Under the Dome Recap: “Imperfect Circles”

by Kelly M. Smith:

Under the Dome Recap: “Imperfect Circles”
Original Air Date (CBS): Monday August 5, 2013
Season 1 Episode 8

“…See what the Dome wants…and convince it to go away.” -Norrie Calvert-Hill

Teenager Norrie Calvert-Hill wakes her “friend” Joe McAlister up, eager to go try out their “Dome Wonder Twin powers” (in previous episode they have touched each other and had massive seizures, believed to be created by the Dome, where they chant in unison “pink stars are falling in lines”. On other occasions, when they touch the Dome separately, they seize individually though they touched in a previous episode when they believed the military was going to blow them up and nothing happened whatsoever).

Julia Shumway (local news reporter and editor of the paper, The Democrat) and Dale “Barbie” Barbara (ex-military man who now works as an enforcer for a bookie and killed Julia’s gambling husband, though she doesn’t know it) wake up in bed together, with no regrets. There’s a knock at the door.
It’s Julia’s neighbor Harriet Bigelow (played by Megan Ketch best known from the popular CBS TV seriesBlue Bloods), a pregnant woman due in six weeks, wanting to borrow yogurt. Her husband Greg is deployed.

At the Rennie house, James (AKA “Big Jim”) physically throws his son, James “Junior” Rennie, out of the house, slapping him around. He tells him not to touch Angie McAlister (Joe’s older sister, whom Junior held captive in an underground bomb shelter for the first few days of the Dome’s appearance) again and also to find somewhere else to live.

Angie watches it all and checks that Jim knows his son is crazy. Jim offers to let her stay, so he can keep an eye on her, but she wants to get home to Joe. First, she wants to pay her respects to Rose Twitchell, whose body is being kept in the Sweetbriar Rose kitchen. She learns that Jim owns it–he bought the place after Rose kept borrowing money. (Rose was murdered by two looters in last week’s episode, a very touching scene when Barbie tells Jim she passed.)

Back at Julia’s, Harriet leaves with her yogurt and sees her husband Greg (played by Adam Poole) across the street. She goes to greet him, but instead of touching him, she touches the Dome, as in her haste she forgot it was even there. As we have learned, the Dome does strange things, medically. It has blown deceased Sheriff Howard “Duke” Perkins’s pacemaker right out of his chest, given kids and teens seizures and also make the deceased Reverend Lester Coggins’s hearing aid kill him, when Big Jim shoved his head against the Dome in order to keep him quiet. Harriet’s water breaks and she cries for help.

Junior and Barbie report to new Sheriff Linda Esquivel at the police station Junior was made an honorary cop after Jim realized they were short-handed with the Dome in place and three of their four remaining officers dead. Barbie was also asked to help with law enforcement by Linda. She takes Junior to go look for the Dundees, the brothers who killed Rose. Barbie goes on patrol.

Harriet tries to make sense of what she saw on the street. Julia gets her to her car.

Angie goes to visit Rose’s body. Joe’s friend Benny (well, we haven’t seen him in a while, have we?) finds her in the café and she asks for his help.

On his farm, Ollie Dinsmore enjoys acting magnanimous as people come to fill up on water from his well. Jim says he’s there to make nice and Ollie ends up taunting him about his propane supply, implying that it might not be Jim’s anymore, which unsettles and angers the Second Selectman. The viewers never did find out what, exactly, he needed all of that propane for, did we? After all, his explanation of “in case of an emergency” in the last episode wasn’t very convincing…

Joe and Norrie make out against the Dome, trying to provoke a reaction. When they get nothing, they wonder if they need to go to the center of it, like the nucleus of an atom. In a previous episode, when they kissed, nothing happened, then either. Yet, before the military fired their missile at the Dome, every time their skin touched it sparked a seizure or, recently, made the radio frequency go all wonky.

Jim drives up to his shipping container and finds Ollie’s man, Boomer (played by Jeff Chase from the soap opera Days Of Our Lives), a giant of a man, guarding it with a shotgun. He’s taken the lock off and won’t let Jim near it. When Jim tries to get passed him, Boomer whacks him in the gut and the face with the shotgun. Again, excellent stunt-work from Dean Norris.

Linda and Junior look for Waylon and Clint Dundee (the brothers, as I mentioned, who killed Rose). She mentions they tried to rape Angie, which of course hits a special kind of crazy place in Junior, making him want to find them all the more.

Meanwhile, Julia and Harriet get stopped at a junk roadblock and the Dundee brothers come out with guns drawn and start to siphon their gas (if anyone remembers The Stand: Uncut Edition, Stephen King–writer ofUnder The Dome novel and executive producer of the TV adaptation–also used a junk roadblock for the bad guys to try and get what they wanted from the heroes; it’s a tactic I rather like).

