‘Under the Dome’ episode 5 review: Did the military blow up the dome?

The past few episodes of “Under the Dome” have felt like a lot of set up for something bigger coming our way, so did tonight deliver?

The military are bringing in civilians to talk to loved ones who are trapped inside the dome. Linda gets to see her fiance, Rusty, and tells him that his brother Freddy is dead. Julia is waiting for Peter to show up, but of course he doesn’t, and instead her sister in law shows up with a letter from Peter saying that he’s leaving her. Norrie’s mothers have told her that her father was an anonymous donor, but he shows up on visitors day to tell her the truth and she freaks out on all of her parents.

Barbie is suspicious of the reason behind the visitors and uses his military connection to get one of them to talk to him. He realizes very quickly that visitors day wasn’t about saying hello to loved ones, it was about saying goodbye, because the military is going to try and blow up the dome. Julia announces to the town what the military’s intentions are and that everyone has to get to the old cement factory for shelter.

Jim finds Angie in the bunker and she tells him that Junior is keeping her prisoner, but Jim decides not to help her just yet until he can figure out what to do. When he hears about the dome being blown up he decides it’s best to let Angie go. Junior comes home to get Angie from the bomb shelter, but when Jim tells him that he let Angie go Junior takes off looking for her. Angie runs back to her house to find her brother, but instead she finds Junior is waiting for her. He tells her about the missile attack and how they are going to die and she kisses and holds him while they wait for the bomb to take their lives.

Joe and Norrie discover that the dome is trying to communicate with them (or possibly through them) whenever they touch, so Joe kisses Norrie just as the missiles hit the dome and nothing happens to the dome or anyone in the town. Also Norrie and Joe are able to touch for the first time without having a seizure.

Lester threatened to expose Jim and his drug dealings if he doesn’t come clean himself to the townsfolk, but instead pushes Lester into the dome and his hearing aid explodes, killing him.

We’ve been really excited all week about the idea of the military blowing up the dome and seeing what transpires out of that, but this episode was a very slow build to what was an anti-climatic end since we knew that they weren’t going to be able to blow up the dome and kill everyone from the beginning of this episode, because if this attack worked there’d be no more TV show. What did you think of tonight’s episode of “Under the Dome”?

Photo: CBS