'Under the Dome' Series Finale Postmortem: Show Boss Talks Sacrifices and What a 4th Season Would Look Like
Warning: This post contains character and storyline spoilers for the series finale of Under the Dome.
The dome is down. Big Jim is a congressman, Jarbie is about to get hitched, and Joe and Norrie have been reunited. For all its ups and downs, Under the Dome managed to pull off an emotionally satisfying finale, and we spoke to executive producer Neal Baer about what it takes to make that happen.
Though there was concern among fans that the abrupt cancellation by CBS — the announcement came just last week — would mean unanswered questions or worse, a hastily reshot finale, Baer says, “The end is really how we planned it” from the beginning of the season. “The [cancellation] decision was made after the show [finished production].” In fact, he jokes, “Maybe we did too good a job” of providing a satisfying conclusion, making it easier for executives to give the show the axe.
“There’s nothing that happened that was suddenly a last-minute change,” he says. Unlike some shows that start with a loose endpoint and fill in the blanks until the end, Dome’s third season holds up because “it was very planned out. It all makes sense with Sam, with Eva, Dawn, Barbie, Barbie going back to Julia.”
Everything plays into the main goal of the season. “We really were focused on getting out of the dome this year,” emphasizes Baer. “We had planned how we were going to do it with the eight notes,” and if you go back to the beginning of the season, you can see it. “As they started whistling those notes and we don’t know why? It all plays to the end, which is: That is the way out. There was always the way out from the very beginning of the season.”
What about that eighth note? For a moment there, we all were heartbroken at Joe sacrificing himself for Norrie, for the town. He was Baer’s favorite character to write. “It was really through his youthful enthusiasm and through his eyes that we could understand” what was happening in the town. Which makes his sacrifice unsurprising, really. “Barbie was the hero, always fighting for everybody,” says Baer, but Joe was “the most noble character of the whole series.”
Everyone is forced to give something up in the finale — even someone as narcissistic as Big Jim. As much as he loves himself, “He also loved Chester’s Mill — it was always what was interesting about Big Jim.” So when he kills Junior, it’s part self-preservation and part sacrifice for the good of the town. “He didn’t want to. He’s weeping when he does it — he’s holding him at the end.”
They could have continued on with another dome, Baer says, had they been picked up for a fourth season but, creatively, the show had done all it set out to do. As with any good science-fiction story, real world issues are expressed as a metaphor, and they had explored those ideas fully. The dome as an “environmental parable,” for example. Or, “This issue between the individual and the group: creativity and suppressing that for betterment of the group, which has to do with how we live our lives as individuals and how we need to come together as a group to prevent the destruction of our environment. All those questions were addressed and savored. Now we leave it to the audience to decide what they think.”
In this day and age of series shows like The Mindy Project and Longmire gaining new life on streaming services, the door is still open for a fourth season. Baer doesn’t think it’s likely but, “One never knows! Stranger things have happened.” Production costs make it unlikely, but we asked what Season 4 would look like just in case.
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Baer says Big Jim thinks of himself as a savior, and he calls him a “narcissist. Like Trump.” So, “In the sequel to Under the Dome, it’ll be Big Jim running for president. But it’ll be a different dome. It’ll be a dome of Trump’s hairdo!” Baer says, laughing.
