrupted by black army vehicles that surround them. Emerging from one of them is Big Jim, now a congressman. He takes them to his office, where they explain some things: the soldier, Jenkins, is named “Norrie”; the woman who took the call is Big Jim’s chief of staff; the NSA guy who called her is “Mr. May”; and the hit they found was security camera footage of Dawn, alive.

Meanwhile, Norrie uses the stolen keycard to enter an army facility where all the kindred are kept, including Joe, whom she tearfully tells she’ll come back and save.

And in a field somewhere, Dawn’s (adopted?) children report to her that they’ve found one of the eggs.

Lingering questions

• Is Joe infected?

• Is the military actually intending on curing the kinship or just holding them for study and experimentation? How was Joe cleansed of kinshipness and why can’t that process be reproduced?

• Did Big Jim’s quid pro quo from the military consist of money or of rigging his congressional election? I wouldn’t normally think of the latter but I get a real “conspiracy theorist that turns out to actually be right” vibe from that character.

• I didn’t recognize Norrie as Joe’s girlfriend. Is this somebody else who loves him, or did she change her appearance to infiltrate the army?

Ratings

I evaluate the finale-of-the-week from an angle that its writers never intended: how well it works as an individual episode watched in isolation. This will likely differ greatly from how the episode works in its proper context. And it should go without saying that the following does not apply to the series as a whole, which I have not watched.

The rating system is from 0 to 10, where 5 is considered average for television. These are intended to be measurements, not judgements; high ratings are not necessarily better and low rating are not necessarily worse. For example, a strong character piece may have no plot, or a finale may intentionally provide no closure - neither of which makes an episode bad.

Story: 5/10. A fairly typical plot for a television finale. You have the wrapping-up of the main plot with the dome; the two leads getting together; and a classic timeskip in the denouement followed by the equally classic “the bad guy’s still out there” ending.

I’m not completely sure I can identify the subplots, partially because they weren’t very impressive. Joe and his girlfriend have one, but it wasn’t really brought to a resolution. Sam and James, the two members of the kinship who hated each other, had their own subplot, but I’m not sure that “both of them dying” counts as a plot development.

If my guess is good (and this is going out on a bit of limb), I think Big Jim’s arc is the most interesting. As stated above, I get a major survivalist/conspiracy-theorist vibe from him. I’m guessing that the writers deliberately set up the pendulum to swing all the way in the opposite direction: he closes the series about as far as possible from where he started it, actually working for the government to help keep the conspiracy and using government resources to fight aliens.

Writing: 4/10. The dialogue wasn’t bad, just formulaic. None of it made me sit up and take notice.

Two things stood out for ill. The first is the really strange present-tense voiceover during the Previously. Who exactly is Big Jim talking to? The audience? What audience is listening to him in the middle of the crisis? It’s also strange that he refers to “The Enemy Within” when the only person in-universe to use the term is Dawn - and she uses it about a different group of people. So it’s there only to name-drop the episode title, written by somebody who didn’t notice the episode title was also being dropped within the opening minute.

The second was the absurd scene in which Mr. Barbara “traps” Dawn on a wooden plank. Is he such an expert carpenter and judge of Dawn’s weight¹¹ that he knows exactly how strong a piece of wood needs to be that it won’t collapse if she stands on it but will if she tries to run? How did he turn around in midair fast enough to grab the chain while falling into the ravine, and what made him so sure he’d succeed rather than plummet to his death? Why was that a better idea than wrapping the chain around the plank and threatening to yank it out from under her?

The writers clearly had a lot of trouble figuring out a way that Barbara could trap Dawn long enough to investigate whether there was any Eva left in her. And they did not come up with a good solution.

Production: 5/10. Standard production values for broadcast television. Some pretty substandard acting by the extras among the kinship.