Barbie finds them just in time and disarms one, but gets distracted by Harriet in labor. He radios Linda to report which way they ran and then heads to get Harriet to Alice Calvert-Hill (biological mother of Norrie), the only doctor in town.

Norrie and Joe trek toward the center of the Dome. He finds their connection to it “cool”. Joe’s pet dog Truman is bothered by something and runs off, but they forge on, knowing the dog will find his way back home.

Back at the café, Angie and Benny finish burying Rose. She wants to clean the café up, make it look nice again. Jim comes by and goes for a bottle of liquor. Though it hasn’t been mentioned, viewers will notice that the man drinks quite a bit.

At Joe’s house, Carolyn Hill (Alice’s wife and Norrie’s mother as well) tries to take care of Alice, who insists she doesn’t feel sick. Alice has diabetes and has run out of insulin. The town medical center’s supply has also been depleted. Carolyn blames herself that they ended up in town and trapped. She had wanted to make a pit stop, if you remember, in the cozy little place on their way to taking their wild daughter to a reform school.
Barbie arrives carrying Harriet, interrupting them.

As Norrie and Joe reach the center of the Dome, the hair stands up on Norrie’s arms, as if they walked through a wall of static electricity. They find a pile of leaves, carefully placed to appear natural…too natural. It shocks them. They hurry to move the leaves and find another, small Dome covered in dirt. They wash it off and see a small black, egg-shaped object.

Alice expertly guides Harriet through labor and her Dome freak out (though she is a psychologist by trade she had to undergo mandatory medical residency at a hospital).

Ollie drops by Jim’s office to gloat over his theft of the propane, giving him all the water, crops and propane in The Mill. “It’s my turn to have my sweaty little hand wrapped around this town’s neck,” he says.
From now on he expects Jim to do what he says, not the other way around anymore.

The Dundee brothers hide out at the junkyard. Junior and Linda get the drop on them and disarm them. Linda is putting cuffs on one brother when he knocks her down and runs. The other brother gets away from Junior and he chases him down.
The Dundee brother near Linda starts shooting at her and she has no choice but to fire at him, though she’d rather have not used her firearm. Meanwhile, Junior stalks down the other, unarmed brother, who is on the ground and says he’ll go quietly. Junior shoots him in the chest while he’s down, disregarding his pleas and assurances he will be compliant with the law.

In the woods, Norrie and Joe talk to the mini-Dome to try to get it to respond. They both put their hands on it and try to talk to it, but at first there is no response. Suddenly, Alice appears in the woods, but she disappears when Norrie removes her hands from the object. Norrie suddenly wants to find her mother, believing that that must’ve been a sign of some sort.

As Alice is delivering the baby, she starts to feel something is wrong.

At the propane’s hiding place, Boomer puts two tanks in his truck and gets in, probably to bring it to Ollie’s farm. Big Jim sees his opportunity to get even. He fires a gun at him from nearby and watches, chugging from a whiskey bottle, as Boomer and his truck go up in a fireball (fantastic display of pyrotechnics).

Alice is feeling weak but talks Barbie through cutting the cord because it’s wrapped around the baby’s neck and is in danger of killing the child who hasn’t even been fully born yet. Harriet gives one final push and delivers a healthy baby girl. Harriet decides to call her Alice.

After holding the baby, “adult” Alice gets weaker and weaker, her blood sugar going either way up or way down…she thinks.

Junior goes by the café, saying he wants to talk to Angie. Benny, a tough skater kid, refuses to leave them alone. Junior apologizes to her for everything and tells her the Dundees won’t bother her again, shocking her.

Norrie and Joe come back to his house to find that Alice had a heart attack and is really weak, without the proper medication to combat the effects of her diseases. (Joe, finding that he is living alone, had allowed the Calvert-Hill family to stay with him, as they had no place of their own in The Mill.)

Joe waits outside the house and is there when Angie finally comes home. Until then, he had thought that his sister had been trapped outside the Dome

Norrie explains that she knew something was wrong when she saw her mom in the woods, as if the Domewanted her to know. Norrie says a tearful good-bye to her mom then runs outside. Joe follows her in the dark.

Norrie puts her hand on the Dome and tells it–begs it–to bring her mom back.

Harriet holds her new baby, Alice, named after a woman she never knew from the girl next door, so to speak…a woman who is now dying.

Carolyn, distraught and feeling guilty, kisses her wife good-bye.

When Norrie gets nothing from the Dome she yells and screams at it to tell her what it wants.

In the forest, the black egg streaks a vivid purple.