There was one thing that caught my eye: in the overhead shot where we watch the dome come down, there is a massive black blotch in the lower left corner of the screen, presumably from some event earlier in the series when somebody tried to use fire or a massive explosive to breach the dome. That was a nice detail that piqued my interest.

Characterization: 7/10. Maybe I’m being overly generous with this, but there are a few things that I am choosing to believe were deliberate nods to character complexity rather than inconsistencies and mistakes.

I really liked Big Jim as an antihero. He is necessary for the survival of the human race, yet he is clearly a complete asshole, yet killing the alien inhabiting his son (if that really was his son) affected him deeply, yet he is only days later shamelessly extorting the army for money and power.

I’m also very interested in the nature of the kinship. First, it’s uncommon for a show to have the aliens’ claim that “nothing of the host survives” turn out to actually be true rather than bluster.

Second, Dawn regularly claims that things like “love” and “sentiment” are human traits that hold no relevance to them - but the way she reacts to James and to Sam would seem to wholly contradict this. Are they really as emotionless as they claim, or is she just in superiority-complex-induced denial? Or do those concepts have analogues among the kinship that play similar roles but are far more circumscribed in their extent - limited only to the queen’s relationship with the candidates for Alphadom? She certainly holds no sentiment for her drones, executing them without a second thought as a lesson to the others, and planning to abandon them to the army while she creates a new brood.

I could choose to view this negatively. The traits that I just described are common to many a human evil overlord with disposable minions, including some in real life. So it’s possible that Dawn’s behavior merely reflects the writers’ inability to imagine a truly alien mindset. But something about it feels purposeful, like the writers wanted to hint towards a hypocrisy in the kinship’s condescension towards humanity. I’m willing to hike this score up a couple of points under the assumption that it’s deliberate.

Accessibility: 3/10. As stated at the top, I already knew the basic premise of the show, which helped a great deal. And while I was eventually able to work out the main plotline and most of the main characters’ names, there’s still a lot of incomprehensible lore that remains mystifying even after the credits close.

“You grasp the threads of dawn, weaving the first light where wolves whisper secrets to the vigilant.” See? Two can play at that game, lady.

Closure: 6/10. A lot was left up on the air, most of it deliberate. Dawn is out there somewhere and the heroes are trying to find her. Joe is in military custody with some unknown amount of alien still in him, as are dozens of others. We don’t truly know Big Jim’s agenda. Julia and Mr. Barbara aren’t quite engaged, at least not yet.

And yet despite all that, this is a fairly natural endpoint to the series. There’s no dome anymore, and everyone who lived in the town (save five or six people) is dead or in custody. If the show wanted to continue it would have to have a new name.

Do I want to watch the series now?

I’m definitely interested enough to read up on the lore. I want to know what Big Jim is really up to, what the “kinship” is all about, and what exactly the humans messed with that tainted the aliens’ lifecycle. But merely meeting broadcast television’s usual standards aren’t enough of a draw, not in this day and age.

Is there a series finale you’d like me to try? Join our Discord or leave a comment below.

1. I am probably not remembering this accurately. It was a casual conversation we had years ago. And of course once the show was added to the queue I deliberately didn’t follow up, so as to avoid spoilers.

2. Name given in captions.

3. It’s so weird this isn’t capitalized.

4. I’m not clear on something here. Fact 1: Joe used to be kinship. Fact 2: Big Jim and Julia are the only ones who were never kinship. So where does that leave, say, Shovel Man? If he’s formerly kinship like Joe, why does Dawn trust Joe so much more? If he was never kinship, why can he go free where Big Jim and Julia need to stay locked up? Or is there a third category?

5. Writing this footnote after the episode ended: Nope. It’s just a weird sentence.

6. This is not how radio transmissions work.

7. How do the aliens remove their domes if they don’t have humans to whistle?

8. Her name showed up once - either mentioned or in captions - but I’ve forgotten it. I want to say Lily?

9. Not even giblets.

10. How is the military so sure of this?

11. She’s part alien now. How many calories is that?